Dr. Lester’s winning paper, “Improving the Performance of Collection-Oriented Operations through Parallel Fusion,” presented a technique for using multiple processors to make computer programs run faster.

Dr. Lester spoke at the Maharishi University of Management 2011 Convocation ceremony.

MUM professor receives best paper award at international conference of engineers
by Maharishi University of Management, Fairfield, Iowa, USA, Achievements
14 October 2011

Bruce Lester, Maharishi University of Management professor of computer science, received the Best Paper Award as a result of his presentation on parallel processing at the 2011 International Conference of Parallel and Distributed Computing held in London in July. This conference was part of the annual World Congress on Engineering sponsored by the International Association of Engineers.

Dr. Lester’s paper, “Improving the Performance of Collection-Oriented Operations through Parallel Fusion,” presented a technique for using multiple processors to make computer programs run faster.

“All new computers today have processors with multiple cores, which have the potential to greatly improve computer performance,” said professor Lester. “However, this potential offered by the computer hardware is not yet fully realized by the software. One very promising technique for solving this problem is called data parallel programming, in which the same operation is applied in parallel to different pieces of data. In the ordinary implementation of data parallel operations, all the cores must synchronize with each other after each operation. In my paper, I present a technique for removing this time-consuming synchronization, thus speeding up the program by as much as 80%.”

Dr. Lester has a Ph.D in computer science from MIT and was a faculty member at Princeton University for two years. He founded the Computer Science Department at MUM and served as department chair for seven years. Professor Lester is one of the pioneering researchers in the field of parallel computing and has published numerous research papers in this area. He is author of the textbook The Art of Parallel Programing, which was adopted as a course text by 62 universities.

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