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Thursday, November 05

The Combinatorial Scientific Computing and Petascale Simulations (CSCAPES) Institute: Recent Research

Alex Pothen, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana
Computer Science Department and Computing Research Institute Seminar
9:30 AM, Computational Sciences Building (5600), Room J-302
Contact: Ed D’Azevedo (dazevedoef@ornl.gov), 865.576.7925

Abstract

In this talk I will describe the CSCAPES Institute, which was established with funding from the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy in their Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing (SciDAC) program for the period 2006-2012. Member institutions in the Institute include Purdue, Sandia National Labs, Argonne National Lab, Ohio State, and Colorado State. The mission of the Institute is to enable petascale performance for scientific and engineering simulations that need to solve combinatorial problems; such problems are modeled in terms of graphs and hypergraphs. The CSCAPES Institute focuses on three research themes: parallelization toolkits and load balancing, automatic differentiation, and parallel graph and matrix computations.

Achieving scalable performance for combinatorial problems on petascale architectures is difficult due to the inherent sequentiality of the algorithms, the relatively high ratio of communication costs to computation costs, and computational schedules that are determined by the input graph. I will describe new algorithms for solving prototypical combinatorial problems (matching and coloring) that have the potential to scale, for the first time, to peta-scale machines.

CSCAPES researchers currently work with application groups from accelerator design, fluid dynamics, systems biology, and climate modeling. I will look forward to interacting with researchers at ORNL with opportunities for collaborations.

Biosketch:
Alex Pothen is a Professor of Computer Science and Director of the Computing Research Institute at Purdue University, and is also the Director of the CSCAPES Institute. Alex received an undergraduate degree from the Indian Institute of Technology in New Delhi, and his Ph.D. from Cornell University. He has held earlier academic appointments at the University of Waterloo, Penn State, Old Dominion University, and ICASE, a research institute at NASA.