Biography

Bruce Childers is the Dean of the School of Computing and Information (SCI). He previously served as Interim Dean, Senior Associate Dean of SCI, Special Assistant to the Provost for Data Science, and Chair of the Department of Information Culture and Data Stewardship. He is a Professor of Computer Science. Previously acting as Associate Dean for Strategic Initiatives, Childers led faculty recruitment and development for SCI. He has also been the Co-director of the Graduate Computer Engineering program and the Director of Graduate Studies for Computer Science. He graduated from the University of Virginia with a PhD (CS, 2000) and the College of William and Mary with a BS (CS, 1991).

Childers' recent research focuses on novel technologies and cultural change to advance transparency, reuse and reproducibility of data science for accelerated discovery and trustworthy insight. With colleagues, these scholarly contributions are disseminated through innovations embodied in open source software, including the Occam system. His research also addresses the software-hardware boundary for improved energy, performance, reliability, and robustness, with an emphasis on embedded systems, including the Internet-of-Things.

He has participated in numerous events, including past steering committee chair of the ACM SIGPLAN and SIGBED Conference on Languages, Compilers, and Tools for Embedded Systems (LCTES); program chair of LCTES; organizing committee of the DOE, DoD and NSF Workshop on Modeling and Simulation of Systems and Applications; and Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Computers. He has participated in several activities on scientific reproducibility, particularly in computer science research.

A recent curriculum vitae is available.

Reproducible Computationally-driven Science with Workflows

Workflow Systems: OCCAM from Rachel Kelly on Vimeo.

Companion slides (PDF) to the video of the talk.

Talk given at the Modeling the World's Systems Conference, May 22, 2018, Pittsburgh, PA.

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2020—2021 School of Computing and Information Annual Report

December 6, 2021: The SCI accomplished so much in the last year! Read selected highlights in our inaugural annual report. This is an amazing community, and I hope you feel the same after reviewing the report. Read more from my annual message at the SCI website.

Data Science Task Force Report

January 18, 2021: The Data Science Task Force completed its recommendations for a set of goals and actions to coordinate and amplify data, data methods, and their intersections with multiple disciplines at Pitt. Enjoy!

Interim Dean

July 1, 2020: It is my honor to serve as Interim Dean of the SCI. During this period, as a school, we will strive to be collaborative, open, and transparent, and we will pursue our goals and ideas with thoughtfulness, energy, and optimism. And most importantly, I invite you to join SCI in continuing to write our story together. Read more from my 2020 message at the SCI web site.

Selected Publications

A complete list of publications is available.

  • IEEE TCAD 2020

    HPE: Hierarchical Page Eviction Policy for Unified Memory in GPUs, Qi Yu, Bruce Childers, Libo Huang, Cheng Qian, and Zhiying Wang IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems Vol. 39, No. 10, Oct. 2020

  • IEEE IPDPS 2020

    Coordinated Prefetching and Page Eviction for Memory Oversubscription Management in GPUs, Qi Yu, Bruce Childers, Libo Huang, Cheng Qian, Hui Quo, and Zhiying Wang, IEEE Int'l. Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium, New Orleans, Louisiana, May 2020

  • ACM CF 2018

    CMH: Compression Management for Improving Capacity in the Hybrid Memory, Cheng Qian, Bruce R. Childers, Libo Huang, Qi Yu and Zhiying Wang, ACM Int'l. Conference on Computing Frontiers, Ischia, Italy, May 2018

  • ISCA 2017

    Quality of Service Support for Fine-Grained Sharing on GPUs, Zhenning Wang, Jun Yang, Rami Melhem, Bruce R. Childers, Youtao Zhang and Minyi Guo, International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA), Toronto, Canada, June 2017

  • ACM TODAES 2017

    On the Restore Time Variations of Future DRAM Memory, Xianwei Zhang, Youtao Zhang, Bruce R. Childers and Jun Yang, ACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems (TODAES), Volume 22, Issue 2, February 2017

  • HPCA 2016

    Restore Truncation for Performance Improvement in Future DRAM Systems, Xianwei Zhang, Youtao, Zhang, Bruce R. Childers and Jun Yang, IEEE International Symposium on High Performance Computer Architecture, Barcelona, Spain, March 2016

  • HPCA 2016

    Simultaneous Multikernel GPU: Multi-tasking Throughput Processors via Fine-Grained Sharing, Zhenning Wang, Jun Yang, Rami Melhem, Bruce R. Childers, Youtao Zhang and Minyi Guo, IEEE International Symposium on High Performance Computer Architecture, Barcelona, Spain, March 2016

  • HPCA 2015

    Supporting Superpages in Non-Contiguous Physical Memory, Yu Du, Miao Zhou, Bruce R. Childers, Daniel Mosse' and Rami Melhem, IEEE International Symposium on High Performance Computer Architecture, San Francisco, California, February 2015