Title: Exascale Challenges for the Computational Science Community

Speaker: Dr. Horst Simon, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Date/Time: Thursday, March 24, 2011, 1:00 pm Mountain Time        

Location: CSRI Building/Room 90 (Sandia NM) 

Brief Abstract: "The development of an exascale computing capability with machines capable of executing O(1018) operations per second in the 2018 time frame will be characterized by significant and dramatic changes in computing hardware architecture from current (2010) petascale high-performance computers. From the perspective of computational science, this will be at least as disruptive as the transition from vector supercomputing to parallel supercomputing that occurred in the 1990s." This was one of the findings of a recent workshop on crosscutting technologies for exascale computing. The impact of these architectural changes on future applications development for the computational sciences community can now be anticipated in very general terms. In this talk, I will summarize what I believe will be the major changes in the next decade for applications development.

Biography:  Horst Simon is an internationally recognized expert in computer science and applied mathematics and the Deputy Director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory(Berkeley Lab). Simon joined Berkeley Lab in early 1996 as director of the newly formed National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), and was one of the key architects in establishing NERSC at its new location in Berkeley. Under his leadership, NERSC enabled important discoveries for research in fields ranging from global climate modeling to astrophysics. Simon was also the founding director of Berkeley Lab's Computational Research Division, which conducts applied research and development in computer science, computational science, and applied mathematics.

In his prior role as Associate Lab Director for Computing Sciences, Simon helped to establish Berkeley Lab as a world leader in providing supercomputing resources to support research across a wide spectrum of scientific disciplines. He is also an adjunct professor in the College of Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. In that role he worked to bring the Lab and the campus closer together, developing a designated graduate emphasis in computational science and engineering. In addition, he has worked with project managers from the Department of Energy, the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Defense and other agencies, helping researchers define their project requirements and solve technical challenges.

Simon's research interests are in the development of sparse matrix algorithms, algorithms for large-scale eigenvalue problems, and domain decomposition algorithms for unstructured domains for parallel processing. His algorithm research efforts were honored with the 1988 and the 2009 "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Bell_Prize">Gordon Bell Prize for parallel processing research. He was also member of the NASA team that developed the NAS Parallel Benchmarks, a widely used standard for evaluating the performance of massively parallel systems. He is co-editor of the biannual TOP500 list that tracks the most powerful supercomputers worldwide, as well as related architecture and technology trends.

CSRI POC: Scott Collis, 505-284-1123