Center for Hybrid Multicore Productivity Research (CHMPR)
Distinguished Computational Science Lecture Series
Computational Science at the
Argonne Leadership Computing Facility
Paul Messina
Director of Science Argonne National Laboratory
http://www.alcf.anl.gov
3:00 p.m. Thursday, 1 November 2012, ITE 456, UMBC
The goal of the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF) is to extend the frontiers of science by solving problems that require innovative approaches and the largest-scale computing systems. ALCF’s current production computer has over 150,000 cores, and the system currently being readied for production – Mira, an IBM Blue Gene/Q system — has nearly one million cores. How does one program such systems? Are current software tools such as MPI and OpenMP available for such systems. Are scientific and engineering applications able to scale to such levels of parallelism? Is resilience a new concern for 1,000,000 production codes on Mira This talk will address these questions and describe a sampling of projects that are using ALCF systems in their research. Finally, the ways to gain access to ALCF resources will be presented.
Paul Messina is Director of Science at the ALCF. Dr. Messina guides the ALCF science teams using the IBM Blue Gene systems. In 2002-2004, he served as Distinguished Senior Computer Scientist at Argonne and as Adviser to the Director General at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research). Previously at Caltech, Dr. Messina served as Director of the Center for Advanced Computing Research, as Assistant Vice President for Scientific Computing, and as Faculty Associate for Scientific Computing. He led the Computational and Computer Science component of Caltech’s research project funded by the Academic Strategic Alliances Program of the Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative. He also acted as Co-principal Investigator for the National Virtual Observatory and TeraGrid. At Argonne, he held a number of positions from 1973-1987 and was the founding Director of the Mathematics and Computer Science Division.