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| LLNL's Steven Ashby Joins PNNL as Deputy Director for Science and Technology |
| Steven Ashby has joined Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) as the new Deputy Director for Science and Technology (DDST) after a distinguished career at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). As the DDST, Ashby will work with PNNL's scientific and technical staff to advance its S&T capabilities on behalf of scientific discovery, energy independence, environmental stewardship, and national security. |
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| Photo: PNNL |
| Steven Ashby |
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| "One of my main objectives is to determine how we can best integrate our current science and technology programs to enable new discoveries and to address national needs, especially in energy and security," Ashby said. "As I learn more about PNNL's strengths in all areas, the goal will be to leverage those strengths through partnerships with other laboratories and universities to make the biggest possible impact for the nation." |
| Ashby, who is well known in the computational science community, is particularly enthusiastic about working with colleagues at PNNL in developing a comprehensive computing strategy for the Laboratory. |
| "Our computational science capabilities are very strong, but they may not be as well known as those at other labs," Ashby said. "We will be looking to see how the pieces here can work together to create a program that is greater than the sum of the parts." |
| Ashby points to the NWChem chemistry code and a suite of subsurface science applications as examples of PNNL's expertise in computational science. In his view, they also represent an opportunity for PNNL to collaborate with others in the spirit of SciDAC. |
| "NWChem is today's leading computational chemistry code. We want to take it to the next level of performance to take full advantage of the next generation extreme-scale computing systems," Ashby said. "Subsurface science codes, which I first learned about as a graduate student, have exploited parallel supercomputing power for years in support of important DOE programmatic work. PNNL is investing internally in designing implementation of both of these capabilities so that they can be effectively used for extreme-scale problems and we recognize that we will need to engage the SciDAC community in doing this." |
| PNNL has earned a strong international reputation in the area of data science through its work in information visualization and analytics for national security programs. "Though not as well known in the science community, these efforts are world class and we plan to bring them to bear on computational science projects of interest to the SciDAC community." |
| As an example of how this expertise can be applied to DOE needs, Ashby noted that a team at PNNL developed ScalaBLAST, a parallel version of the BLAST code being used for high-performance data-intensive bioinformatics analysis at DOE's Joint Genome Institute (JGI) in California. The new code scales up to thousands of processors and is already improving JGI's productivity. |
| A key element of PNNL's computing landscape is its hardware, primarily Chinook, a 160 teraflop HP system in EMSL, the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory, a user facility for DOE's Office of Biological and Environmental Research. EMSL houses one of four DOE computing centers running large-scale, high-impact computational science applications under INCITE, the Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment program. PNNL has also installed a Cray XMT system featuring massively multithreaded architecture as part of the Center for Adapative Supercomputing Software focused on Multithreaded Architectures (CASS-MT). "Our next challenge is to determine how best to apply these tremendous resources," Ashby said, "to areas of greatest importance to DOE and the nation." |
Prior to joining PNNL, Ashby spent nearly 21 years at LLNL, where he conducted numerical algorithms research and led the ParFlow groundwater modeling project. He also founded the Center for Applied Scientific Computing and served as leader of the Computing Applications and Research Department. He remains active in the computational science community through his involvement in OASCR and SIAM activities.
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