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SCIDAC '06 Conference Summary
Dr. William Tang
The second annual Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing Conference was held from June 25-29, 2006 at the new Hyatt Regency Hotel in Denver, Colorado. This conference showcased outstanding SciDAC sponsored computational science results achieved during the past year, emphasizing science at terascale. The program also featured exciting developments in computational science from national and international contributors outside of the SciDAC program, to help foster communication between SciDAC computational scientists and those funded by other organizations. The conference emphasized the cooperative efforts of domain scientists, applied mathematicians, and computer scientists to effectively take advantage of terascale computers to accelerate progress in scientific discovery in a variety of fields, as well as the development of new applications for petascale computing in the near future.

Application domains within the SciDAC '06 conference agenda encompassed a broad range of science including:

  
Figure 3. A presentation captures the attention of SciDAC 2006 participants.
  • The DOE core mission of energy research involving combustion, including studies relevant to current issues of fuel efficiency and pollution as well as magnetic fusion investigations impacting prospects for future energy sources.
  • Fundamental explorations into the building blocks of matter, ranging from quantum chromodynamics – the basic theory describing the compostion of all matter – to the design of modern high-energy accelerators.
  • The formidable challenges of predicting the behavior of molecules in quantum chemistry, and investigating the complex biomolecules that form the basis of all biological systems.
  • Studies of the dynamics of exploding stars for insights into the nature of the universe.
  • Integrated climate modeling to enable realistic analysis of earth's changing climate.
Because of the huge temporal and spatial scales involved, advanced computation is often the only method by which significant progress can be made when dealing with these complex, multicomponent physical, chemical, and biological systems. Working with domain scientists, applied mathematicians and computer scientists have continued to develop improved discretizations of the underlying equations and their complementary algorithms in order to enable faster and more detailed solutions on modern parallel computing platforms, particularly as they evolve from the terascale toward the petascale regime. Moreover, the associated tremendous growth of data generated from the tera- to the petabyte range demands not only advanced data analysis and visualization methods to extract useful information but also the development of efficient workflow strategies which can deal with the data input/output, management, movement, and storage challenges. If scientific discovery is expected to keep pace with the continuing progression from tera- to petascale platforms, the vital alliance between domain scientists, applied mathematicians, and computer scientists will be even more crucial. During the SciDAC' 06 Conference, some of the future challenges and opportunities in interdisciplinary computational science were discussed in the Advanced Architectures Panel and by Dr. Victor Reis, Senior Advisor to the Secretary of Energy, who gave a featured presentation on "Simulation, Computation, and the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership."
Overall, the conference provided an excellent opportunity to highlight the rising importance of computational science in the scientific enterprise and to motivate future investment in this area. As Michael Strayer, SciDAC Program Director, has noted: "While SciDAC may have started out as a specific program, Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing has become a powerful concept for addressing some of the biggest challenges facing our nation and our world." Looking forward to next year, the SciDAC 2007 Conference will be held on June 24-28 at the Westin Copley Plaza in Boston, Massachusetts, and will be chaired by David Keyes of Columbia University.  
Figure 4.Poster session at SciDAC 2006.
Dr. William Tang, Chief Scientist at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory; Associate Director of the Princeton Institute of Computational Science and Engineering at Princeton University; Chair for the SciDAC 2006 Conference.

 

Published by IOP Publishing in association with Oak Ridge National Laboratory, for the US Department of Energy, Office of Science. Copyright © 2006 by IOP.