This month, we highlight Dr. Jon Calhoun, an Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the director of the Future Technologies in Heterogeneous and Parallel Computing (FTHPC) Laboratory at Clemson University. Dr. Calhoun holds a B.S. in Computer Science &
Mathematics from Arkansas State University and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, under the guidance of Professors Luke Olson and Marc Snir. In recognition of his achievements, Dr. Calhoun was inducted into the Arkansas TRIO Program Hall of Fame in 2013. At Clemson, he received the NSF CAREER award in 2020, the R&D 100 award in 2021 for his work on the SZ lossy compressor framework, and the 2022 CECAS Junior Faculty Award for Excellence in Teaching. That same year, he was inducted into Arkansas State University College of Engineering’s Alumni Academy. Dr. Calhoun is a regular NSF panelist and serves on program committees for top conferences like Supercomputing, IPDPS, and ISC. In 2022, he was elevated to Senior Member of the IEEE.
How long have you been at Clemson and how did you get here?
I’ve been here since August 2017, but I became aware of Clemson midway through my PhD. Many people I interacted with in the U.S. Department of Energy had degrees from Clemson. At conferences like Supercomputing, Clemson’s bright orange booth and tiger paw were hard to miss. When I was applying for faculty positions, Clemson was a top choice, largely due to its focus on high-performance computing (HPC), the Palmetto cluster, and the work of faculty members like Melissa Smith, Walt Ligon, and Amy Apon. Interestingly, I briefly knew Dr. Apon from my undergraduate days at Arkansas State University when she was at the University of Arkansas, although I didn’t realize this connection until after I was hired here. If it weren’t for the Palmetto cluster and the faculty, I might have gone elsewhere. In fact, I almost accepted a job at another university. But on the day I was about to commit, Melissa Smith called, and two days later, I interviewed at Clemson. It all worked out in the end!
Tell us about you your work with at Clemson, and what aspects are you most passionate about?
I specialize in high-performance computing (HPC), which involves using massive computing systems—composed of hundreds of thousands of networked servers—to tackle complex problems in science and engineering. Today, supercomputers are essential tools for scientists, engineers, and companies alike. I see myself as a “Swiss Army knife” for HPC, combining my math and computer science backgrounds to help people use these systems more efficiently. My group’s goal is to remove the barriers that prevent applications from making full use of HPC systems. One key focus of my group is data compression. While generating data is easy, managing and transferring it is challenging due to its sheer size. We develop custom data compression algorithms to help users manage their data more effectively. By making data smaller, we allow users to store and process more of it.
How many students do you have in your group? How many members have?
I have about 15 graduate students, and roughly the same number of undergraduates, though this number varies depending on whether you count CI students involved in competitions like the student cluster competition. I’m a strong advocate for undergraduate research. As a first-generation college student, I wouldn’t be where I am today if it hadn’t been for a faculty member who introduced me to research during my sophomore year. I want to provide similar opportunities, especially for first-generation students, to explore HPC.
With such a large group and having a full teaching load, how do you manage to balance personal life with a very active professional life at Clemson?
It’s definitely a work in progress! It was easier before I was married, and during the pandemic, when everything was closed, I had more time to focus on work. During that time, my group grew from five students to its current size. Now, my wife helps me find a better work-life balance and I’m aiming to keep the group smaller moving forward.
What advice would you give to your first year, faculty self?
Before agreeing to anything, ask yourself whether you should do it, not just whether you can do it. I tend to focus intensely on my work and sometimes overlook other commitments. I’m also very optimistic about research, often underestimating the time required. It’s important to step back and consider everything you have going on before making decisions.
Besides the Palmetto cluster, what other resources at Clemson you would mention to new faculty members in your area?
I would highlight the CloudLab project, a cloud computing testbed supported by the National Science Foundation and involving several U.S. universities, including Clemson. CloudLab allows you to configure servers as if you have your own personal cloud, free of charge. While the resources aren’t as large as those offered by commercial providers like AWS, CloudLab provides access to exotic hardware, making it a great testbed for experimentation.
How do you see your department, college, or Clemson evolving in the next 5 – 10 years?
I believe HPC will play an increasingly critical role in Clemson’s future. AI and machine learning are hot topics right now, and training large AI models requires resources like the Palmetto cluster—lots of GPUs, memory, and servers. HPC will be key to advancing various fields, from business and finance to genomics and history. I expect that the demand for HPC resources will continue to grow as more areas embrace technology to accelerate their work.
What else would you like to tell us about your group, your research, your teaching, yourself?
Well, I’ll mention one thing about teaching. And I’ll sort of try to segue back into not work-related things. So I mentioned that I went to grad school to do research. I wanted to work in national lab, but along the way, I found that I like teaching. So I worked with the Center for Innovation, Teaching and Learning at Illinois, and I trained every TA in the computer science department from 2013 till I graduated in 2017; so 500 plus TAs. Before they were allowed to go in front of the classroom, they had to sit through a TA training that me and one of my roommates ran. And so in doing so, I saw what worked well. We had a joke that if you were a good researcher, you were a bad teacher. And case-in-point, there was a professor at Illinois, fantastic researcher, but his slides were his class. They looked like transparencies from way back when, just converted to digital, like hand drawn transparencies. I wanted to do a much better job when I became a professor. And so I don’t like just sitting in front of the classroom lecturing. I like it to be very interactive, sort of active learning style of getting you to become a master of your own material. And so having hands on exercises, having the students actually working, developing and experimenting with whatever you’re teaching before they have to go and try it for themselves. It’s a lot nicer for students to fail in the classroom than fail in the job. And so whether it’s an undergrad class, whether it’s a grad class, I force participation in various ways. My favorite way is I have a deck of playing cards, and each card has the student’s name on it. So whenever I need someone to ask a question to if no one wants to answer the question, I have a nice selection of candidates. And so I found that by starting that early in the semester, by the end of the semester, I don’t need the cards, because everyone’s talking. And I think that works well from the education perspective. Because you’re involved, you care about it more, and they seem to learn better. And so that mindset of being interactive, being social, not being sort of like you’re up here on this hill and you’re sort of proclaiming to the masses the information. I’m not a big fan of that. And so, like, even in my research group, I try to be involved. And I guess really being like a mentor, like an apprenticeship relationship, is like, I’m going to help you not make the same mistakes that I’ve made. And so I hopefully I will be able to continue to do this.
My group is a little big now, so I’m not able to do this as well as I want to, and that’s why I want to try to pare it down. But it will get there. And then, as for what I like to do outside, besides spending time with my wife,
the things that I like to do to relax. I played trumpet since I was in seventh grade. I had a small music performance scholarship at Arkansas State. At Illinois, I played in a summer band, and when I lived here in Clemson, I played occasionally at my church. Since getting married and moving a little bit further field I have not yet haven’t played trumpet quite so much. So that’s one thing I would like to get back into doing. I also like gardening. Gardening is, like my thing. I grew up, my parents, grandparents, they all had a huge garden. And so it is the way that I decompress from every. Thing is, I get home and have dinner with my wife, and then I will spend maybe the next hour or two hours or so just working in the garden, playing with the dogs in the yard, or just, I just like being outside in nature.
More information about Jon Calhoun
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