August 14–16, 2024
Dr. Sudhakar Yalamanchili Award
The Dr. Sudhakar Yalamanchili Award is intended to recognize researchers who showcase the most outstanding contribution to the field of computer modeling and simulation during the annual Workshop on Modeling & Simulation of Systems and Applications. The award honors "Sudha" Yalamanchili, Regents' Professor and Joseph M. Pettit Professor in Computer Engineering at Georgia Tech's School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, where he joined the faculty in 1989.
Yalamanchili was a longtime proponent of computer modeling and simulation and a champion of the community, helping to launch the initial ModSim workshop in 2012 and serving on its Organizing Committee thereafter. Throughout his career, he made seminal research contributions in high-performance computing, communications/networking, and computer architectures. Moreover, he was a beloved mentor whose commitment endeared him to his students and earned him a distinguished mentoring award twice in his career at Georgia Tech.
The Dr. Sudhakar Yalamanchili Award will be presented to the researcher who demonstrates an “outstanding contribution to ModSim” as derived from a Contributed Abstract and Presentation/Poster Session hosted during the ModSim 2024 Workshop. ModSim 2024 Workshop Organizing Committee members will evaluate the abstracts/presentations/posters and make the final selection. To qualify, a person must be a graduate student or postdoctoral researcher within six years of her/his highest awarded degree at the time of the ModSim conference. All submissions that satisfy these criteria are eligible for the award.
Current & Past Award Winners
2023 Award Winner: Taekyung Heo
Hyesoon Kim (right), a professor at Georgia Institute of Technology's College of Computing,
presented the 2023 Dr. Sudhakar Yalamanchili Award to Taekyung Heo (left).
Congratulations to Taekyung Heo, a research engineer with the Synergy Lab at Georgia Institute of Technology and a research advisor at Meta. His work, Chakra: Advancing Benchmarking and Codesign with Standardized Workload Traces, earned the 2023 Dr. Sudhakar Yalamanchili Award, which is presented annually at the Workshop on Modeling & Simulation of Systems and Applications in honor of the late Regents’ and Joseph M. Pettit Professor from Georgia Tech’s School of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
Heo’s winning presentation at ModSim 2023 included an introduction to Chakra, a performance modeling framework for distributed machine learning workloads that allows users to estimate the execution time and resource usage of a distributed machine learning task for a given system configuration. It uses execution traces (Chakra ET) to capture relevant execution and dependency information and provides the tools to enable collection, generation, and adoption of Chakra ETs by multiple simulators, emulators, and benchmarks.
Sudha Award Winning Poster: "Chakra: Advancing Benchmarking and Codesign with Standardized Workload Traces
2022 Award Winner: Mikhail Isaev
Congratulations to Mikhail Isaev, a Ph.D. student at Georgia Institute of Technology's School of Computer Science. His work, ParaGraph: An Application-Simulator Interface and Toolkit for Hardware-Software Co-Design, earned the Dr. Sudhakar Yalamanchili Award, created in honor of the late Regents’ Professor and Joseph M. Pettit Professor in Computer Engineering at Georgia Tech’s School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. The award recognizes the most outstanding contribution to the field of computer modeling and simulation presented during the ModSim 2022 workshop.
In his winning presentation, Isaev described ParaGraph an open-source tool for large-scale systems co-design. The tool is designed to be an interface between the parallel program source code and a system-level simulator that “executes” the program on the model of a distributed system. ParaGraph mimics the actual software-hardware stack and decouples application from hardware modeling.
Sudha Award Winning Poster: "ParaGraph: An application-simulator interface and toolkit for hardware-software co-design"
2021 Award Winner: Sophia Shao
Congratulations to Sophia Shao, Assistant Professor with the Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences department at the University of California, Berkeley. Her work, Enabling Holistic Machine Learning Hardware Evaluation via Full-System Simulation, earned the inaugural Dr. Sudhakar Yalamanchili Award, created in honor of the late Regents' Professor and Joseph M. Pettit Professor in Computer Engineering at Georgia Tech's School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Shao was presented the award for her outstanding contribution to the field of computer modeling and simulation during the ModSim 2021 workshop.
Sudha Award Winning Poster: "Enabling Holistic Machine Learning Hardware Evaluation via Full-System Simulation"
*Originally intended to debut at ModSim 2020, presentation of the inaugural Sudha Award was delayed due to the pandemic. The award was debut at ModSim 2021.