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Archive of Scientists behind SciDAC

Pete Beckman Appointed ALCF Project Director

Pete Beckman has been appointed project director of the ALCF. He also will serve as acting division director for the Leadership Computing Facility. Pete will be responsible for bringing the 500-TF IBM BG/P through acceptance testing and into early science, bringing the 100-TF BG/P into INCITE production, upgrading the storage and I/O systems, and transitioning the ALCF organization into steady-state operations. He will also recruit additional staff and users to the ALCF and chart a path for the future.

Pete previously served as the ALCF's chief architect and has more than a decade of experience in large-scale computing and project management. He has worked in systems software for parallel computing, operating systems, and Grid computing for 20 years. He also worked in industry, serving as vice president of Turbolinux's worldwide engineering efforts, managing development offices in the United States, Japan, China, Korea, and Slovenia.

James Hack Named Director of NCCS

James J. ("Jim") Hack has been selected to direct the National Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS), a leadership computing facility at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), and to head ORNL's Climate Change Initiative. As director of the NCCS, in partnership with the project director of the Leadership Computing Facility at ORNL, Hack will lead the world's premier high-performance computing facility for open science and advancing scientific discovery. As leader of the Climate Change Initiative, he will develop Laboratory-wide programs in climate change and lead a team of scientists and engineers across ORNL in advancing the state of the art in Earth system discovery and policy through enhanced scientific understanding, Earth system modeling, and advances in computational and observational programs.

Hack joins ORNL from the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) with a distinguished career in climate science research. He has long collaborated with the international climate community and continues to serve on the Department of Energy's Advanced Scientific Computing Advisory Committee and the Workin Group on Numerical Experimentation, which is supported by the Joint Scientific Committee for the World Climate Research Program and the World Meteorological Organization Committee for Atmospheric Sciences, the United Nations' authoritative voices on weather, climate, and water.

Kathy Yelick named New NERSC Division Director

Kathy Yelick, head of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Future Technologies Group, a professor of computer science at UC Berkeley and an internationally recognized expert in developing methods to advance the use of supercomputers, has been named director of the NERSC Division at Berkeley Lab. Yelick, who has been head of the Future Technologies Group since 2005, will officially assume her new job in January 2008.

Yelick has a major involvement in two SciDAC projects: The Center for Scalable Application Development Software for Advanced Architectures (CSCaDS) and The Performance Engineering Research Institute (PERI), where she leads the automatic tuning effort. These activities reflect her career focus on making parallel machines easier to use through the use of libraries, languages, compilers, and other software tools.

The Winter 2007 issue of SciDAC Review has a feature Kathy Yelick and her new role at NERSC. "When Horst Simon announced that he wanted to relinquish the leadership of NERSC, we knew he would be a tough act to follow," said Dr. Michael Strayer, head of DOE's Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research, which funds NERSC. "But with the selection of Kathy Yelick as the next director, I believe that NERSC will continue to build upon its success in advancing scientific discovery through computation. We are extremely happy to have her take on this role."
Read her longer biography.

David Keyes Receives 2007 Fernbach Award

David Keyes, an applied mathematician with a long history of involvement in SciDAC research, has been named the recipient of the 2007 Sidney Fernbach Award. The Fernbach award was established in 1992 in memory of Sidney Fernbach, a pioneer in the development and application of high performance computers, and is given by the IEEE Computer Society for innovative uses of high-performance computing in problem solving. Keyes was designated the 2007 award recipient in recognition of his outstanding contributions to the development of scalable numerical algorithms for the solution of nonlinear partial differential equations as well as his exceptional leadership in high-performance computation. Keyes is PI of the SciDAC TOPS Center and General Chair of the 2007 SciDAC Conference. The award was presented at SC07, where Keyes gave a plenary lecture as part of a special awards session. more

Sherry Li Named Associate Editor of ACM TOMS Journal

Xiaoye Sherry Li, a computer scientist in LBNL’s Computational Research Division, has been named an associate editor of the ACM Transactions on Mathematical Software (TOMS). TOMS publishes research results addressing the development, evaluation and use of mathematical software. In addition, TOMS publishes machine-readable computer software which is incorporated into the Collected Algorithms of the ACM. Li is well known for her development work on SuperLU, a general purpose library for the direct solution of large, sparse, nonsymmetric systems of linear equations on high performance machines. She is a member of the SciDAC TOPS Center.
more on Li

Dean Williams wins the Emerald Award

Dean Williams, principal investigator for the SciDAC project “Scaling the Earth System Grid to Petascale Data Center for Enabling Technologies," has won the Senior Investigator Emerald Award, which recognizes consistent leadership in advancing basic science knowledge or discovering, developing, and implementing entirely new technologies. The Emerald Awards, sponsored by Science Spectrum magazine, are billed as the premier awards for African Americans, Hispanics, Asian Americans and Native Americans working in the research sciences.

Williams has been the lead computer scientist for the Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison (PCMDI) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory for the last 18 years, designing and developing data analysis tools and visualization. He is the also the Deputy Division Leader of the Biology Atmosphere, Chemistry and Earth (BACE) Division at LLNL.

Williams' career has been focused on unifying the scientists of the climate change community by providing tools, data, and computing to enable scientific discovery. He created Climate Data Analysis Tools (CDAT), a DOE-funded environment of open source tools that allow users to manage, analyze, visualize, and control climate data sets. Williams and his team developed, contributed, and supported numerous software packages to the climate community through CDAT. He increased the effectiveness of CDAT by increasing the accessibility to the worldwide datasets, most notably by hosting the IPCC (International Panel on Climate Change) data. He has incorporated cutting edge grid technology to leverage the compute power of several organizations with his ASCR-funded Earth Systems Grid project. His strategic vision has resulted in enabling scientific advances in climate change as evidenced by more than 200 publications, most notably the IPCC reports on climate. He credits his success to the combined accomplishments of his team.

AMS recognizes Warren Washington

The American Meteorological Society has presented Warren Washington with the Charles Franklin Brooks Award for Outstanding Services to the Society, "for decades of service to the AMS and as a representative of the atmospheric sciences community at the highest levels of policymakers."

In addition to his duties as Senior Scientist and Section Head for the Climate Change Research Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, Washington is consultant and advisor to a number of government officials and committees on climate system modeling. He has been on the Secretary of Energy's Biological and Environmental Research Advisory Committee (BERAC) since 1990.

With the others members of the SciDAC project "Modeling the Earth System", Washington is using the formidable computing resources of the National Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS) to increase the confidence of global climate analysis. In doing so, the project will provide information needed by residents and policy makers alike to address their changing climate.

The team contributed simulations for the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), sponsored by the United Nations. The reported concluded that there is more than a 90-percent chance that climate warming over the last 50 years has been the result of human activity.

Washington's team goes into 2007 with an INCITE allocation of 4 million processor hours on the Cray XT4 Jaguar and 1.5 million processor hours on the Cray X1E Phoenix systems at NCCS. The outcome will be of benefit not only to the dozens of leading scientists working on the project, but also to the scientific community in general.

In Memoriam: Ken Kennedy, Rice University

The computing world was saddened at the loss in early February of Ken Kennedy, the founder of Rice University's nationally ranked computer science program and one of the world's foremost experts on high-performance computing. In 1997, he was tapped to co-chair the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC), a congressionally mandated committee charged with advising the president, Congress and other federal agencies on advanced information technology. The panel's 1999 report urged U.S. leaders to increase spending for computing research by more than $1 billion, and it served as a catalyst for increased IT research support from numerous federal agencies.

Kennedy's ground-breaking work on program language implementation and optimization techniques were recognized by his peers with the 1999 Lifetime Achievement Award from ACM SIGPLAN. Kennedy also dedicated more than two decades of his research career to developing high-level programming tools for parallel and distributed computer systems. His contributions helped make supercomputers more accessible to scientists and engineers.

More recently, Kennedy had been selected to lead the Center for Scalable Applications Development Software for Advanced Architectures (CScADS) for the Department of Energy's SciDAC program. The Center will address the challenges of multi-core compilers.

"Ken's leadership, talent, and enthusiasm will be sorely missed as we address the challenges of petascale computing," said Dr. Michael Strayer, director of the SciDAC program for DOE's Office of Science. "As the CScADS team moves forward in implementing the shared vision for U.S. high performance computing, we hope to continue the legacy of the pioneer from Rice."

Rice University's tribute to Dr. Kennedy.

SciDAC researchers prominent in INCITE Awards

The Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program was conceived specifically to seek out computationally intensive, large-scale research projects with the potential to significantly advance key areas in science and engineering. The program encourages proposals from universities, other research institutions and industry. In 2007, Argonne, Lawrence Berkeley, Oak Ridge and Pacific Northwest national laboratories all provided resources for the INCITE program. Read the project factsheets (pdf).

2006 Gordon Bell prize has SciDAC connection

A team led by Francois Gygi (left) has been awarded the prestigious Gordon Bell Prize for "peak performance". Gygi is a member of the SciDAC Q-SIMAN project. Also on the winning Gordon Bell team is Bronis de Supinski (right), a member of the SciDAC Performance Engineering Research Institute. Their entry was titled “Large-Scale Structure Calculations of High-Z Metals on the BlueGene/L Platform.” Molybdenum, a high-Z or heavy metal, is of particular interest to scientists with the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) Stockpile Stewardship Program.

The team used Qbox, a first principles molecular dynamics (FPMD) code, to achieve simulations of unprecedented scale and detail. A sustained peak performance of 207.3 TFlop/s was measured on 65,536 nodes, corresponding to 56.5 percent of the theoretical full machine peak using all 128k CPUs. Read more about the award-winning effort.

SciDAC Supernova Researcher Honored

Stan Woosley, leader of SciDAC's Supernova Science Center project, was among 72 scientists recently elected to the prestigious National Academy of Sciences in recognition of his original research contributions to science. Woosley is a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

The SciDAC project he leads aims to develop detailed computer simulations to understand how supernovae explode, creating the most powerful explosions and brightest objects in the universe. Read more about the center.