NERSCPowering Scientific Discovery for 50 Years

Fourth Workshop on the DOE Advanced Computational Software Collection

Robust and High Performance Tools for Scientific Computing

May 9, 2003

BERKELEY, Calif. — The U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory is hosting a four-day workshop on the DOE Advanced CompuTational Software (ACTS) Collection, a set of software tools aimed at simplifying the solution of common and important computational problems. The workshop will be held Aug. 5-8 in Berkeley.

Developed mainly at DOE national laboratories, the DOE ACTS Collection has substantially benefited a wide range of scientific codes and industrial applications. These benefits include improving the efficiency of scientific research in high performance computing environments and enabling computation that would not have been possible otherwise.

"Despite these successes, there is still a need for a greater infrastructure to reach out to academia and industry through dissemination and instruction on the state-of-the-art tools and to simultaneously provide an umbrella for tool developers to receive the feedback from these communities," said workshop co-organizer Tony Drummond. "These workshops, now in the fourth year, are part of an approach to build such an infrastructure."

As part of this outreach, DOE will sponsor a limited number of graduate students and postdoctoral fellows to participate in the workshop. This support includes round-trip transportation to and from Berkeley, local transportation, lodging, meals and workshop materials. Applications from other research scientists are also encouraged.

The four-day workshop will present an introduction to the ACTS Collection for application scientists whose research requires either large amounts of computation, a large volume of data manipulation, the use of robust numerical algorithms, or combinations of these. The workshop will include a range of tutorials on the tools (both those currently available in the collection and some deliverables from the DOE SciDAC program), discussion sessions aimed at solving specific computational needs by the participants, and hands-on practice using high performance computers at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing (NERSC) Center.

The workshop will consist of parallel sessions with tutorials grouped by the following topics:

  • Direct and iterative methods for the solution of linear and non-linear systems of equations
  • PDEs and multi-level methods
  • Numerical optimization
  • Structured and unstructured meshes (generation, manipulation and computation)
  • Development of high performance computing applications
  • Performance monitoring and tuning
  • Grid computing

Application Instructions The deadline for applications is Monday, June 9, 2003.

Students and postdoctoral fellows should submit an abstract describing the nature of their work, future plans and/or current needs for computation. A letter of recommendation from the applicant's supervisor also needs to be provided. The recommendation letter must also arrive no later than June 9, 2003.

Other applicants must submit a letter outlining their current work and future plans and needs for computational resources with a list of publications.

Important Dates:

  • Application deadline: Monday, June 9, 2003
  • Application review completed and invitations sent: Friday, June 20, 2003
  • Attendee confirmation of participation deadline: Monday, June 30, 2003

 


About NERSC and Berkeley Lab
The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) is a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science User Facility that serves as the primary high performance computing center for scientific research sponsored by the Office of Science. Located at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, NERSC serves almost 10,000 scientists at national laboratories and universities researching a wide range of problems in climate, fusion energy, materials science, physics, chemistry, computational biology, and other disciplines. Berkeley Lab is a DOE national laboratory located in Berkeley, California. It conducts unclassified scientific research and is managed by the University of California for the U.S. Department of Energy. »Learn more about computing sciences at Berkeley Lab.