Hello!

My name is Ritvik Rao, and I am a 5th year Ph.D. student in Computer Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. I am advised by Prof. Laxmikant Kale and work within the Parallel Programming Laboratory. I have been working within the field of high performance computing since I was an undergraduate, and I am particularly interested in writing parallel programs using task-based runtime systems (and other alternatives to MPI) such as Charm++.

My current focus (and thesis topic) is developing optimizations for large-scale fine-grained irregular applications. I am currently wrapping up a project on acclerating the friends-of-friends problem for cosmological cluster finding. I have also worked on graph algorithms; in particular, I developed a new asynchronous approach for the single-source shortest paths (SSSP) problem.

I also conduct research on the design of task-based runtimes. I am the primary designer of Reconverse, a new communication layer for message-driven runtime systems that includes a unique system of queue registration and adaptive scheduling. I also worked on implementing the Ray Core API on top of Charm4Py, which showed how HPC runtimes like Charm4Py can be used to speed up AI workloads implemented in Ray.

This page is under construction

I will eventually add my papers, talks, my CV, and my picture to this page. Until then, everything else you see on this site is a placeholder.