Numerical algorithms for high-performance computational science

David Keyes directs the Extreme Computing Research Center at KAUST. He works at the interface between parallel computing and the numerical analysis of PDEs, with a focus on scalable implicit solvers. Newton-Krylov-Schwarz (NKS) and Additive Schwarz Preconditioned Inexact Newton (ASPIN) are methods he helped name and is helping to popularise. Before joining KAUST as a founding dean in 2009, he led multi-institutional scalable solver software projects in the SciDAC and ASCI programs of the US DOE, ran university collaboration programs at LLNL’s ISCR and NASA’s ICASE, and taught at Columbia, Old Dominion, and Yale Universities. He is a Fellow of SIAM, AMS, and AAAS, and has been awarded the ACM Gordon Bell Prize, the IEEE Sidney Fernbach Award, and the SIAM Prize for Distinguished Service to the Profession. He earned a BSE in Aerospace and Mechanical Sciences from Princeton in 1978 and a PhD in Applied Mathematics from Harvard in 1984.

Katherine Yelick is a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California at Berkeley and the Associate Laboratory Director for Computing Sciences at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. She is known for her research in parallel languages, compilers, algorithms, libraries, and scientific applications. She is the former director of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), and currently oversees NERSC, ESnet, and the and the Computational Research Division. Yelick has served on the Computer Science Telecommunications Board (CSTB) and the Computing Community Consortium (CCC). She is a Fellow of ACM and AAAS, and recipient of the ACM-W Athena award and ACM/IEEE Ken Kennedy Award. She is also a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Anna Scaife (MPhys Bristol, PhD Cambridge) is Professor of Radio Astronomy at the University of Manchester, where she is head of the Jodrell Bank Interferometry Centre of Excellence, and holds the 2017 Blaauw Chair in Astrophysics at the University of Groningen. She is the recipient of a European Research Council Fellowship for her research group's work investigating the origin and evolution of large-scale cosmic magnetic fields, and leads a number of projects in technical radio astronomy development and scientific computing as part of the Square Kilometre Array project. As well as scientific research, Anna runs two Newton Fund training programs that provide bursaries for students from Southern Africa and Latin America to pursue graduate degrees in the UK focusing on Big Data and data intensive science. In 2014, Anna was honoured by the World Economic Forum as one of thirty scientists under the age of 40 selected for their contributions to advancing the frontiers of science, engineering or technology in areas of high societal impact.

Michela Taufer holds the Jack Dongarra Professorship in High Performance Computing in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Tennessee Knoxville. She earned her undergraduate degrees in Computer Engineering from the University of Padova, Italy and her doctoral degree in Computer Science from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology or ETH, Switzerland. From 2003 to 2004 she was a La Jolla Interfaces in Science Training Program (LJIS) Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California San Diego (UCSD) and The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI), where she worked on interdisciplinary projects in computer systems and computational chemistry.

Taufer’s research interests in high performance computing include scientific applications, scheduling and reproducibility challenges, and big data analytics. She is currently serving on the NSF Advisory Committee for Cyberinfrastructures (ACCI). She is a professional member of the IEEE and a Distinguished Scientist of the ACM.

Professor Rick Stevens is internationally known for work in high-performance computing, collaboration and visualisation technology, and for building computational tools and web infrastructures to support large-scale genome and metagenome analysis for basic science and infectious disease research. He is the principle investigator for the NIH-NIAID funded PATRIC Bioinformatics Resource Center which is developing comparative analysis tools for infectious disease research, and for the Exascale Computing Project (ECP) Exascale Deep Learning and Simulation Enabled Precision Medicine for Cancer project which focuses on building a scalable deep neural network code called the CANcer Distributed Learning Environment (CANDLE) to address three top challenges of the National Cancer Institute. Stevens has been a professor at the University of Chicago since 1999, and Associate Laboratory Director at Argonne National Laboratory since 2004. Over the past twenty years, he and his colleagues have developed the SEED, RAST, MG-RAST and ModelSEED genome analysis and bacterial modelling servers that have been used by tens of thousands of users to annotate and analyse more than 250,000 microbial genomes and metagenomic samples. He teaches and supervises students in the areas of computer systems and computational biology, and he co-leads the DOE national laboratory group that has been developing the national initiative for exascale computing.

Jack Poulson is a computational scientist with interests spanning numerical linear algebra, mathematical optimisation, lattice reduction, statistical inference, and differential geometry. As a graduate student at The University of Texas at Austin, he created a hierarchy of open source libraries for distributed-memory linear algebra that culminated in his doctorate on fast solvers for frequency-domain anisotropic wave equations. His subsequent academic career involved serving as a Postdoctoral Scholar at Stanford University, an Assistant Professor of Computational Science and Engineering at The Georgia Institute of Technology, and an Assistant Professor of Mathematics at Stanford University. He then spent several years developing production machine learning systems as a Senior Research Scientist at Google and is now the owner of a small scientific computing company.

John Shalf is Department Head for Computer Science at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and recently was deputy director of Hardware Technology for the DOE Exascale Computing Project. Shalf is a co-author of over 60 publications in the field of parallel computing software and HPC technology, including three best papers and the widely cited report The Landscape of Parallel Computing Research: A View from Berkeley (with David Patterson and others), as well as ExaScale Software Study: Software Challenges in Extreme Scale Systems, which sets the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency's (DARPA's) information technology research investment strategy for the next decade.

Tony Hey began his career as a theoretical physicist with a doctorate in particle physics from the University of Oxford in the UK. After a career in physics that included research positions at Caltech and CERN, and a professorship at the University of Southampton in England, he became interested in parallel computing and moved into computer science. In the 1980s he was one of the pioneers of distributed memory message-passing computing and co-wrote the first draft of the successful MPI message-passing standard.

After being both Head of Department and Dean of Engineering at Southampton, Tony Hey was appointed to lead the UK’s ground-breaking ‘eScience’ initiative in 2001. He recognised the importance of Big Data for science and wrote one of the first papers on the ‘Data Deluge’ in 2003. He joined Microsoft in 2005 as a Vice President and was responsible for Microsoft’s global university research engagements. He worked with Jim Gray and his multidisciplinary eScience research group and edited a tribute to Jim called The Fourth Paradigm: Data-Intensive Scientific Discovery. Hey left Microsoft in 2014 and spent a year as a Senior Data Science Fellow at the eScience Institute at the University of Washington. He returned to the UK in November 2015 and is now Chief Data Scientist at the Science and Technology Facilities Council.

In 1987 Tony Hey was asked by Caltech Nobel physicist Richard Feynman to write up his ‘Lectures on Computation’. This covered such unconventional topics as the thermodynamics of computing as well as an outline for a quantum computer. Feynman’s introduction to the workings of a computer in terms of the actions of a ‘dumb file clerk’ was the inspiration for Tony Hey’s attempt to write The Computing Universe, a popular book about computer science. Tony Hey is a fellow of the AAAS and of the UK's Royal Academy of Engineering. In 2005, he was awarded a CBE by Prince Charles for his ‘services to science.’

Erin Carson is a research fellow in the Department of Numerical Mathematics at Charles University in Prague. She received her PhD at the University of California, Berkeley in 2015, supported by a National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship, and spent the following three years as a Courant Instructor/Assistant Professor at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University. Her research interests lie at the intersection of high-performance computing, numerical linear algebra, and parallel algorithms, with a focus on analysing tradeoffs between accuracy and performance in algorithms for large-scale sparse linear algebra.

Steve Furber CBE FREng FRS is ICL Professor of Computer Engineering in the School of Computer Science at the University of Manchester, UK. After completing a BA in mathematics and a PhD in aerodynamics at the University of Cambridge, UK, he spent the 1980s at Acorn Computers, where he was a principal designer of the BBC Microcomputer and the ARM 32-bit RISC microprocessor. Over 120 billion variants of the ARM processor have since been manufactured, powering much of the world's mobile and embedded computing. He moved to the ICL Chair at Manchester in 1990 where he leads research into asynchronous and low-power systems and, more recently, neural systems engineering, where the SpiNNaker project has delivered a computer incorporating a million ARM processors optimised for brain modelling applications.

Professor George Constantinides holds the Royal Academy of Engineering / Imagination Technologies Research Chair in Digital Computation at Imperial College London, where he leads the Circuits and Systems Group. His research is focused on efficient computational architectures and their link to software through High Level Synthesis, in particular automated customisation of memory systems and computer arithmetic. He is a programme and steering committee member of the ACM International Symposium on FPGAs, a programme committee member of the IEEE International Symposium on Computer Arithmetic, and Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Computers. 

Tim Palmer is a Royal Society Research Professor in the Department of Physics at the University of Oxford. Prior to that he was Head of Division at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts where he pioneered the development of ensemble prediction techniques, allowing weather and climate predictions to be expressed in flow-dependent probabilistic terms. Such developments have included the reformulation of sub-grid parametrisations as stochastic rather than deterministic schemes. Over the last 10 years, Tim has been vocal in advocating for much greater dedicated computing capability for climate prediction than is currently available. He has won the top awards of the European and Meteorological Societies, the Dirac Gold Medal of the Institute of Physics, and is a Foreign or Honorary Member of a number of learned societies around the world.

Guillaume Aupy is a researcher at Inria Bordeaux Sud-Ouest. His research interests include algorithm design and scheduling techniques for parallel and distributed platforms, and also the performance evaluation of parallel systems. Specifically his current focus revolves around data-aware scheduling at the different levels of the memory hierarchy (cache, memory, buffers, disks).

He completed his PhD at ENS Lyon in 2014 on reliable and energy efficient scheduling strategies in High-Performance Computing. He served as the Technical Program vice-chair for SC'17, workshop chair for SC'18 and algorithm track vice-chair for ICPP'18.

Satoshi Matsuoka from April 2018 has been the director of Riken R-CCS, the tier-1 HPC center that represents HPC in Japan, currently hosting the K Computer and developing the next generation Post-K machine, along with multitudes of ongoing cutting edge HPC research being conducted. He was the leader of the TSUBAME series of supercomputers, at Tokyo Institute of Technology, where he still holds a Professor position, to continue his research activities in HPC as well as scalable Big Data and AI. He has won many accolades including the JSPS Prize from the Japan Society for Promotion of Science in 2006, presented by his Highness Prince Akishino; the ACM Gordon Bell Prize in 2011; the Commendation for Science and Technology by the Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology in 2012; and the 2014 IEEE-CS Sidney Fernbach Memorial Award, the highest prestige in the field of HPC.

Michael Heroux is a Senior Scientist at Sandia National Laboratories, Director of SW Technologies for the US DOE Exascale Computing Project (ECP) and Scientist in Residence at St. John’s University, MN. His research interests include all aspects of scalable scientific and engineering software for new and emerging parallel computing architectures.

He leads several projects in this field: ECP SW Technologies is an integrated effort to provide the software stack for ECP. The Trilinos Project (2004 R&D 100 winner) is an effort to provide reusable, scalable scientific software components. The Mantevo Project (2013 R&D 100 winner) is focused on the development of open source, portable mini-applications and mini-drivers for the co-design of future supercomputers and applications. HPCG is an official TOP 500 benchmark for ranking computer systems, complementing LINPACK.