Computing In Transition: HPC and Parallel I/O

18 September 2015

9:00am to 10:00am

B47 R505a/b St Lucia

Locations

University of Queensland: Time: 9.00 - 10.00am Seminar Room 505A/B, Axon Building (#47), St Lucia Campus. Enquiries: Fran Moore (Research Computing Centre)

Monash University: Time: 9.00 - 10.00am Seminar Room G12A, Building 26, Clayton Campus. Enquiries: Caitlin Slattery (Faculty of IT)

Speaker

Professor William Gropp

Abstract

Computing has become central to all areas of science and engineering. Historically, high-end computing, used for the most demanding of problems in computational science, has meant supercomputing, using systems measured by the number of floating-point operations per second they could perform (at least in theory).

In the past few years, this picture has become more complex, both with increased and wider focus on data and with new ways to deliver large scale computing, using cloud computing.

This talk covers some of the issues facing the US research computing community, with a special focus on computing supported by the National Science Foundation, and will take a close look at the gap between data capability and what is achieved by applications on those four supercomputing systems.

Biography

Professor William Gropp is the Thomas M. Siebel Chair in the Department of Computer Science, Director of the Parallel Computing Institute, and Chief Scientist of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign.

He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1982, was assistant and later associate professor in the Computer Science Department of Yale University until 1990. He then joined Argonne National Laboratory where he held the positions of Senior Scientist (1998-2007) and Associate Division Director (2000-2006). He joined Illinois in 2007.

His research interests are in parallel computing, software for scientific computing, and numerical methods for partial differential equations.

While at Argonne, he created the MPICH project, which developed the implementation of the Message Passing Interface used on most of the leading HPC systems as well as parallel clusters of all sizes. Other projects include PETSc, one of the most popular scalable numerical libraries, and pnetCDF, a scalable version of the netCDF I/O library.

His current projects include Blue Waters, an extreme scale computing system, and the development of new programming systems and numerical algorithms for scalable scientific computing.

Among his awards are the Gordon Bell prize, the IEEE Sidney Fernbach Award, and the IEEE Medal for Excellence in Scalable Computing.

He is a Fellow of ACM, IEEE, and SIAM and a member of the National Academy of Engineering.

Slides

Click here to view the seminar slides (2.5 MB, PDF).

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