Petascale Initiative
Alice Koniges (third from left) leads the Computational Science and Engineering Petascale Initiative, which pairs post-doctoral researchers with high-impact projects at NERSC. The post-docs are (from left) Jihan Kim, Filipe Maia, Robert Preissl, Brian Austin, Wangyi (Bobby) Liu , Kirsten Fagnan and Praveen Narayanan.
The Computational Science and Engineering Petascale Initiative at LBNL identifies key application areas with specific needs for advanced programming models, algorithms, and other support. The applications are chosen to be consistent with the current mission of the Department of Energy, with a particular focus on applications that benefit energy research, those supported by other Recovery Act funding and Energy Frontier Research Centers (EFRCs). The initiative pairs post-doctoral researchers with these high-impact projects at NERSC. The post-doctoral research program is centered at the Oakland Scientific Facility (OSF), NERSC's operations center and is led by principal investigator Alice Koniges.
Background
The multicore revolution provides opportunity for major increases in computational power over the next several years, if it can be harnessed. Elective use of multicore platforms is essential for science problems that require petascale computing, but is also necessary to continue the performance growth associated with Moore's Law at computing systems at all scales. This transition from simply increasing the single-processor and network performance to a different architectural paradigms forces application programmers to rethink the basic models of algorithm development and parallel programming from both the language and problem division standpoints. Additionally, advances in architecture and availability of resources are making the high performance computing (HPC) world more attractive to a variety of research areas that were not previously using advanced computing.
Selected Accomplishments
- Two post-docs (Kim and Preissl) were co-authors and significant contributors to the paper “Application Acceleration on Current and Future Cray Platforms,” winner BEST PAPER, CUG 2010, Edinburgh, May 2010.
- Two first author (Fagnan and Narayanan) post-doc papers were presented at CUG 2011.
- More than 15 talks and conference poster presentations have been given.
- Two post-docs (Kim and Maia) served as teaching assistants for the NERSC sponsored user course on GPUs, Aug. 2010.
- One post-doc (Preissl) served as a teaching assistant for an SC10 (Supercomputing 2010) conference tutorial.
- One post-doc (Maia) created and launched a scientific data bank for x-ray images: Coherent X-ray Imaging Data Bank.
Please also see our publications page.
