Tuesday, May 21, 2013

No Exascale for You! Part Deux: The Interview


Although Horst Simon was named Deputy Director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, he maintains his strong ties to the scientific computing community as an editor of the TOP500 list and as an invited speaker at conferences.

Twice during the week of May 6, Simon gave back-to-back presentations of a new talk on “Why We Need Exascale and Why We Won’t Get There by 2020.” Not only was the talk a hit with conference attendees, but it also made its way onto Slashdot. In this HPCwire exclusive, Simon talks about his presentation with Jon Bashor of Berkeley Lab.

Simon is well positioned to discuss the path to exascale. An internationally recognized expert in computer science and applied mathematics, he joined Berkeley Lab in 1996 as director of the newly formed National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), and was one of the key architects in establishing NERSC at its new location in Berkeley. Under his leadership NERSC enabled important discoveries for research in fields ranging from global climate modeling to astrophysics. Simon was also the founding director of Berkeley Lab's Computational Research Division, which conducts applied research and development in computer science, computational science, and applied mathematics.

In his prior role as Associate Lab Director for Computing Sciences, Simon helped to establish Berkeley Lab as a world leader in providing supercomputing resources to support research across a wide spectrum of scientific disciplines. Simon’s research interests are in the development of sparse matrix algorithms, algorithms for large-scale eigenvalue problems, and domain decomposition algorithms for unstructured domains for parallel processing. His algorithm research efforts were honored with the 1988 and the 2009 Gordon Bell Prize for parallel processing research. He was also member of the NASA team that developed the NAS Parallel Benchmarks, a widely used standard for evaluating the performance of massively parallel systems. He is co-editor of the twice-yearly TOP500 list that tracks the most powerful supercomputers worldwide, as well as related architecture and technology trends.

heh. Wonder who was guilty of trolling /.?  ;)

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