Society depends on cloud-computing in ways most people don’t even realize. It’s more than photo storage. It’s being able to go to school online during a pandemic, knowing how long an automobile wreck is going to delay a commute, and providing a developing country with an opportunity to communicate and export goods globally. As an internationally recognized expert and leader in her field, Amy Apon explores the performance, improvement and evaluation of parallel and distributed systems, and utilizes various cloud-computing architectures in order to solve important scientific and industry-related problems.
Bio
With a distinguished background in computer science, Apon’s research includes exploring the performance, improvement and evaluation of parallel and distributed systems, and utilizing various cloud-computing architectures in order to solve important scientific and industry-related problems.
Her research around the commercial cloud is making computational systems accessible to all kinds of industries and business sizes. In collaboration, her work has been recognized by commercial cloud companies for building systems that take streaming data and, after analyzing the data, working with the size of the data to address latency issues and design or build cloud architecture to meet the requirements or provide a solution. An example of this would be connected transportation systems in traffic planning for commercial and passenger vehicles discussed in “Data Analytics for Intelligent Transportation Systems,” a book co-authored with colleagues.
Before coming to Clemson, and now with the Palmetto Cluster located on the main campus, she has studied supercomputers and all layers of cluster computing – from the application layer and network protocol layer to file systems, storage and more. Under her leadership, Clemson’s School of Computing has more robust research capabilities and is acquiring more recognition, ranking as one of the top 100 computer science schools in the United States, according to U.S. News & World Report, and the best in South Carolina, according to Niche.com.
As an internationally recognized expert and thought leader in her field, Apon has won numerous awards, published more than 100 scholarly publications, and has served on over 50 boards and committees in various roles such as chair, reviewer and panelist. She has been a program officer in the Computer and Network Systems Division of the Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Directorate of the National Science Foundation and has served as the elected chair of the Coalition for Academic Scientific Computation (CASC). CASC regularly testifies before Congress and provides advice at the highest level of funding agencies on strategy and policy for scientific computation.
Before joining Clemson, she was a professor at the University of Arkansas and started the Arkansas High Performance Computing Center, serving as its founding director. She also led cyberinfrastructure for the state of Arkansas. She’s taught at Vanderbilt University, Fisk University and East Central University, and she was a software design engineer for Texas Instruments.
We use the cloud in our daily lives in ways we don’t even realize. When you Google something on a map and you get navigation information so you can drive to a place you’ve never been before, there’s a cloud architect in the background that is solving that problem for you.
