Abstract

February 6, 2006

Title: Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing
Presented by: David Keyes, Applied Mathematics, Columbia University and Director of Institute for Scientific Computing Research, LLNL

Video Podcast

Abstract

The Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing (SciDAC) initiative is a set of interconnected projects --- science, software development, and research directed towards the latter --- designed to support simulation, data exploration, and collaboration in many thrust areas of the U.S. Department of Energy, including: climate modeling, fusion energy, chemistry and materials science, astrophysics, and high energy and particle physics. Lab and university-based SciDAC participants are creating a new generation of scientific simulation codes for terascale systems. The software spills over into many projects not officially in the SciDAC portfolio. This lecture briefly reviews the sweep of SciDAC and then focuses on the speaker's SciDAC project, Terascale Optimal PDE Simulations (TOPS)

Biography

David Keyes is the Fu Foundation Professor of Applied Mathematics in the Department of Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics at Columbia University, an affiliate of the Center for Data Intensive Computing (CDIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory, and Acting Director of the Institute for Scientific Computing Research (ISCR) at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Keyes works at the algorithmic interface between parallel computing and the numerical analysis of partial differential equations, across a spectrum of aerodynamic, geophysical, and chemically reacting flows. Newton-Krylov-Schwarz parallel implicit methods, introduced in a 1993 paper he co-authored at ICASE, are now widely used throughout engineering and computational physics, and have been scaled to thousands of processors on the ASCI platforms.

Research specialty: applied and computational mathematics for PDEs, computational science, parallel numerical algorithms, parallel performance analysis, PDE-constrained optimization. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1984.

Keyes has led one of NSF's "Grand, National, and Multidisciplinary Challenges" centers and one of the DOE's ASCI centers. He currently directs a nine-institution Integrated Software Infrastructure Center (ISIC) for the Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research of the DOE, one of seven such centers created nationally in 2001 under the Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing (SciDAC) initiative. In 2003, he organized the "Science-based Case for Large-scale Simulation" (SCaLeS) workshop for the Office of Science of the DOE and was editor-in-chief of the resulting two-volume report. He also serves on the Advisory Board of the DOE Computational Science Graduate Fellowships. At Columbia, he directs the program in Applied Mathematics, and is faculty advisor to the local student chapter of SIAM.