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| News |
| Fernbach Award |
| Dr. David Keyes Honored for his Outstanding Contributions to HPC |
| Dr. David Keyes—a Fu Foundation Professor of Applied Mathematics at Columbia University, and the current director of the Toward Optimal Petascale Simulations (TOPS) SciDAC Center—has been named recipient of the 2007 Sidney Fernbach Award. The Fernbach Award honors a computational scientist "for outstanding contributions to the development of scalable numerical algorithms for the solution of nonlinear partial differential equations and exceptional leadership in high-performance computation." |
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| Figure 2. Fernbach Award winner Dr. David Keyes spoke at the opening session of SciDAC 2007. |
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| As director of the TOPS Center, Dr. Keyes leads efforts to create software, develop and implement algorithmic research on optimal solution methods for simulations, and to provide consulting throughout the DOE national laboratory complex. Simulations of importance often involve the solution of partial differential equations on terascale computers—those capable of performing more than a trillion calculations per second. In addition the TOPS Center researches, develops, and deploys an integrated toolkit of open-source, optimal complexity solvers for the nonlinear partial differential equations that arise in many DOE application areas, including fusion, accelerator design, global climate change, and reactive chemistry. The algorithms created as part of this project aim to reduce current computational bottlenecks by orders of magnitude on terascale computers, enabling scientific simulation on a scale heretofore impossible. |
| Moreover, Dr. Keyes directs the Institute for Scientific Computing Research (ISCR), an association with LLNL and university collaborators. ISCR's mission is to keep the Lab aware of and connected to important external computer advances, and to carry these advances into the Lab so that they can be put into practice. This fits with SciDAC's aim to promote large-scale scientific computation at the Lab. |
| Dr. Keyes has co-organized and lectured for numerous conferences and short courses on high-performance computing with PDE-modeled systems for NASA Langley, LLNL, the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), the Department of Defense Modernization Centers, the domain decomposition and parallel computational fluid dynamics communities, and university departments. Dr. Keyes is currently a member of the editorial boards of numerous publications, and he has served as an editor of The SIAM Journal of Scientific Computing. |
| Dr. Keyes graduated summa cum laude from Princeton University in 1978 with a B.S.E. in aerospace and mechanical sciences and a Certificate in Engineering Physics. He received his Ph.D. in applied mathematics from Harvard University in 1984. He then participated in a post-doc in the Computer Science Department at Yale University and taught there for eight years, as Assistant and then Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering. Dr. Keyes joined Old Dominion University and the Institute for Computer Applications in Science & Engineering (ICASE) at the NASA Langley Research Center in 1993. At Old Dominion, Dr. Keyes was the Richard F. Barry Professor of Mathematics & Statistics and Director of the Center for Computational Science. Dr. Keyes was also awarded a Gordon Bell Prize for High-Performance Computing in 1999, and he received a National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award in 1989. |
| Dr. Keyes was chair of the SciDAC 2007 Conference held last June in Boston, MA (figure 2). His introductory remarks advocated predictive simulation as critical to understanding and prioritizing the world's problems. He further made a case for petascale and exascale simulations to move from interpolary to predictive capability, and to couple together more interacting phenomena. Dr. Keyes also urged the conference participants to educate policy makers and the public about the limitations of simulations. |
