Sean Siddens

Computer Science PhD Student

University of Washington

About Me

Last updated: 9/18/24

Hey 👋, I’m Sean. I’m a first year computer science PhD student at the University of Washington, advised by Mark Oskin.

My research interests generally revolve around high performance computing, with an emphasis on parallel programming and heterogeneous architectures. I strongly believe that the future of computing will be significantly impacted by specialized hardware accelerators. I’m interested in optimizing application performance on these systems and enhancing developer interaction through improved compiler tools and programming models.

Interests

GPU Programming - fine grained synchronization, dynamic work allocation, GPGPU
Computer Architecture - specialized architectures and heterogenous systems
Computer Graphics - real time rendering, physically based light transport, GPU driven rendering
Compilers

Education

PhD in Computer Science, 2024 - Present
University of Washington
BSc in Computer Science, 2020 - 2023
University Of California, Santa Cruz

Timeline

Sep ‘24: Started my PhD at UW!
Feb 7-9th ‘24: Attended Vulkanised 2024 where Devon McKee gave a presentation on work I partially collaborated on.
Jan ‘24 - Aug ‘24: Worked as a Junior Specialist at UCSC, leading work on the Ecoscape project, a tool to visualize and model the habitat connectivity of birds in order to help inform conservation and climate efforts.
Dec ‘23 - Jan ‘24: Completed a winternship at Trail of Bits with Tyler Sorensen, where I investigated security vulnerabiltiies of multi-tenant GPU systems.
Apr ‘23 - Sep ‘23: Participated in research as an undergrad at the Concurrency and Heterogenous Programming Lab (CHPL) at UCSC.
- Significantly contributed to Epiphron, a portable benchmark suite studying fine-grained synchronization and dynamic work allocation on GPUs.

Gallery

Cool stuff I’ve made

Density plot of eigenvaules of the companion matrices of degree 23 Littlewood polynomials. [{{< icon name="github" pack="fab" >}}](https://github.com/seansiddens/BohemianMatrices)

Density plot of eigenvalues of a random sample of matrices whose entries lie in the beta distribution. [{{< icon name="github" pack="fab" >}}](https://github.com/seansiddens/BohemianMatrices)

A rendering from my CPU path tracer written in C. Scene is solely illuminated from image-based-illumination (IBL) by the HDRI sky-box. [{{< icon name="github" pack="fab" >}}](https://github.com/seansiddens/PathTracer)

Attractor of a linear iterated function system. Created by following the chaos game. [{{< icon name="github" pack="fab" >}}](https://gist.github.com/seansiddens/3b8d41e5d013acbff96489f170eb81db)

Simulation of random walkers using compute shaders.

$A rendering from my CPU path tracer. Code adapted from Peter Shirley\'s Ray Tracing Weekend book series.[{{< icon name="github" pack="fab" >}}](https://github.com/seansiddens/PathTracer)$

Exploring the relationship between Mandelbrot and Julia sets. Made in [Shadertoy](https://www.shadertoy.com/view/3tyyz3).

$Newton fractal created by applying Newton's method to a complex-valued function. [{{< icon name="github" pack="fab" >}}](https://github.com/seansiddens/NewtonFractals)$

A rendering from my CPU path tracer. Scene is illuminated by an emmisive sphere. [{{< icon name="github" pack="fab" >}}](https://github.com/seansiddens/Pathtracer)

Diffusion limited aggregation simulation with compute shaders.[{{< icon name="github" pack="fab" >}}](https://github.com/seansiddens/DLA)

Rotating the matrice distribution. [{{< icon name="github" pack="fab" >}}](https://github.com/seansiddens/BohemianMatrices)

Julia sets for values rotated along the unit circle on the complex plane. Made in [Shadertoy](https://www.shadertoy.com/view/3tyyz3).

Tiled Julia sets forming the Mandelbrot set. Made in [Shadertoy](https://www.shadertoy.com/view/3tyyz3).

$Zoomed in region of littlewood fractal. [{{< icon name="github" pack="fab" >}}](https://github.com/seansiddens/BohemianMatrices)$

Rendering of the Mandelbrot set using the escape time iteration coloring algorithm. [{{< icon name="github" pack="fab" >}}](https://github.com/seansiddens/Mandelbrot)

Slime mold simulation. [{{< icon name="github" pack="fab" >}}](https://github.com/seansiddens/PhysarumSim)

Sphere inside a rotating cube. Rendered from scratch using 3D points and a perspective transformation matrix.

Density plot of eignevalues of tridiagonal matrices. [{{< icon name="github" pack="fab" >}}](https://github.com/seansiddens/BohemianMatrices)

Contact

Feel free to reach out: