PhD candidate, Computer Science
Faculty advisors: Matt Sinclair and Shivaram Venkataraman
Brandon Tran earned a bachelor of science degree from the University of Saint Thomas and subsequently worked as an application developer for the Minnesota Department of Health for a year. He is currently a PhD candidate in the Computer Sciences department at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, under the guidance of Dr. Matt Sinclair and Dr. Shivaram Venkataraman. During his graduate studies, he received the Letters & Science Advanced Opportunity Fellowship and completed two internships at Oak Ridge National Lab as part of the Department of Energy OMNI internship program.
Brandon has contributed to two publications for the Super Computing conference and co-authored a submission for the NSF Workshop on Sustainable Computing for Sustainability. He focuses his research on developing energy models for graphics processing units (GPUs) in high-performance computing systems. These computing systems consume immense amounts of power, but how much power each component of the computer uses for a given task is difficult to measure. Brandon is developing an energy model to help researchers get more intelligent information about how much energy different aspects of their computing job require.
“If they were interested in making their workload more energy efficient, they know what is contributing to their energy consumption which is what they should tackle first,” he said.
Beyond academics, he serves as the president of SACM at UW–Madison, which is the student chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery. Brandon said the Advanced Opportunity Fellowship gave him time to get used to a new environment during his first year of graduate school and focus on taking classes without balancing a teaching or research assistantship. The ability to explore different opportunities helped him connect to SACM, where he now helps to build community for students in computer sciences.