NERSC Scientific Computing Group Staff

Esmond Ng, Group Leader of the Scientific Computing Group, has been involved in the development and implementation of sparse matrix algorithms since 1979, and has been involved in R&D management in scientific computing since 1995. He became one of the co-authors of the well-known sparse matrix package, SPARSPAK, when he was a graduate student at the University of Waterloo. At ORNL, Esmond was one of the first researchers to develop and implement efficient algorithms for sparse matrix computation on parallel computer architectures. He and a colleague, Dr. Barry W. Peyton, worked on sparse matrix algorithms that are specifically designed for computers that have memory hierarchy. Some of the sparse matrix codes they developed have been incorporated into the scientific computing libraries of several computer vendors, as well as in Matlab. Esmond earned his bachelor's, master's, and Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of Waterloo in Canada.

Julian Borrill is a computational cosmologist, specifically interested in the generation and evolution of primordial perturbations in the very early universe. He is currently working on the development of parallel algorithms for the analysis of the increasingly intractable cosmic microwave background datasets expected over the next 10 years from the BOOMERANG and MAXIMA balloons and the MAP and PLANCK satellites. He has previously worked at Dartmouth College and Imperial College, London. He holds an M.A. in mathematics and political science from the University of Cambridge, an M.Sc. in Astrophysics from the University of London, an M.Sc. in Computer Science also from the University of London, and a D.Phil. in Physics from the University of Sussex.

Andrew Canning works on the programming and algorithmic developments necessary to run codes on parallel machines, specializing in materials science applications. Along with a team of colloborating scientists at Oak Ridge National Lab, Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, and the University of Bristol (UK), Andrew won the 1998 Gordon Bell Prize for the fastest parallel application, which modeled 1,024 atoms of a metallic magnet. Although the team won for their 657 Gigaflop/s performance level, they subsequently were able to run the application at more than one Teraflop/s. Andrew has a B.S. in theoretical physics and astronomy from the University of Glasgow and a Ph.D. in statistical physics from the University of Edinburgh. For three years he was an employee of Cray Research in Lausanne, Switzerland, developing parallel codes and algorithms for materials science applications on the Cray T3D parallel computer.

Chris Ding (also known as Hong Ding) provides consultation and collaboration on the effective use of NERSC's massively parallel computers to the climate modeling, computational biology, and high energy and nuclear physics communities. He is one of the principal investigators in a multi-agency, multi-laboratory collaboration that aims to develop a modular, performance-portable Climate System Model. His group is working on I/O performance and numerical reproducibility in climate simulations, and their algorithms for more efficient and reliable codes have been widely adopted by the climate modeling community. Chris received a Ph.D. in physics and computer science from Columbia University with a thesis on lattice gauge theory simulation and parallel processing, which involved building and programming a parallel processor. As one of three developers of the first-generation parallel supercomputer, he participated in designing, testing, and assembly coding to provide basic operating system functions, developed efficient codes for QCD simulations, and obtained extensive physics results.

Tony Drummond is working on scientific applications that could potentially benefit from the use of the ACTS Toolkit, supporting the tools installed in the NERSC HPC computers, promoting interoperability of the tools, and marketing them to researchers at DOE labs and universities. Tony spent five years as a postdoc and research assistant at the UCLA Department of Atmospheric Science, optimizing numerical models of the atmosphere. He received his M.S. in Computer Sciences from the University of Tulsa and his Ph.D. in Computer Sciences from the National Polytechnical Institute of Toulouse, France.

Helen has worked on investigating how large scale scientific applications (mostly climate models) can be run effectively and efficiently on massively parallel supercomputers: design parallel algorithms, develop and implement computing technologies for science applications. Some of her experiences include distributed components coupling libraries, parallel programming paradigms, scientific applications porting and benchmarking. Helen has a Ph.D. in Marine Studies and an M.S in Computer Information Science, both from the University of Delaware.

Jodi Lamoureux works with several projects in high energy physics and fusion energy, particularly the AMANDA neutrino detector.

Sherry Li provides support for mathematical libraries on the parallel machines at NERSC. Her current research interests are in design and performance evaluation of numerical algorithms for various high performance architectures. She has diverse experience working in several areas, including parallel computing, sparse linear algebra, combinatorial algorithms, and floating-point arithmetic. Her software development credits include SuperLU and SuperLU_MT, XBLAS, CLAPACK, and ieee_except. Sherry received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from UC Berkeley. Her home page is http://www.nersc.gov/~xiaoye/.

Osni Marques's interests are numerical linear algebra, scientific computation and parallel computing. He collaborates with the Lawrence Berkeley Lab Earth Sciences Division on applications that require the solution of large inverse problems; and also with the UC Berkeley Computer Sciences Division in the study and implementation of algorithms for the solution of problems in numerical linear algebra, in the framework of the LAPACK and ScaLAPACK libraries. He developed several numerical software packages for the solution of sparse eigenvalue problems and sparse linear direct solvers for 2D finite element problems. Before joining NERSC, Osni worked for four years at CERFACS, in Toulouse, France. He holds a Ph.D. in Structural Engineering from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Osni's home page is http://crd.lbl.gov/~osni.

Peter Nugent joined NERSC after four years as a post-doc in the Lab's Physics Division to help strengthen the computational astrophysics activity at NERSC. Peter worked with Saul Perlmutter's Supernova Cosmology Project and used NERSC's Cray T3E and IBM SP supercomputers to perform thousands of supernova simulations. As the theorist in Saul's group, Peter conducted "spectrum synthesis," starting with a theory of an exploding supernova to create a theoretical spectrum and then compare that model with observed data. The goal of the work is to make supernovae a better tool for cosmology. Peter earned his Ph.D. in physics, with a concentration in astronomy, from the University of Oklahoma.

Lin-Wang Wang earned his Ph.D. in Theoretical Solid State Physics at Cornell University. His research interests include large-scale total energy calculations for material simulations, nanoscale electronic structure calculations, alternatives to local-density approximation methods, and software applications.

Michael Wehner is working on a project funded by the DOE Office of Biological and Environmental Research. His primary duties are to maintain and support state-of-the-art climate models on the NERSC facilities, and to coordinate climate modeling activities among NERSC users. His research interests are ensemble climate simulation, dynamical cores of general circulation models, coupled atmospheric oceanic general circulation models, and computational physics on massively parallel processors. Michael received a B.S. in physics from the University of Delaware and an M.S. and Ph.D. in nuclear engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has been involved in climate modeling since 1991.

Chao Yang received his Ph.D. in Computational Science and Engineering from Rice University. He previously worked at NEC Systems Laboratory and at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where he was the recipient of the 1999 Alston Householder Postdoctoral Fellowship.