Kevin Bowers

Current

• Scientist at D.E. Shaw Research LLC
• Guest Scientist at Los Alamos National Lab (Self-employed)

Past

• Technical Staff Member at Los Alamos National Lab
• Member Technical Staff at Lucent Bell Labs / Agere Systems
• Graduate Research Assistant at Los Alamos National Lab

• Intern at Intel Corporation

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1 more...

Education

• University of California, Berkeley
• Purdue University
• The University of Akron

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Recommended

2 people have recommended Kevin

Connections

94 connections

Industry

Research

Websites

• My Website

Kevin Bowers’s Summary

- Development and application of advanced theoretical and computational techniques to enabling technologies; enjoy adapting physics, electrical engineering, mathematics and computer science methods to challenging problems in any discipline
- Proven ability to do innovative R&D rapidly even in new fields with experience in a broad spectrum of organizations (large to small to independent, public to private to academic, biotech to defense to telecom to semiconductors)
- Proven ability to design breakthrough algorithms and to optimize (both algorithmically and in implementation) software and hardware for ultra high performance; computational experience on platforms ranging from desktops to distributed supercomputers with hundreds of thousands of cores producing data at rates of hundreds of terabytes every second

Kevin Bowers’s Specialties:

Scientific Computing: Particle and electromagnetic simulation (Boltzmann and Maxwell equations), PDEs (initial value, boundary value and eigenvalue systems), matrix algorithms (dense, structured and sparse), pattern recognition (hidden Markov, clustering), signal processing (FFT, wavelets, filtering, compression), C, C++, FORTRAN, assembly (x86, Cell BE, i960), MATLAB/MEX, Mathematica, LaTeX, parallel programming (distributed memory/MPI, shared memory/pthreads, data parallel/SIMD), Linux ...

Kevin Bowers’s Experience

• Scientist

  D.E. Shaw Research LLC

  (Privately Held; 11-50 employees; Biotechnology industry)

  2004 — Present (4 years)

  - Researched scientific computing: Novel parallel decompositions and distributed cache protocols; communication, thread, SIMD and NUMA optimization (latency optimized network protocols, parallel FFTs, SSE/AltiVec code generation); robust (even bit-level reversible!) integration/thermodynamic sampling with single, double and custom precision; patents pending
  - Architected a massively parallel molecular dynamics code (Desmond) based on this: designed code, implemented core, integrated work of several developers; more numerically robust, more scalable and/or faster than comparable codes---won best paper at Supercomputing 2006, featured in Nature, being commercialized
  - Assisted with design and bring up of large clusters (thousands of cores) dedicated to Desmond including performance modeling / competitive analysis of HPC technology (heterogeneous multicore CPUs, GPUs)
  - Contributed to design of a custom ASIC for MD (Anton): parallelization, numerical formats, instruction set design

• Guest Scientist

  Los Alamos National Lab (Self-employed)

  (Self-Employed; Myself Only; Defense & Space industry)

  2004 — Present (4 years)

  Architected software for petaflop (million billion floating point operations per second) scale supercomputers:
  - VPIC (below) is a flagship application for the world's first petaflop capable supercomputer (Roadrunner,13K AMD Opteron cores and13K IBM Cell chips); the initial port sustained roughly half a petaflop during Roadrunner acceptance and assessment trials
  - Received a Defense Programs Award of Excellence (with B. Albright, L. Yin and T. J. T. Kwan)

• Technical Staff Member

  Los Alamos National Lab

  (Government Agency; 5001-10,000 employees; Research industry)

  2002 — 2004 (2 years)

  Applied Physics Division (X)
  Plasma Physics Group (X-1)
  - Developed algorithms for parallel supercomputers, culminating in VPIC, an ultra high performance first-principles kinetic particle-in-cell code (on a per node basis, usually faster than comparable codes by one to two orders of magnitude; used for modeling plasma instabilities / turbulence, laser-plasma interactions, relativistic beams, magnetic reconnection ...)
  - Applied advanced analysis techniques to multi-terabyte multi-dimensional data sets (implemented maximum-likelihood and maximum-entropy PDF estimation methods to couple and analyze PIC, Monte-Carlo and hydrodynamic simulations; invoked spectral, time-frequency, time-scale and wavelet methods to analyze plasma turbulence)
  - Modeled relativistic electron beam X-ray radiographic sources

• Member Technical Staff

  Lucent Bell Labs / Agere Systems

  (Public Company; 10,001 or more employees; Nanotechnology industry)

  2001 — 2002 (1 year)

  Physical Sciences Research Division
  Opto-Electro-Mechanical Integration Research and Optical MEMS Groups
  - Applied the PROPHET and IMSIL codes to optimize SiGe dopant implantation processes
  - Developed models of dopant diffusion in alloy lattices
  - Derived analytic models of electro-mechanical coupling in MEMS mirror arrays
  - Implemented a highly efficient 2.5d frequency domain electromagnetic scattering code (intended for optimization of waveguide devices and diffractive / binary optics, optimized matrix algorithms achieve theoretical memory limited performance on SMP workstations, automatic boundary mesh generation able to handle arbitrary linear materials, unbounded systems and systems with wide scale variation, compact representation of scattered fields achieved through novel application of Huygens' principle)

• Graduate Research Assistant

  Los Alamos National Lab

  (Government Agency; 5001-10,000 employees; Computer Software industry)

  1997 — 1997 (less than a year)

  Computing, Information and Communication Division (CIC)
  Image Processing and Analysis Group (CIC-3)
  - Researched multilingual handwritten document analysis (developed a medial axis / skeletonization / thinning algorithm; implemented a C++ class for training and evaluation of hidden Markov models; implemented code to extract and cluster feature vectors from document images; developed and evaluated of several algorithms to perform language identification on handwritten documents---the top algorithm correctly classified out of eight choices the language with 88% accuracy, top two choices over 97%)

• Intern

  Intel Corporation

  (Public Company; 10,001 or more employees; Computer Hardware industry)

  1996 — 1996 (less than a year)

  i960 Embedded RISC Processor Component and Tools Applications Engineering
  - Assisted OEMs with Intel component related design issues---dealt with ~700 issues
  - Identified sales opportunities and recommended components to OEMs for new designs
  - Qualified potential errata in i960 software tools, components and manuals
  - Trained other Intel employees about the i960 processor and applications
  - Planned, designed, and completed technical projects to demonstrate the use and suitability of Intel components in designs (benchmarked the i960 family in various embedded applications, wrote a bootstrap loader for the i960CF on a Cyclone development board, developed ethernet drivers for an i82596 MAC to i960CF hardware interface, developed a software interface between a Pentium desktop and an i960Hx PCI-SDK board, created a preemptive multitasking kernel for i960Hx processor for the i960 Programmer's Cookbook)

Kevin Bowers’s Education

• University of California, Berkeley

  Ph.D., Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 1997 — 2001

  - Electromagnetics and Plasmas (Major), Quantum and Optical Electronics (Minor), Signal Processing and Scientific Computing (Minor), GPA: 3.79 / 4.00
  - Award Winning Thesis: High Frequency Electron Resonances and Surface Waves in Unmagnetized Bounded Plasmas (Advisor: C. K. Birdsall; Committee: M. A. Lieberman---chair, D. Attwood and J. Fajans; Received the APS-DPP Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Prize in a national competition and the David J. Sakrison Memorial Prize for outstanding thesis research in EECS)
  - Coursework: Theoretical Plasma Physics, Partially Ionized Plasmas, Lightwave Devices, Random Processes in Systems, Multidimensional Signal Processing, Microwave Circuits, Soft X-ray and Extreme Ultraviolet Radiation, Applied Electromagnetic Theory, Quantum Electronics and Nonlinear Optics, Quantum Mechanics (137A, 137B, 221A)

  Activities and Societies:

  Conducted thesis related research in the Plasma Theory and Simulation Group with NSF/DOE support, Taught the recitation for Electromagnetic Fields and Waves with a 4.4/5.0 overall student rating, DOE student representative to the 50th Meeting of Nobel Laureates, Fannie and John Hertz Foundation Fellowship, DOD Fellowship (alternate, declined), NSF Graduate Research Fellowship (declined), Regents Fellowship

• Purdue University

  B.S., Electrical Engineering, 1994 — 1997

  - Completed Degree in Five Semesters (Semester Honors and Dean's List all semesters; nominated for Outstanding Senior in Engineering by ECE Faculty), GPA: 3.97 / 4.00
  - Coursework: Distributed Parameter Systems, Digital Signal Processing, Complex Analysis, Mathematical Logic, Feedback Systems Analysis, Microprocessor Systems, VLSI Design Lab, Electromech. Devices, Electric and Magnetic Fields, Semiconductor Device Fundamentals, Probabilistic Methods in Electrical Engineering, Signals and Systems and Lab, Digital Logic Design and Lab, Electromagnetism and Optics, Electronics Design and Analysis and Lab, Electronic Measurement Lab, Linear Circuit Analysis I and II, Thermodynamics, Freshman Engineering Project, Classical Mechanics, General Chemistry I and II, Honors Computer Programming, History of Science and Technology I, Macroeconomics, Microeconomics, Speech Communication

  Activities and Societies:

  Jazz Band (2nd Concert Alto Sax / 1st Lab Tenor Sax), Concert Band (co-principal Alto Sax), Taught the help session for Honors Computer Programming, Grader for Semiconductor Device Fundamentals, Meissner Fellowship (declined), Electromagnetic Coil Winding Association Scholarship, Dean's Engineering Scholarship, Robert C. Byrd Scholarship

• The University of Akron

  Attended in High School, Mathematics, 1992 — 1993

  - GPA: 4.00 / 4.00

Additional Information

Kevin Bowers’s Websites:

• My Website

Kevin Bowers’s Interests:

Jazz music, classical music, audiophile, pool, table tennis, chess, go, politics, law, mathematics, computer graphics, new technology

Kevin Bowers’s Groups:

IEEE, APS, hold active DOE Q clearance

•    Hertz Foundation member

Kevin Bowers’s Honors:

- Numerous invited talks and publications
- State Champion 4-man Policy Debate
- National Merit Finalist
- AP Scholar with Distinction

Kevin Bowers’s Contact Settings

Interested In:

• career opportunities
• consulting offers
• new ventures
• job inquiries
• expertise requests
• business deals
• reference requests
• getting back in touch