Mike Gowanlock is an associate professor in the School of Informatics, Computing, and Cyber Systems at Northern Arizona University. He obtained his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Hawaii at Manoa in 2015, and was a postdoctoral associate at MIT Haystack Observatory from 2015-2017. Mike Gowanlock is interested in parallel, high performance, and data-intensive computing, general purpose computing on graphics processing units, astronomy, and astrobiology.

Computer Science: I have been designing multi-dimensional data access methods for graphics processing units (GPUs), which exploit the GPU’s high on-card memory bandwidth and massive parallelism. Additionally, I have worked on hybrid CPU/GPU algorithms for several domains. Other recent projects include applying parallel computing to cybersecurity and ecology.

Astroinformatics: I am working on a Solar System alert broker for the Rubin Observatory, the Solar System Notification Alert Processing System (SNAPS). SNAPS will rely on parallel multi-core CPU and GPU-accelerated near real-time outlier detection algorithms to detect interesting events on small bodies in the Solar System.

Astrobiology: I am interested in the regions of the Galaxy expected to have the highest carrying capacity for land-based complex life, and other astrobiological questions at large scales.

Contact

• E-mail: michael.gowanlock@nau.edu
• Phone: 928-523-4184
• Mail: School of Informatics, Computing and Cyber Systems, PO Box 5693, Flagstaff, AZ, 86011, USA
• Office Location: School of Informatics, Computing, and Cyber Systems (Building #90) Office: 302