Plenary Lecture

FROM THE REAL WORLD TO MODELS AND PARADIGMS IN PARALLEL SCIENTIFIC COMPUTING

Assoc. Prof. ION CÂRSTEA
University of Craiova,
ROMANIA
incrst@yahoo.com

Abstract: The people are not isolated actors on the world scene. They enter in competition and co-operation. This real scenario is the basis of the parallel computing and finally, the basis of the parallel computers. The work in the team with the principal characteristics, the co-operation and the collaborative competition, is an education model. Cooperation and collaborative competition must be the basis of the educational process from universities, aspects that are often ignored in educational politics from Romania. The nature models are the starting points in many human projects like the parallel processing of data. The nature models must be the starting points of the educational process with emphasis on the inter-human relations.
The real world offers a lot of models and paradigms for engineers in the area of the computer science and engineering. In a high- performance education we can not ignore the large computing power of the advanced computers as the parallel computers. To ignore the high-level information technology is an anti-social act in any university. Unfortunately, many professors are the slaves of an old-fashioned mode of understanding the education in engineering. It is not a good practice to solve a problem in any way; we must solve a problem with a good performance in terms of the limited physical and abstract resources of the world. An extrapolation of this idea can be done for computers where the physical resources and the abstract resource (as the processing time) are of the great importance for the engineers.
We shall present some models and paradigms in parallel scientific computing starting from the real world models. The old Latin concept divide et impera is a good approach for the development of large engineering projects, for analysis and synthesis of the large-scale systems. The manager-workers paradigm is another paradigm for many parallel algorithms in engineering and business and the performance evaluation of the programs based on this paradigm is developed and presented.
Engineering education from Romanian universities is analysed in context of the reconstruction process of the Romanian school. Some aspects of the politics in the area of human resources and infrastructure from universities are presented using target examples. The effects of the reform in engineering education are analysed in the context of the last decades and educational reform from Romania.


Brief Biography of the Speaker:
The speaker is an Assoc. Professor at the Computer Engineering and Communications Department, Faculty of Automatics, Computers and Electronics, University of Craiova, Romania.
He has a BSc and MSc in Automatics from the University of Craiova, Romania. He has a Ph.D. in Automatics from the University of Ploiesti, Romania. Also, he has a BSc and MSc in Mathematics from the Natural Sciences Faculty, University of Craiova, Romania.
He was director of the research projects supported by international grants at University of Houston (USA)- 6 months (Fulbright Grant), at the University of Coimbra, Portugal – 9 months (NATO grant), at the Polytechnics of Milano, Italy- 4 months (a CNR-NATO grant). In 2004 he was invited at the Mathematics Department, University of Trento, Italy, for 2 months.
Ion Cârstea published 10 books in the area of programming languages, advanced computers and CAD of the electromagnetic devices. He is the co-author of the book FINITE ELEMENTS in WSEAS Press, 2007.
He is the author of more than 130 papers in revues, scientific journals and international conference proceedings. He is a reviewer for several WSEAS International Conferences and was a member in many international scientific committees. In the year 2007, he was Plenary speaker and chair at the WSEAS Conferences from Arcachon (France) and Venice (Italy).
His research interests include parallel algorithms and parallel programs for numerical simulation of the distributed-parameter systems, software products for coupled and inverse problems in engineering, domain decomposition method in the context of the finite element method.