Engineering Grad Student Discovers the Benefits of High Performance Computing

Andy Lee, a graduate research assistant in electrical engineering, is quick to admit that he is not a computer programmer. But when his mentor, electrical engineering Regents’ professor Constantine Balanis encouraged him to learn more computer science, Lee committed fully, taking an introductory course in parallel programming from Dan Stanzione, the director of the High Performance Computing Initiative (HPCI) at ASU. The skills he developed in the class have since formed the basis for achieving his master’s degree, as he adapts a nonparallelized code from former students in his program. The result has been a complete shift in his graduate school experience.

“I never thought I’d be doing any computer science as part of my master’s in engineering,” Lee says. But the value of these new skills has not escaped him. As a member of the Advanced Helicopter Electromagnetics (AHE) Program, a three-way partnership between the industry, the government and the university, Lee has worked on numerous projects involving the improvement and understanding of helicopter applications. After Balanis discovered a parallelized form of a code a student had developed for an AHE project, it occurred to him that parallelizing was one technique that could answer other helicopter-related questions. While many computer programs only run on one computer, parallelized programs run on several simultaneously, dramatically reducing the time it takes to deliver results. With this knowledge, Balanis suggested that Lee consider modifying, or parallelizing a different code. Following Balanis’s recommendation, Lee took Stanzione’s course on parallel programming, and he has since been working on parallelizing that code to answer questions involving antennae systems mounted on Apache helicopter airframes. He will defend the project as his thesis this summer, and hopes to use his new code to answer questions such as where the best place to install antenna on an Apache helicopter, based on certain specifications of radiation antennae coverage.

Lee says his work on the thesis has also reunited him with his former physics teaching associate, Scott Menor, who is now an assistant research scientist at the HPCI. Menor says he remembers Lee as a bright and enthusiastic student who never knew how good he was. When Lee later approached him with computer programming questions, Menor remembers his former student’s surprise. “He was like, ‘You’re still here?’ And I was like, ‘Yup!’”

Now, Menor says he’s excited about the progress Lee has made on the code, which has expanded from 14,000 lines to over 32,000. “When I run [the program] it’s definitely faster now,” Lee says. With this new background in computer programming, Lee is excited about what the future may bring. With graduation approaching, Lee says he’s grateful for the ways this new skill set will make him a more competitive job candidate. He is clearly in awe of how much he has learned from Balanis, Stanzione, Menor and the operations manager at the HPCI, Doug Fuller. “They’ve all been great mentors, and I can see now, how useful computer programming is. At the end of the day, it’s just so nice to be able to point to [the code] and say: ’I did that.’”