High Performance Computing Past, Present and Future

Monday, May 23, 2016
11:30 AM - 1:00 PM
(Pacific)
William J. Perry Conference Room
Encina Hall, Second Floor, Central, C231
616 Jane Stanford Way, Stanford, CA 94305
Speaker: 
  • Trish Damkroger

Abstract: Supercomputing impacts everybody, everywhere, every day. The simulation capabilities have allowed advanced medicine, energy, aviation and manufacturing. Supercomputers allow us to explore fields such as global climate change, as well as tackle problems for which experiments are impractical, hazardous or prohibitively expensive. The Department of Energy is a leader in supercomputers as part of their national security mission. With the demise of underground testing, supercomputers are a key resource used to ensure the safety and reliability of the nuclear stockpile. This talk will explore the buildup to our current petaflop systems and the challenges to obtaining exascale systems in the future.

About the speaker: As Acting Associate Director for Computation at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), Trish Damkroger leads the 1,000-employee workforce behind the Laboratory’s high performance computing efforts. The Computation team develops and deploys an integrated computing environment for petascale analytics and simulations such as understanding global climate warming, clean energy creation, biodefense, and nonproliferation. LLNL’s computing ecosystem includes high performance computers, scientific visualization facilities, high performance storage systems, network connectivity, multiresolution data analysis, mathematical models, scalable numerical algorithms, computer applications, and necessary services to enable LLNL mission goals and scientific discovery through simulation.