Craig Steffen at the NCSA

Craig Steffen is a senior research scientist at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has been part of the Science and Engineering Applications Support (SEAS) team in the Blue Waters project since 2012.

Craig joined the NCSA in July 2002, and mostly telecommutes from his home in southeastern Kentucky. He works normal working hours (eastern time), and can be reached via e-mail, work phone 217-300-1881 or his mobile 217-979-2392.

Craig is in the NCSA building (office 4006G) once a month for a few days, usually Monday through Thursday early afternoon. His schedule for these visits is available on an internal wiki page.

An interesting unix shell command (archived here for posterity).

Craig's publications:

Craig P. Steffen. A Better Way of Scheduling Jobs on HPC Systems: Simultaneous Fair-Share. In HPCSYSPROS19: HPC System Professionals Workshop at Supercomputing 2019. Denver, Colorado, November, 2019. DOI:10.5281/zenodo.3525381.
Thomas R.W. Scogland, Craig P. Steffen, Torsten Wilde, Florent Parent, Susan Coghlan, Natalie Bates, Wu-chun Feng, and Erich Strohmaier. 2014. A power-measurement methodology for large-scale, high-performance computing. In Proceedings of the 5th ACM/SPEC international conference on Performance engineering (ICPE '14). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 149-159, DOI:10.1145/2568088.2576795.
Mike Showerman, Jeremy Enos, Craig Steffen, Sean Treichler, William Gropp, and Wen-mei W. Hwu. "EcoG: A Power-Efficient GPU Cluster Architecture For Scientific Computing". Computing in Science and Engineering, March/April 2011 (invited article), DOI=10.1109/MCSE.2011.30.
Jeremy Enos, Craig Steffen, Joshi Fullop, Michael Showerman, Guochun Shi, Kenneth Esler, Volodymyr Kindratenko, John E. Stone, James C. Phillips. "Quantifying the Impact of GPUs on Performance and Energy Efficiency in HPC Clusters". The "Work in Progress in Green Computing" Workshop at the IEEE-sponsored First International Green Computing Conference, August 16-18 2010, Chicago, Illinois.
Craig Steffen, Gildas Genest, "Nallatech In-Socket FPGA Front-Side Bus Accelerator". Computing in Science and Engineering, pp. 78-83, March/April, 2010 (invited article).
M. Showerman, J. Enos, A. Pant, V. Kindratenko, C. Steffen, R. Pennington, W. Hwu. "QP: A Heterogeneous Multi-Accelerator Cluster". In Proc. 10th LCI International Conference on High-Performance Clustered Computing, 2009.
Robert J. Brunner, Craig P. Steffen, Volodymyr V. Kindratenko,"Accelerating Scientific Applications with Reconfigurable Computing: Getting Started", Computing in Science & Engineering, vol. 9, no. , pp. 70-77, September/October 2007, DOI:10.1109/MCSE.2007.91.
B Bode, R Bradshaw, E DeBenedictus, N Desai, J Duell, G A Geist, P Hargrove, D Jackson, S Jackson, J Laros, C Lowe, E Lusk, W McLendon, J Mugler, T Naughton, J P Navarro, R Oldfield, N Pundit, S L Scott, M Showerman, C Steffen and K Walker. Scalable system software: a component-based approach. Journal of Physics: Conference Series. Volume 16, SciDAC 2005, SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY THROUGH ADVANCED COMPUTING 26–30 June 2005, San Francisco, CA, USA. DOI:10.1088/1742-6596/16/1/075.
R.T. Jones, T. Bogue, B.E. Evans, M. Kornicer, A.R. Dzierba, R. Gardner, J.L. Gunter, D. Krop, R. Lindenbusch, D.R. Rust, C. Steffen et al. "Performance of the radphi detector and trigger in a high rate tagged photon beam". Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research Section A: Accelerators, Spectrometers, Detectors and Associated Equipment, Volume 570, Issue 3, 21 January 2007, Pages 384-398.
R.T. Jones, M. Kornicer, A.R. Dzierba, J.L. Gunter, R. Lindenbusch, E. Scott, P. Smith, C. Steffen, S. Teige, P. Rubin and E.S. Smith. "A bootstrap method for gain calibration and resolution determination of a lead-glass calorimeter". Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research Section A: Accelerators, Spectrometers, Detectors and Associated Equipment, Volume 566, Issue 2, 15 October 2006, Pages 366-374.

Conference Presentations, Posters, Webinars, Workshops, Classes, Service

Aaron Saxton, Shirui Luo, Abert Bode, William Kramer, Xiyue Zhu, Jiahua Dong, Nattapon Jaroenchai, Craig Steffen, Rob Kooper. Accurate Polygonal Feature Extraction from Historical Geologic Maps using Prompted Segmentation. AGU 2024, Washington D.C., December 2024.
Craig P Steffen, Roland Haas, Katherine Kendig, Liudmila Mainzer, Ryan Chui, Christina Fleige. "Efficient Software for Archiving and Retrieving Results of Massive Bionfirmatics Analyses in High-Performance Computing Environments". HPC User Software and Tools (HUST21) Supercomputing workshop, St. Louis, Missouri, November 19, 2021. Proceedings:DOI:10.5281/zenodo.5805629.
Invited Panelist on NSF proposal review panel in 2018.
Blue Waters SEAS members Craig Steffen and Jaehyuk Quack were invited participants (among about 20) at "Isambard: Stoking the Fire" internal hackathon at Cray in Bristol, England to test NSF benchmark codes on ARM processors that took place March 19 and 20, 2018. Results will be under NDA for most of 2018, but publications will be forthcoming when the processors are GA. Hackathon hosted by University of Bristol, Cray in Bristol, and Cavium. Host and organizer was Simon McIntosh-Smith of the University of Bristol.
Tiffany Li, Craig Steffen, Ryan Chui, Roland Haas, Liudmila S. Mainzer. "Benchmarking Parallelized File Aggregation Tools for Large Scale Data Management". Poster presented at Supercomputing 2017, Denver, Colorado, November 12-17, 2017.
"Blue Waters Local Software To Be Released: Module Improvements and Parfu Parallel Archive Tool". Talk given twice (November 15,16 2016) at NCSA booth at SC 2016. Outlines two pieces of software to be released December/January.
"Power Monitoring at the NCSA Innovative Systems Lab and Blue Waters". Invited talk at the 2013 Salishan Conference on High Speed Computing, Gleneden Beach Oregon, April 22-25 2013.
Craig Steffen (based on work also by many others). "Power Monitoring At The NCSA Innovative Systems Lab". Invited Webinar to the Energy Efficient HPC working Group, February 8, 2011.
Craig Steffen (based on work also by many others). Invited presentation on power measurement methodology and analysis for the Green 500 BOF at SuperComputing 2010, November 18, 2010.
"Two Nallatech FPGA Control Abstraction APIs: One Using A HomeBrew API and Later Using The OpenCL Interface". Poster at Symposium for Application Accelerators in High Performance Computing, July 13-15 2010, Knoxville, Tennessee (SAAHPC 2010). Submitted abstract.
"Abstraction Library To Simplify Application FPGA Configuration and Control". Poster at Symposium for Application Accelerators in High Performance Computing, July 25-27 2009, University of Illinois Urbana/Champaign (SAAHPC 2009).
Volodymyr Kindratenko and Craig Steffen. "Introduction to Reconfigurable Computing". Tutorial presentation at Reconfigurable Systems Summer Institute, July 7-9 2008 University of Illinois, Urbana/Champaign (RSSI 2008).
"Algorithm Accelerators from the HPC/Data-Movement Point of View". Invited presentation at the Many-core and Reconfigurable Supercomputing Conference, April 1-3, 2008, The Queen's University of Belfast, Northern Ireland (MRSC 2008).
"Parametrization of Algorithms and FPGA Accelerators To Predict Performance". In Proc. 3rd Annual Reconfigurable Systems Summer Institute (RSSI 2007).
Rob Pennington, Volodymyr Kindratenko, Seung Jae Lee, David Meixner, David Pointer, David Raila, Craig Steffen. "NCSA Innovative Systems Lab Projects on FPGA Computing". Invited presentation at Manchester Reconfigurable Supercomputing Conference, March 28 2007, University of Manchester, England (MRSC 2007).
"An Algorithmic Replacement for BLAST". Poster at Reconfigurable Systems Summer Institute, July 12-13 2006, University of Illinois, Urbana/Champaign (RSSI 2006).
Kris Gaj, Volodymyr Kindratenko, Craig Steffen. "Reconfigurable Tutorial Part I". Reconfigurable Systems Summer Institute, July 11-13 2005, University of Illinois, Urbana/Champaign (RSSI 2005).

Important results that did not make it to publication: