Presenter

Ritu Arora specializes in designing high-productivity and scalable infrastructure for powering discoveries and is currently leading the development of the software infrastructure for integrating and efficiently utilizing supercomputing, cloud computing, and volunteer computing resources. She has delivered multiple innovative software products for the scientific community including, a portable and containerized filesystem for cloud computing platforms, an interactive parallelization tool for teaching and learning parallel programming, an interactive tool for application-level checkpointing, and a framework for supporting interactive and batch computing modes from the convenience of a web-browser. Her areas of expertise and interest include High Performance Computing (HPC), data-intensive computing, cloud computing, advanced software engineering, and health informatics.

Prior to joining UTSA, Ritu worked at the University of Texas (UT) at Austin, where she was appointed as a Research Scientist at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), and as Associated Faculty in the Department of Statistics and Data Sciences. At TACC, she provided consultancy on effectively leveraging large-scale systems for activities ranging from big data management to eDiscovery to video analytics. She has led both collaborative and individual research on efficiently utilizing deep-memory hierarchies on advanced computing platforms, and on optimizing the power consumption of HPC platforms. At UT Austin, she taught courses on scientific programming, parallel programming, and intelligent systems in geosciences. As a part of her education and outreach efforts, she has conducted tutorials and trainings at national and international events on topics related to parallel programming, parallel filesystems, and cloud computing. She has led multiple workforce development initiatives and has mentored many students to successful careers in computing.

Ritu received her Ph.D. in Computer and Information Science from the University of Alabama at Birmingham in 2010. She passionately promotes the use of technology for creating social impact, and actively engages in the causes for creating inclusive policies and communities.