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| News |
| Conference |
| Over 300 Participate in SciDAC 2007 in Boston |
| The third annual SciDAC Conference took place on June 24-28 at Boston's Westin Copley Place. Over 300 registered participants, including domain scientists, applied mathematicians, computer scientists, computer system vendors, program managers, and support staff, attended 36 plenary talks as well as poster sessions involving 76 invited presenters. SciDAC 2007's schedule also featured informal poster receptions, working breakfasts and lunches, and even a "Right-brain Night" showcasing both reverent and irreverent artistic statements by computational scientists as inspired by their work. In addition, 115 participants--mostly doctoral students and post-docs--gathered on June 29 at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for a full day of tutorials on the use of SciDAC software. Eleven SciDAC-sponsored research groups presented their software at an introductory level in both lecture and hands-on formats that included live runs on a local BlueGene/L. |
| The program of SciDAC 2007 followed the pattern established by previous meetings in San Francisco (2005) and Denver (2006). The Boston venue permitted outreach to a number of universities in the immediate region and throughout southern New England, including SciDAC campuses of Boston University, Harvard, and MIT, as well as a dozen others, including most of the Ivy League. Altogether, 55 universities, 20 laboratories, 14 private companies, five agencies, and four countries were represented among the conference and tutorial workshop participants. Approximately 47% of the conference participants were from government laboratories, 37% from universities, 9% from federal program offices, and 7% from industry. |
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| Figure 1. On the left, SciDAC 2007 participants share science and snacks at a poster session. On the right, conference chair and SciDAC PI, Dr. David Keyes of Columbia University, speaks during the opening session. |
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| Worldwide, no scientific agenda is pushing the petascale frontier--and looking to what lies beyond--as vigorously as SciDAC. This fact was very much on display at SciDAC 2007. In one panel, for instance, leaders of a series of town hall meetings on exascale simulation for energy and environment (E3) considered future approaches to whole-system modeling in a variety of DOE scientific areas related to energy, environmental sustainability, and global security. In another panel, computer vendors were invited to comment on the prospects for delivering exascale computing systems. |
Though a logistically complex conference, SciDAC 2007 was kept on track by the exceptional talent of the organizational staff. The extra effort made by presenters to package their leading-edge science in a form accessible to colleagues from other disciplines as well as to their fellow specialists ensured an extremely productive conference, and will foster enhanced communication and accelerated scientific progress. SciDAC 2007 also owes much of its success to Dr. Michael Strayer, Associate Director for the Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research (OASCR) and Director of SciDAC, who envisioned the meeting three years ago as a highly visible manifestation of the fruits of SciDAC, and who continues to sustain it with his enthusiasm.
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Further Reading |
http://www.scidac.gov/Conference2007/
http://www.iop.org/EJ/toc/1742-6596/78/1
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