Dr Emily Kahl1
1Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre, Perth, Australia
Biography:
Emily Kahl is a Supercomputing Applications Specialist at the Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre. She develops and maintains software for molecular simulation, with a specific focus on GPU-accelerated computing and machine learning methods in quantum chemistry. She has extensive experience developing and supporting software for computational chemistry and molecular modeling and has contributed to multiple open-source molecular dynamics projects.
Emily is also an advocate for open-source software in computational science, and the code she has developed for atomic and molecular simulation has seen widespread use by Australian and international researchers. Prior to joining Pawsey, Emily completed her PhD in physics at the University of New South Wales and worked as a research software engineer at the University of Queensland.
Abstract:
The Rust programming language has rapidly become one of the most popular and well-loved languages for system programming, due to its focus on performant memory- and thread-safety, sophisticated toolchains, and commitment to fostering an inclusive and diverse developer community. It has seen widespread adoption in applications ranging from web browsers to hardware device drivers and operating system kernels.
But despite its performance and safety benefits, Rust has seen comparatively little adoption in the research computing space. I believe that this is a missed opportunity.
This talk will provide a brief overview of the Rust programming language, with a focus on technical features that are well-suited to the unique challenges of scientific programming. I will also discuss some of the issues that have blocked more widespread adoption in research, and finish with some examples of scientific computing projects that have successfully used Rust to improve their robustness and performance.