December 2007 Staff Research Notes

Nano Poster Wins Award
Three researchers from won the Best Poster Award at the November SC07 supercomputing conference in Reno.

Zhengji Zhao, Juan Meza and Lin-Wang Wang were recognized for their poster describing "A New O(N) Method for Petascale Nanoscience Simulations,” which describes new linear scaling three-dimensional fragment (LS3DF) method for ab initio electronic structure calculations.

The poster was one of 39 accepted for the conference from more than 150 submissions. SC07 is the leading international conference on high performance computing, networking, storage and analysis.

Zhao is a high-performance computing consultant at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing (NERSC) center at Berkeley Lab. Meza is the head of CRD’s High-Performance Computing Research Department and Wang is a scientist in the department’s Scientific Computing Group.

Kudos for Visualization Poster
A group of CRD researchers won the Best Poster Award at IEEE VAST 2007 (IEEE Symposium on Visual Analytics Science and Technology), which took place from Oct. 30 to Nov. 1 in Sacramento.

Cecilia Aragon, Stephen Bailey, Sarah Poon, Karl Runge and Rollin Thomas were recognized for their poster “Sunfall: A Collaborative Visual Analytics System for Astrophysics,” which described the first visual analytics system in production use at a major astrophysics project (the Nearby Supernova Factory).

Aragon is a member of CRD’s Visualization Group and the NERSC Analytics Team. Bailey, Poon, Runge and Thomas were all with the Physics Division when the research was performed (Bailey and Poon have since left the Lab). Thomas has since joined the Computational Cosmology Center (C³), which includes researchers from the CRD and Physics Divisions.

SIAM Editorial Board
Esmond Ng, head of CRD’s Scientific Computing Group, has accepted an invitation to serve on the editorial board of the SIAM Journal on Scientific Computing. He will begin the 3-year term on January 1.

SIAM, the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, publishes 14 journals. Ng, whose research interests include sparse matrix computation, numerical linear algebra and parallel computing, also is on the editorial board of the SIAM Journal on Matrix Analysis and Applications. He has been on the board since 1997 and is now serving the fourth term.

Promoting Computational Nanoscience
Juan Meza and Kathy Yelick spoke at a November workshop on “Excellence in Computer Simulation” in Berkeley. The workshop is organized and sponsored by the Network for Computational Nanotechnology (NCN), the Center of Integrated Nanomechanical Systems (COINS) and Berkeley Lab’s Molecular Foundry. 

The meeting created a forum for sharing thoughts about where computational science is heading and ideas on how the nanoscience community can be more effective in its research. It’s also an opportunity for students to think about how to prepare themselves for careers in computational science and engineering.

Meza is the head of CRD’s High-Performance Computing Research Department while Yelick is the incoming director for the National Energy Research Scientific Computing (NERSC) center. 

New AAAS Fellow
David Patterson, a CRD researcher and the E.H. and M.E. Pardee Chair of Computer Science at UC Berkeley, has been named a 2007 Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). New fellows will be recognized for their contributions to science and technology at the Fellows Forum on February 16 during the AAAS Annual Meeting in Boston, where each fellow will receive a certificate and a blue and gold rosette as a symbol of their distinguished accomplishments.

Patterson is also a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering. He led the design and implementation of RISC I, the first VLSI Reduced Instruction Set Computer, and he shared the 2000 IEEE von Neumann medal and IEEE’s 1999 Reynold Johnson Information Storage Award. He is currently building novel microprocessors using Intelligent DRAM for portable multimedia devices, and is a member of the ROC (Recovery Oriented Computing) project.