National Center for Computational Sciences

SC07 Speakers

Kwan-Liu Ma (University of California-Davis)

Biography
Dr. Kwan-Liu Ma is a professor of computer science at the University of California-Davis, and leads the VIDI (Visualization and Interface Design Innovation) research group. He also directs the DOE SciDAC Institute for Ultrascale Visualization. His research spans the fields of visualization, high-performance computing, and user interface design. Professor Ma received his PhD in computer science from the University of Utah in 1993. During 1993-1999, he was with ICASE/NASA LaRC as a research scientist. In 1999, he joined UC Davis. In the following year, Professor Ma received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) for his work in parallel visualization. In 2001, he received the Schlumberger Foundation Technical Award for his work in large data visualization. In 2007, he received the College of Engineering’s Outstanding Mid-Career Research Faculty Award. Professor Ma actively serves the research community by playing leading roles in the 2005 NSF Workshop on Cyber Security, SC06 and SC07 Workshop on Ultrascale Visualization, 2007 Asia-Pacific Symposium on Visualization, 2008 Pacific Visualization Symposium, and 2008 Eurographics Symposium on Parallel Graphics and Visualization. Professor Ma also serves on the editorial boards of the IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications and the IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Graphics.

Talk Title
"Ultra-Scale Visualization"

Mark Gordon (Iowa State University)

Biography
Mark Gordon, Distinguished Professor or Chemistry at Iowa State University and Director of the Ames Laboratory Applied Mathematical Sciences program, was born and raised in New York City. After completing his B.S. in Chemistry in 1963, Professor Gordon entered the graduate program at Carnegie Institute of Technology, where he received his PhD in 1967 under the guidance of Professor John Pople, 1998 Chemistry Nobel Laureate.

Following a postdoctoral research appointment with Professor Klaus Ruedenberg at Iowa State University, Professor Gordon accepted a faculty appointment at North Dakota State University in 1970, where he rose through the ranks, eventually becoming distinguished professor and department chair.

He moved to Iowa State University and Ames Laboratory in 1992. Profesor Gordon’s research interests are very broadly based in electronic structure theory and related fields, including solvent effects, the theory of liquids, surface science, the design of new materials, and chemical reaction mechanisms. He has authored more than 450 research papers and is a member (and Treasurer) of the International Academy of Quantum Molecular Science.

Title of talk
“Computational Chemistry at the Petascale”

Gil Weigand (Enterprise Technology Systems & Solutions, LLC)

Biography
Former assistant energy secretary and Time Warner technology executive Gil Weigand has accepted a position with Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) as director of strategic programs and planning with the Computing and Computational Sciences directorate.

In this position Weigand will help develop new initiatives that integrate, consolidate, and focus the significant gains in computational-science capabilities on important global challenges related to energy, the environment, and national security. The planned petascale and trans-petascale systems represent an unprecedented opportunity for science—one that will make it possible to use computation not only as a tool for explaining recognized phenomena, but also as a means of making fundamental discoveries and exploring the behavior of complex systems, including those involving humans.

Weigand served in several management positions with the Department of Energy (DOE) during the late 1990s and received the Secretary of Energy Gold Medal in 1996. Among the DOE titles he held were deputy assistant secretary for research, development, and simulation with the agency’s Defense Programs, now National Nuclear Security Agency; deputy assistant secretary for strategic computing and simulation; and Defense Programs senior technical information officer.

During this time he oversaw one of the world’s largest science-based research and development (R&D) programs and was responsible for managing an R&D budget of $2.2 billion focused on product invention and development in a range of science and computer disciplines key to nuclear-weapons simulation and technology.

Weigand was the architect behind DOE’s highly successful Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative. The program built a partnership between DOE laboratories and U.S. industry that developed the world’s first supercomputer capable of a sustained performance of 1 trillion floating-point operations per second (1 teraflops). It also set the pace for the rapid advance in high-performance computing (HPC) that has led to current systems capable of hundreds of teraflops.

In the early 1990s Weigand held several positions within the Department of Defense (DoD). He served as director of the Modernization Office, where he headed the revitalization of HPC and networking at defense facilities, and as program director for high-performance computers at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. As recognition for his work at DoD, he received the Secretary of Defense Medal for Outstanding Public Service in 1993.

After leaving DOE Weigand served as a media and technology executive at Time Warner, both in corporate positions and at the company’s America Online (AOL) division. Weigand’s positions with the company included vice president of the Corporate Technology Group as well as chief technology officer international and senior vice president for Web services at AOL.

Weigand’s AOL group was responsible for several major product launches, including Netscape ISP and TotalTalk, a voice-over-internet-protocol service. While at Time Warner, Weigand remained personally active in R&D and holds 11 recent or pending patents in areas as varied as media restoration, streaming audio/video, and internet-protocol switching in cable-network head ends.

Weigand left AOL to join Canadian media giant CanWest, where he served as senior vice president for digital content at CanWest Media Works, Inc. In that position he led the effort to create a companywide enterprise to manage digital content and integrate business applications. He also managed initiatives for business-applications development and the advancement of a data center capable of supporting the company’s broadcast, print, and internet businesses.

Weigand comes to ORNL from Enterprise Technology Systems & Solutions, LLC, a consulting company Weigand formed to pursue his interests in simulation and high performance computing after leaving CanWest in 2006.

Weigand holds a doctorate in engineering from Purdue University.

Weigand is an avid hiker and looks forward to exploring eastern Tennessee’s mountains

Title of Talk
"Energy Assurance and High Performance Computing"

John Michalakes (National Center for Atmospheric Research Boulder, Colorado)

Biography
Michalakes is lead software developer for the Weather Research and Forecast
(WRF) model, for which he received the UCAR Outstanding Scientific and Technical Achievement award in 2004. Before coming to NCAR, Michalakes worked on a number of high-performance weather and climate applications while in the Mathematics and Computer Science Division at Argonne National Laboratory. He has a MS in Computer Science from Kent State University, 1988. He is also currently working towards a PhD in Computer Science at the University of Colorado at Boulder

Title of Talk
"Weather Modeling into the Petascale"

Moeljo Hong (The Boeing Company)

Biography
He is a principal engineer at the Enabling Technology and Research Group at Boeing Company. His areas of expertise include non-linear aeroelasticity & flutter, unsteady aerodynamics, and chemically reacting flows. His work at Boeing is to develop processes to enable analyses and simulations of transonic flow physics on a complete airplane. Dr. Hong received a Ph.D from the University of Washington in 1990. He previously worked at Amtec Engineering developing CFD codes for high-speed chemically reacting flows and did research in computational geometry.

Title of Talk
"Development and Validations of Computational Tools for Flight Vehicles"

Paul Ricker (University of Illinois)

Biography

Paul Ricker obtained his Ph. D. in physics from the University of Chicago in 1996. From 1996 to 1998 he was a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Virginia, and from 1999 to 2002 he returned to the University of Chicago as a research associate and later research scientist at Chicago’s ASCI Center for Astrophysical Thermonuclear Flashes. For his work at Chicago he received a Gordon Bell Prize in 2000 and the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) in 2001. In 2002 he moved to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he is an assistant professor in the Department of Astronomy and a research scientist at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications.

Ricker is an expert in parallel hydrodynamics and N-body simulation and has performed state-of-the-art simulations of galaxy cluster mergers that are routinely used by observers to interpret X-ray observations of galaxy clusters. He has contributed to our understanding of radio galaxy interactions with the intracluster medium, and he is producing a series of high-resolution cosmological hydrodynamics simulations that will probe the effects of merger-induced gas physics, star formation processes, and black hole feedback on cluster mass-observable relations.

He is one of the principal developers of the widely used FLASH adaptive mesh refinement hydrodynamics code, having developed its original framework as well as several physics modules needed for cosmological simulation.

Title of Talk
"Galaxy Cluster Radio Halos over Cosmic Time"

Phil Andrews (National Institute for Computational Sciences)

Biography
Phil Andrews took his undergraduate degree in mathematics at Cambridge University, England, and his Ph.D. in theoretical plasma physics at Princeton University. He worked in controlled thermonuclear research at GA Technologies before moving to the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center and then the San Diego Supercomputer Center, managing software development, production systems, and user support. He recently became a member of the Joint Institute for Computational Sciences operated by Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the University of Tennessee, Knoxville where he is Project Director for the National Institute for Computational Sciences. He has publications in plasma physics, nonlinear dynamics, biomedical computing, computer scheduling and grid computing.

Title of Talk
"Taking NSF computing to the PetaScale"

Steve Scott (Cray Inc.)

Biography
Steve Scott is the Chief Technology Officer and SVP at Cray Inc., where he has been since 1992 (originally with Cray Research and SGI). Steve was one of the architects of the groundbreaking Cray T3E multiprocessor, focusing on the interconnect and on synchronization and communication mechanisms. He was the chief architect of the GigaRing system area network used in all Cray systems in the late 1990s. More recently, Steve was the chief architect of the Cray X1/X1E supercomputers, which combined high performance vector processors with scalable, globally-addressable system architecture. He was also the chief architect of the next generation Cray “BlackWidow” system, and the architect of the router used in Cray XT3 MPP and the follow-on Baker system. Steve is currently leading the Cray Cascade project, which is part of the DARPA High Productivity Computing Systems program targeting productive, trans-petaflop systems in the 2010 timeframe.

Steve received his PhD in computer architecture from the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 1992, where he was a Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation and Hertz Foundation Fellow. He holds seventeen US patents, has served on numerous program committees, and has served as an associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems. Steve’s interests lie in the areas of processor architecture, memory system design, synchronization and communication mechanisms, and interconnection networks. Steve was the recipient of the 2005 Maurice Wilkes Award, given by the Association for Computing Machinery, and the 2005 Seymour Cray Computer Engineering Award, given by the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

Title of Talk
"ORNL and Cray: Scaling Supercomputing to New Heights"

William Tang (Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory)

Biography
William Tang is the Chief Scientist at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, the U.S. national laboratory for fusion research. He is also Associate Director for the Princeton Institute for Computational Science and Engineering which was established at Princeton University to stimulate progress in innovative computational science via interdisciplinary alliances involving computer science, applied mathematics, and key domain applications areas. In October, 2006, the Chinese Institute of Engineers-USA (CIE-USA), the oldest and most widely recognized Chinese-American Professional Society in North America, presented him its Distinguished Achievement Award “for his outstanding leadership in fusion research and contributions to fundamentals of plasma science.” After receiving a Ph.D. in Physics from the University of California, Davis with dissertation research carried out at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, he advanced to the Principal Research Physicist rank at PPPL and Lecturer with Rank and Title of Professor in the Department of Astrophysical Sciences by 1979 and became a Fellow of the American Physical Society at that time. He successfully served as Head of the PPPL Theory Department, generally recognized as the premier plasma science theory group in the world, from 1992 through 2004. He played a prominent leadership role for the development of DOE’s multi-disciplinary program, SciDAC (Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing), and is currently the Director of the Plasma Science Advanced Computing Institute for the Fusion Energy Sciences Program. In research activities, he is internationally recognized for his leading role in developing the requisite kinetic formalism as well as the associated computational applications dealing with electromagnetic plasma behavior in complex geometries. He has over 200 publications including more than 130 peer-reviewed papers in Science, Phys. Rev. Letters, Nuclear Fusion, etc. with an “h-index” or “impact factor” of 39 on the Web of Science, including over 5300 citations. He has guided the development and application of the most widely recognized codes for realistically simulating complex transport dynamics in plasmas. Relevant to accelerated scientific discovery in the future, these codes have demonstrated excellent scalability on the most advanced HPC platforms worldwide. Prof. Tang has contributed strongly to teaching and research training for over 20 years and has supervised numerous successful Ph.D. students, who have gone on to highly productive scientific careers — include recipients of the prestigious Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers in November, 2000 and in June, 2005.

Title of Talk
"Simulation at the Petascale for Fusion Energy Science & ITER"

Jack Dongarra (University of Tennessee)

Biography
Jack Dongarra holds an appointment as University Distinguished Professor of Computer Science in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at the University of Tennessee. He also holds the titles of Distinguished Research Staff in the Computer Science and Mathematics Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Turing Fellow in the Computer Science and Mathematics Schools at the University of Manchester, and Adjunct Professor in the Computer Science Department at Rice University. He specializes in numerical algorithms in linear algebra, parallel computing, use of advanced-computer architectures, programming methodology and tools for parallel computers. His research includes the development, testing and documentation of high quality mathematical software. He has contributed to the design and implementation of the following open source software packages and systems: EISPACK, LINPACK, the BLAS, LAPACK, ScaLAPACK, Netlib, PVM, MPI, NetSolve, Top500, ATLAS, and PAPI. He has published approximately 200 articles, papers, reports and technical memoranda and he is coauthor of several books. He is a Fellow of the AAAS, ACM, and the IEEE and a member of the National Academy of Engineering.

Title of Talk
"November 2007 Top500 List"