Natalie Beams
Research Assistant Professor at Innovative Computing Laboratory (ICL)
Knoxville, Tennessee, United States
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolNatalie Beams is a Research Assistant Professor and computational performance engineer with 16 years of experience applying numerical methods and high-performance computing to challenging PDE problems. Trained as a mechanical engineer with a PhD focused on high-order hybrid methods combining Green’s functions and finite elements, she has moved from CPU-focused shared-memory solvers (OpenMP, Intel MKL) to porting and optimizing CUDA code across GPU architectures. At the Innovative Computing Laboratory she specializes in profiling-driven performance tuning and has contributed GPU-acceleration work to widely used open-source projects like MFEM via libCEED HIP backends. Her work blends deep numerical analysis with pragmatic software engineering, delivering fast direct solvers for the Helmholtz equation and scalable finite-element kernels. Colleagues value her interdisciplinary collaborations and her tendency to spot cross-architecture portability issues before they surface in production. Always learning, she combines engineering rigor with a knack for bridging research code into robust, performance-oriented implementations.
16 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD at University of Illinois Urbana-ChampaignBachelor of Science - BS, Bachelor of Science - BS at University of Oklahoma
Github Skills (10)
hip10
gpu-programming10
c-language10
hpc10
cprogramming-language10
scientific-computing9
parallel-computing9
cuda8
computational-science7
finite-element-analysis7
Programming languages (6)
Github contributions (5)
mfem/mfem
Mar 2020 - Dec 2021
Lightweight, general, scalable C++ library for finite element methods
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Performance Engineer
Back-end Developer & Performance EngineerContributions:48 reviews, 100 commits, 7 PRs in 1 year 9 months
Contributions summary:Natalie primarily focused on enabling the HIP backend for the libCEED library within the MFEM project, indicating contributions to GPU acceleration. Their work included integrating CEED with the HIP backend, modifying device configurations, and updating relevant kernel functions. Additional commits show the user addressing a hipcc compilation error and making style adjustments, suggesting a focus on code integration and performance optimization for the project.
cppfinite-elementshigh-orderhigh-performance-computingparallel-computing
nbeams/nbeams.github.io
Aug 2019 - Feb 2024
Contributions:14 pushes, 3 branches in 4 years 6 months
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