SciDAC Institutes Strengthening the presence of SciDAC in the academic community DOE Program Managers Computer Science   Fred Johnson Applied Math   Homer Walker DOE Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research

A new component of the SciDAC program is the establishment of the SciDAC Institutes, university-led centers of excellence intended to increase the presence of the program in the academic community and to complement the efforts of the SciDAC Centers for Enabling Technologies. Under SciDAC-2, four SciDAC Institutes have been established at four universities — Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Southern California, the University of California at Davis and Old Dominion University—with a total of 13 universities participating in these partnerships. The SciDAC Institutes will provide opportunities for the sustained infusion of new ideas and community focus into the SciDAC program, as well as providing established outreach channels to foster the next generation of computational scientists. The institutes will receive a total of $8.2 million annually.

The Institutes will assist the SciDAC Scientific Applications teams and focus on particular challenges to effectively utilizing petascale computing but will be more flexible to pursue new research topics and be responsive to the broader community. Through hands-on workshops and tutorials, the SciDAC Institutes will help a broad range of researchers prepare their applications to take advantage of the increasing capabilities of supercomputing centers around the country. At the same time, these opportunities will provide students with valuable experience at the leading edge of computational science.

Although the idea of such institutes dedicated to computational science is new, SciDAC Institutes will be loosely patterned on successful institute models in other scientific communities. Such science institutes, which have helped make significant contributions in various scientific disciplines, include the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics, the Aspen Institute for Physics, and the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute.

SciDAC Institutes will sponsor a variety of activities, which will vary in format to address different purposes and needs. Activities appropriate for SciDAC Institute include:

• pre-doctoral and post-doctoral fellowships for young computational scientists
• topical programs, proposed by the SciDAC community, to address a particular problem of critical interest
• short courses and summer schools to give researchers at all levels training in new high performance computing concepts, technology, techniques, and software
• collaborative workshops to facilitate the interaction of leading researchers working on related problems
• visiting scientists and university faculty sabbaticals
• “coding camps” to facilitate rapid progress in the development of software
• tutorials at key scientific conferences or “on demand” to outreach to new communities.

Institutes Announced in September 2006

Petascale Data Storage
Addressing the challenges of petascale computing for scientific discovery on information storage capacity, performance, concurrency, reliability, availability, and manageability
    Principal Investigator: Garth Gibson (garth.gibson@cs.cmu.edu)
    Carnegie Mellon University

Performance Engineering Research
Enhancing the performance of SciDAC applications on petascale systems
    Principal Investigator: Robert F. Lucas (rflucas@isi.edu)
    University of Southern California

Ultrascale Visualization
Assembling the scalable parallel visualization infrastructure needed to enable knowledge discovery at the petascale and instructing application scientists on how to best use these tools
    Principal Investigator: Kwan-Liu Ma (ma@cs.ucdavis.edu)
    University of California at Davis

Combinatorial Scientific Computing and Petascale Simulations
Accelerating the development and deployment of fundamental enabling technologies in high performance computing
    Principal Investigator: Alex Pothen (pothen@cs.odu.edu)
    Old Dominion University