Rate My Professor Jon Calhoun

Jon Calhoun is an Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Clemson University, where he has served since August 2017, directing the Future Technologies in Heterogeneous and Parallel Computing (FTHPC) Laboratory. A first-generation college student, he earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2017 under advisors Professors Luke Olson and Marc Snir, along with dual B.S. degrees in Computer Science and Mathematics from Arkansas State University in 2012. His early accomplishments include induction into the Arkansas TRIO Program Hall of Fame in 2013 and the Arkansas State University College of Engineering’s Alumni Academy in 2022. Calhoun has received the NSF CAREER Award in 2020 for advancing supercomputer utilization in solving complex problems like weather prediction and airplane design; the R&D 100 Award in 2021 for the SZ lossy compressor framework; the 2022 CECAS Junior Faculty Award for Excellence in Teaching; and elevation to Senior Member of the IEEE in 2022. His research group has also secured best paper and poster awards at IEEE Cluster and ACM Student Research Competition.

Calhoun's research specializes in high-performance computing, focusing on integrating lossy and lossless data compression into scientific workflows to mitigate data generation, movement, and storage bottlenecks, while enhancing the reliability, scalability, and performance of large-scale parallel scientific software. Funded by the NSF, DOE, and U.S. Army, his contributions are evidenced in key publications such as "SZ3: A modular framework for composing prediction-based error-bounded lossy compressors" (2022), "cuSZ: An efficient GPU-based error-bounded lossy compression framework for scientific data" (2020), "IPAS: Intelligent protection against silent output corruption in scientific applications" (2016), "FlipIt: An LLVM based fault injector for HPC" (2014), and "Exploring the feasibility of lossy compression for PDE simulations" (2019). He actively contributes to the field as a regular NSF panelist, program committee member for conferences including Supercomputing, IPDPS, and ISC, and reviewer for journals like IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, IEEE Transactions on Reliability, and Journal of Scientific Computing. Calhoun's work significantly impacts scientific and engineering disciplines by enabling more efficient HPC systems.