I2S researchers earn IEEE TPDS Best Paper Award Runner-Up honor
University of Kansas doctoral candidate Kyrian Chinemeze Adimora and his advisor, Hongyang Sun, assistant professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and faculty member of the Institute for Information Sciences (I2S), have been recognized with the 2025 Best Paper Award Runner-Up by IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems (TPDS), a flagship journal published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and recognized as one of the world’s leading publications in parallel and distributed computing.
Their paper, “HARMONIC: Uncertainty-Aware Multi-Objective Optimization for Energy-Efficient HPC Resource Management,” was selected for the international honor by the IEEE Computer Society, recognizing it as one of the journal’s most outstanding publications of the year.
The award-winning research addresses a critical challenge in high-performance computing (HPC): how to efficiently allocate computing resources while balancing competing objectives such as energy consumption, application performance and system reliability. The researchers developed HARMONIC, an uncertainty-aware optimization framework that accounts for unpredictable variations in application behavior when making scheduling decisions. By incorporating uncertainty directly into the optimization process, HARMONIC enables more energy-efficient and resilient resource management for next-generation HPC systems, advancing sustainable computing for data-intensive scientific workloads.
“Receiving this recognition from IEEE TPDS is an incredible honor,” Adimora said. “I’m grateful for the opportunity to work with Dr. Sun, and I hope our research contributes to making future high-performance computing systems more energy-efficient and sustainable.”
Sun’s research focuses on high-performance computing, artificial intelligence and systems optimization, while Adimora’s doctoral research explores intelligent resource management techniques for large-scale computing systems. Their research was supported in part by the U.S. National Science Foundation. Their collaboration reflects I2S’s mission to advance interdisciplinary research in computing and information sciences while addressing complex challenges with real-world impact.
IEEE is the world’s largest technical professional organization dedicated to advancing technology for humanity. Through its publications, conferences and technical communities, IEEE brings together researchers and practitioners from around the world to advance innovation across computing, engineering and related disciplines.
The recognition underscores I2S’s growing leadership in high-performance computing research and its commitment to developing innovative technologies that improve the efficiency, performance and sustainability of tomorrow’s computing systems.