The Interactive Design Center at Sandia/California
The Computer Sciences and Information Systems group at Sandia/California is located in the Distributed Information Systems Lab. This state-of-the-art facility enables Sandia researchers to develop new technologies for collaborative, high-performance computational work. These technologies will support the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Advanced Simulation and Computing strategy to provide high-end simulation capabilities for the nuclear-weapons complex.
Focus areas of the Computer Sciences and Information Systems group include the following:
Screenshot of SIMBA at work — a software tool that provides an extensive capability for managing, building, and viewing simulation models.
Scientists and engineers today are using high-fidelity modeling and simulation codes to perform virtual prototyping and visualization capabilities. The expected sizes of data sets generated by these approaches will require compute capacity that far exceeds currently developed and planned solutions. This focus area is aimed at the research, design, integration, and production issues needed to deliver commodity-based compute and visualization systems to meet Sandia’s present and future high-performance, scientific-computing needs.
The increased use of computing is driving a rise in the value of information and the increased importance of information protection. This task is increasingly more difficult as communication networks and collaborative environments become more ubiquitous. In this focus area, we address the broad research, development, education, and operational support issues necessary to provide secure distributed computing and information management for ourselves and others.
The increased reliance on modeling and simulation for engineering design using high-performance computing environments requires the development of new computational algorithms and software systems. This is particularly true in the case of terascale and distributed computing systems, since such systems have a higher probability of failure. We research and develop new computational algorithms and component-based software systems. We then integrate these algorithms and systems into robust and reliable problem-solving environments.
Sandia’s computer sciences and mathematics capabilities are also brought to bear on the analysis of large-scale data sets. These data sets, found in scientific computing (e.g., experimental results, modeling and simulation output) and other national-security applications (e.g., sensor network data, web traffic analysis) are often heterogeneous, erroneous, and overwhelming in the rate that they are generated. Such data sets require novel algorithms, visualization capabilities, and high-performance computing architectures to support their transformation into useful information.
Many of the software applications created by Sandia’s Information Systems Development group are available for licensing under open-source or proprietary agreements by contacting the California Partnerships office.
Contact Craig Smith at (925) 294-3358 for more information on partnering opportunities with Sandia’s Computer Science and Information Technology group.