Keynotes
Keynote Speech 1
Richard W. LindermanChief Scientist, Information Directorate, Air Force Research Laboratory, Rome, NY, USA
"Moving towards interactive, green HPC"
[Dec. 20; 8:30am - 9:30am; Grand Sala]
Abstract
Technology advances driven by the gaming and graphics markets are delivering multi-core processing options with ten-fold price-performance and power-performance advantages over conventional High Performance Computing (HPC) nodes. This allows HPCs to explore new areas such as real time interactive applications and embedded processing. A new 500 teraflops machine mixing IBM Cell Broadband Engine, Intel Xeon and Nvidia GPGPU technology is discussed as an example of what is presently possible. Technological impediments to achieving exascale computing such as shrinking base energy consumption, reducing data transport energy requirements, exploiting concurrency, building in resiliency through use of adaptive components, multi-core hardware and parallel software will be discussed.
Bio
Dr. Richard W. Linderman, a member of the scientific and professional cadre of senior executives, is the Chief Scientist, Information Directorate, Air Force Research Laboratory, Rome, N.Y. The Information Directorate leads the discovery, development and integration of affordable warfighting information technologies for air, space and cyberspace forces. It consists of more than 800 military and civilian scientists, engineers, and administrative and support personnel pursuing a wide variety of research and development projects with an annual budget of more than $760 million. Dr. Linderman serves as the directorate's principal scientific and technical adviser and primary authority for the technical content of the science and technology portfolio. He provides principal technical oversight of a broad spectrum of information technologies including fusion and exploitation; command and control; advanced architectures; information management; communications and networking; defensive information warfare; and intelligent information systems technologies.
Dr. Linderman was commissioned as a second lieutenant in May 1980. Upon completing four years of graduate studies, he entered active-duty, teaching computer architecture courses and leading related research at the Air Force Institute of Technology. He was assigned to Rome Air Development Center in 1988, where he led surveillance signal processing architecture activities. In 1991, he transitioned from active-duty to civil service as a senior electronics engineer at Rome Laboratory, becoming a principal engineer in 1997. During these years, he pioneered three dimensional packaging of embedded architectures and led the Department of Defense community exploring signal and image processing applications of high performance computers. Recently, he conceived and demonstrated the use of PS3 gaming consoles to architect supercomputers with outstanding affordability and power efficiency. Dr. Linderman holds six U.S. patents and has published more than 70 journal, conference and technical papers.
Keynote Speech 2
Marc SnirMichael Faiman and Saburo Muroga Professor in the Department of Computer Science at UIUC
courtesy appointment in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science
"Software for Future Exascale Systems" 
[PDF, 1.2MB]
Abstract
The talk will discuss the main software impediments to the effective use of future supercomputing systems and the main research directions that must come to fruition in order for to overcome these impediments.
Bio
Professor Marc Snir is Michael Faiman and Saburo Muroga Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and has a courtesy appointment in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science. He currently pursues research in parallel computing. He is Associate Director for Extreme Scale Computing at NCSA, co-PI for petascale Blue Waters system and co-director of the Intel and Microsoft funded Universal Parallel Computing Research Center (UPCRC).
He was head of the Computer Science Department from 2001 to 2007. Until 2001 he was a senior manager at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center where he led the Scalable Parallel Systems research group that was responsible for major contributions to the IBM SP scalable parallel system and to the IBM Blue Gene system.
Marc Snir received a Ph.D. in Mathematics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1979, worked at NYU on the NYU Ultracomputer project in 1980-1982, and was at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1982-1986, before joining IBM. Marc Snir was a major contributor to the design of the Message Passing Interface. He has published numerous papers and given many presentations on computational complexity, parallel algorithms, parallel architectures, interconnection networks, parallel languages and libraries and parallel programming environments.
Marc is AAAS Fellow, ACM Fellow, and IEEE Fellow. He has Erdos number 2 and is a mathematical descendant of Jacques Salomon Hadamard.
Keynote Speech 3
Edward SeidelDirector of LSU's Center for Computation & Technology
Floating Point Systems Professor in LSU's Departments of Physics & Astronomy and Computer Science
Assistant Director, Mathematical and Physical Sciences (MPS), US National Science Foundation
"The Data and Compute-Driven Transformation of Modern Science"
[Dec. 21; 1:30pm - 2:30pm; Grand Sala]
Abstract
Modern science is undergoing a profound transformation as it aims to tackle the complex problems of the 21st Century. It is becoming highly collaborative; problems as diverse as climate change, renewable energy, or the origin of gamma-ray bursts require understanding processes that no single group or community has the skills to address. At the same time, after centuries of little change, compute, data, and network environments have grown by 12 orders of magnitude in the last few decades. Cyberinfrastructure---the comprehensive set of deployable hardware, software, and algorithmic tools and environments supporting research, education, and increasingly collaboration across disciplines---is transforming all research disciplines and society itself. Motivating with examples ranging from astrophysics to emergency forecasting, I will describe new trends in science and the need, the potential, and the transformative impact of cyberinfrastructure. I will also discuss current and planned future efforts at the National Science Foundation to address them.
Bio
Edward Seidel is a physicist recognized for his work on numerical relativity and black holes, as well as in high-performance and grid computing. In 2003, Louisiana State University recruited Seidel to lead its investment in the Governor's Information Technology Initiative, and he became founding director of LSU's Center for Computation & Technology. Seidel served as CCT director from 2003-2008. Seidel also is the Floating Point Systems Professor in LSU's Departments of Physics & Astronomy and Computer Science. In addition to leading the CCT, he helped initiate, and was the chief scientist for, the $40M Louisiana Optical Network Initiative.
In June 2008, the National Science Foundation selected Seidel as its director for the Office of Cyberinfrastructure (OCI). Seidel began this position Sept. 1, 2008, which oversees advances in supercomputing, high-speed networking, data storage and software development on a national level. In this role he elevated the role of software and of computational and data intensive science programs at NSF. In August, 2009 he also assumed the role of Acting Assistant Director for Mathematical and Physical Sciences (MPS) at NSF, and as of June 1, 2010 he became NSF Assistant Director for MPS.
Seidel earned his Ph.D. from Yale University in relativistic astrophysics. Prior to becoming CCT director, Seidel was a professor at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert-Einstein-Institute, or AEI) in Germany from 1996-2005. There, Seidel founded and led AEI's numerical relativity and e-science groups, which became leaders in solving Einstein's equations using computers, and in distributed and grid computing. He also was a senior research scientist at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and associate professor in the Physics Department at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is a recipient of the IEEE Sidney Fernbach Award, the Gordon Bell Prize, and Heinz-Billing Prize, and is a fellow of the American Physical Society.