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1) High Performance Computing in Science and Engineering: the Tree and the Fruit and 2) Missing Mathematics of Extreme Scale Simulation

Tuesday, February 28, 2012
1PM – 2:30PM
POB 2.302 (AVAYA)

David Keyes

Abstract #1: Most people aware of the U.S. High Performance computing and Communications Act of 1991 (Public Law 102-194, a.k.a. the "Information Superhighway Bill" or the "Gore Bill") note its transformative effects on the development of the information economy, the enhanced productivity of the overall economy, and the democratization of information, tracing a straight line to such diverse phenomena as Google, smart highways, and the Arab Spring. In fact, the high performance computing program, as implemented over the past 20 years by the 15 agencies of NITRD, has also transformed science and engineering, with high performance computing becoming, itself, a science. We reflect briefly not just on the fruit of HPC, but on the tree, itself, and on a host of "piggyback Moore's Laws".

Abstract #2: An oft-quoted motivation for extreme computing is to "take the gloves off" with critical energy and environmental simulations: improve prediction by relaxing the decoupling, rolling out the full physics, cranking up the resolution, and quantifying the uncertainty. Meeting these objectives will indeed justify the daunting development, acquisition, and operation costs of the hardware. New hardware is, however, only one challenge and perhaps neither the highest risk nor the highest payoff. Much mathematics (and software) appears to be missing if the hardware is to be used at its potential. For instance, the promises of multiphysics simulation will not be realized in extreme-scale computational environments in the primary manner through which codes are coupled today, through divide-and-conquer operator splitting. Furthermore, today's successful, decoupled applications will need to be substantially rewritten after two decades of algorithm refinement in a period of programming model stability. While undertaking the latter, it may be natural to rethink the former.

Speaker Biography:

David E. Keyes became the inaugural Dean of the Division of Mathematical and Computer Sciences and Engineering at KAUST (the King Abdullah University of Science & Technology) in Saudi Arabia, in 2009. Previously, he had been the Fu Foundation Professor of Applied Mathematics in the Department of Applied Physics and Applied
Mathematics at Columbia University. He is also faculty affiliate at several national laboratories of the U.S. Department of Energy.

Keyes graduated summa cum laude with a B.S.E. in Aerospace and Mechanical Sciences and a Certificate in Engineering Physics from Princeton University in 1978. He received his Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from Harvard University in 1984. He then post-doc'ed in the Computer Science Department at Yale University and taught there for eight years, as Assistant and Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering, prior to joining Old Dominion University and the Institute for Computer Applications in Science & Engineering (ICASE) at the NASA Langley Research Center in 1993. At Old Dominion, Keyes was the Richard F. Barry Professor of Mathematics & Statistics and founding Director of the Center for Computational Science.

Author or co-author of over 100 publications in computational science and engineering, numerical analysis, and computer science, Keyes has co-edited 12 conference proceedings concerned with parallel algorithms and has delivered over 300 invited presentations at universities, laboratories, and industrial research centers in over 20 countries and 35 states of the U.S. With backgrounds in engineering, applied mathematics, and computer science, and consulting experience with industry and national laboratories, 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.

Keyes has co-organized and/or lectured in numerous conferences and short courses on high-performance computing for systems modeled by partial differential equations for NASA, LLNL, SIAM, the DoD Modernization Centers, the domain decomposition and parallel CFD research communities, and university departments. He is currently co-editor of SIAM's Computational Science & Engineering book series, a member of the editorial board of Springer's Lecture Notes in Computational Science & Engineering, and has served as an editor of SIAM J Scientific Computing and as co-editor-in-chief of Int J. High Performance Computing Applications.

Among Keyes' awards are: a Columbia School of Engineering Distinguished Teaching Award, 2008; the IEEE Computer Society's Sidney Fernbach Award, 2007; the Gordon Bell Prize for High Performance Computing, 1999; a National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award, 1989; the Yale College Prize for Teaching Excellence in the Natural Sciences, 1991; a Yale University Junior Faculty Fellowship, 1990-91; a Harvard-Danforth Certificate for Excellence in Teaching, 1982; and the Hayes-Palmer Prize in Engineering at Princeton, 1978. Keyes has led one of NSF's "Grand, National, and Multidisciplinary Challenges" centers and one of the DOE's ASCI centers. From 2001-2010, he directed a nine-institution center on parallel PDE solvers for the Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research of the DOE, one of four such centers for computational mathematics under the Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing (SciDAC) initiative.

A SIAM Visiting Lecturer since 1992 and a member of the SIAM Council since 2000, Keyes became the Vice President-at-Large of SIAM in January 2006. He is a member of the Presidential Council of Advisors in Science & Technology (PCAST) Networking and Information Technology Committee and of the Advisory Committee of the Mathematics and
Physical Sciences Directorate of the NSF, and of the Office of Cyberinfrastructure for the NSF. Keyes has edited several community reports on simulation in fusion, fission, aerodynamics, nanotechnology, and other areas of science and engineering. 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 co-chaired the NSF Task Force on Software for Science and Engineering and co-edited its resulting report in 2011. He has been a member of a number of blue ribbon panels that issued federal agency-commissioned reports, including "Applied Mathematics at the U.S. Department of Energy: Past, Present and a View to the Future" and the NSF Simulation-based Engineering Sciences report. He also chairs the Steering Committee for
the DOE Computational Science Graduate Fellowships.

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