Loft
Keynotes 4th High Performance Computing Day
Record
numbers attended Lehigh’s Fourth Annual High Performance
Computing Day on Friday, April 3rd despite heavy rains,
thunder, and lightening, appropriate to the subject of
climate change simulation.
Climate
modeling expert, Dr. Richard Loft, the Director of
Technology Development, in the Computational and Information
Systems Laboratory (CISL), at the National Center for
Atmospheric Research (NCAR), spoke on the complexity and
detail required in making weather models.
Loft’s
talk, Recent Advancements Implementing High Resolution
Earth Systems Models on Massively Parallel Computer,
provided the audience with insights into what enormous
computing resources are required to create accurate climate
models.
Dr. Loft
said, “The anticipated availability of massively parallel
peta and exascale computers in the next few years offers the
climate community a golden opportunity to dramatically
advance our understanding of the earth’s climate system and
climate change, if only they can be harnessed to the task.
Unfortunately the fit is not perfect.”
HPC Day
began with morning technical sessions presented by the
Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) that informed
attendees about resources available at the PSC and the
Teragrid, as well as gave listeners an introduction to
parallelism in computing. A hands-on session using one of
PSC’s shared memory architecture computers, emphasized using
Matlab and Star-P software.
Following
lunch and the keynote address, Dr. Loft joined Industrial
and Systems Engineering Department Chair, Tamas Terlaky,
PSC’s John Urbanic and LTS’s Brandon Leeds for an Open Forum
and Panel Discussion with the HPC users in the audience.
The focus
was on discovering ways to lower the barriers to using HPC
resources by researchers who are experts in their own
domains, but are not computer scientists. The panel was
moderated by Lehigh HPC Steering Committee Chair, CSE
Professor Brian Davison.
Wrapping
up the afternoon, two Lehigh University faculty members
spoke on their use of high performance computing in their
research: CSE Professor John Spletzer on Computing
Requirements for Autonomous Vehicles, and EES Professor
Ben Felzer on combining different earth models to make more
accurate climate predictions.
--Brandon
Leeds
Article posted April 14,
2009
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