About me

I am a fourth year PhD student in the Electrical and Computer Engineering department at The University of Texas at Austin, advised by Prof. Milos Gligoric. I am interested in Compilers, High Performance Computing, and Software Engineering.

I am the lead developer of PyKokkos, a Python framework for writing performance portable kernels in Python. Using PyKokkos, I have written high-performance software entirely in Python, including a Python port of ExaMiniMD a molecular dynamics mini application, a particle-in-cell (PIC) solver of the electron Boltzmann equation, and various machine learning algorithms. More recently, I have been working on lazy evaluation and kernel fusion for PyKokkos.

My other work includes Tempo, a CUDA framework for writing test generation programs, and WayOut a framework for automatic generation of Python language bindings for C++ code.

I am on the job market in 2024, find my most recent resume here.

Publications

A Multi-GPU Python Solver for Low-Temperature Non-Equilibrium Plasmas
James Almgren-Bell, Nader Al Awar, Dilip Geethakrishnan, Milos Gligoric, and George Biros
International Symposium on Computer Architecture and High Performance Computing
(SBACPAD 2022), pages 140-149, November 2-4, Bordeaux, France

PyKokkos: Performance Portable Kernels in Python
Nader Al Awar, Neil Mehta, Steven Zhu, George Biros, and Milos Gligoric
International Conference on Software Engineering, Tool Demonstrations Track
(ICSE Demo 2022), pages 164-167, May 21-29, Pittsburgh, USA

Programming and Execution Models for Parallel Bounded Exhaustive Testing
Nader Al Awar, Kush Jain, Christopher J. Rossbach, and Milos Gligoric
Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications
(OOPSLA 2021), pages 1-28, October 17-22, 2021, Chicago, USA

Dynamic Generation of Python Bindings for HPC Kernels
Steven Zhu, Nader Al Awar, Mattan Erez, and Milos Gligoric
International Conference on Automated Software Engineering
(ASE 2021), pages 92-103, Virtual, November 2021.

The Kokkos EcoSystem: Comprehensive Performance Portability For High Performance Computing
Christian Trott, Luc Berger-Vergiat, David Poliakoff, Sivasankaran Rajamanickam, Damien Lebrun-Grandie, Jonathan Madsen, Nader Al Awar, Milos Gligoric, Galen Shipman, and Geoff Womeldorff
Computing in Science and Engineering
(CISESI 2021), pages 1-9, November 2021.

A Performance Portability Framework for Python
Nader Al Awar, Steven Zhu, George Biros, and Milos Gligoric
International Conference on Supercomputing
(ICS ’21), June 14–17, 2021, Virtual Event, USA
(This paper was nominated for the Best Paper Award.)

How Effective are Existing Java API Specifications for Finding Bugs during Runtime Verification?
Owolabi Legunsen, Nader Al Awar, Xinyue Xu, Wajih Ul Hassan, Grigore Roşu, Darko Marinov
Automated Software Engineering Journal
(JASE 2019), 26(4): 795-837, December 2019