Associate Professor Henry Hoffmann Receives Presidential Early Career Award

Henry Hoffmann, an associate professor in UChicago CS, is one of this year’s recipients of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the White House announced. Hoffmann was cited for “exceptionally innovative research on programming systems of power-constrained, complex exascale platforms, which will greatly increase user productivity, performance of High Performance Computing applications, and the rate of new scientific insights.”

Awarded since 1996, PECASE is the highest honor bestowed by the United States government to outstanding scientists and engineers who are beginning their independent research careers and who show exceptional promise for leadership in science and technology. The award acknowledges the contributions scientists and engineers have made to the advancement of science, technology, education, and mathematics (STEM) education and to community service as demonstrated through scientific leadership, public education, and community outreach.

Hoffmann’s research group focuses on self-aware and adaptive computing systems that find the optimal balance between performance and energy consumption. His recent work includes CALOREE, an approach that combines control theory with machine learning to create an “intelligent” resource manager, and the “Divide and Conquer” algorithm for optimized scheduling of supercomputing tasks. 

Since joining UChicago CS in 2013, Hoffmann has also graduated five PhD students and represented the department at the 2018 Grace Hopper Celebration, the world’s largest gathering of women technologists. His work on self-aware computing has been featured in Crunchbase and Scientific American, who named it one of their ten “world-changing ideas” in 2011.