Frederica Darema Lecture Series Presents Kevin Brown, Argonne National Laboratory - "Simulating High-performance Computing (HPC): The Good, the Bad, and the Opportunities"
Speaker: Kevin Brown, Walter Massey Fellow at Argonne National Laboratory
Title: Simulating High-performance Computing (HPC): The Good, the Bad, and the Opportunities
Abstract: High-performance computing (HPC) systems, or supercomputers, are big and complex. They integrate the most advanced computing, memory, storage, and networking technologies to meet the computational needs of our greatest scientific and engineering endeavors. However, designing and configuring these systems is challenging due to the complex inter-operation of tightly coupled components.
Simulation-based co-design has become the industry standard in evaluating and optimizing supercomputer designs and configurations. These simulation models, while they abstract the full complexities of the real-world, still require a significant amount of time and computing resources to execute. To enable predicting longer timescales, finer-grain activities, and larger-scale phenomena, we require faster model executions. Parallel discrete events simulations (PDES) and techniques such as machine-learning based surrogate modeling can improve time to prediction, but challenges remain due to model scale and complexity. This talk discusses some of the key challenges with PDES in designing large-scale scientific infrastructure, such as integrating multi-scale models, and explores opportunities for cross-disciplinary collaborations.
Bio: Kevin A. Brown is an Argonne Scholar – Walter Massey Fellow in the Mathematics and Computer Science Division at Argonne National Laboratory.
Brown received his B.Sc. from the University of Technology, Jamaica (UTech) and his M.Sc. and Ph.D. from the Tokyo Institute of Technology. He has previously worked in industry as a Systems Administrator and has also worked in other national research laboratories in Japan, Spain, and the USA.
At Argonne, Brown investigates new networking technologies and designs for next-generation supercomputers. He has worked on topics such as Big Data, performance analysis and visualization, and network simulation and modeling.
About the Darema Lecture Series: The Illinois Institute of Technology College of Computing’s Dr. Frederica Darema Lecture Series in Computer Science is funded by an endowment to help advance female and minority early-stage computer science researchers at U.S. academic institutions.
“Opportunities to succeed as an academic in the areas such as computer sciences, are not readily available to everyone,” says Dr. Frederica Darema (M.S. PHYS ’72). “This fund enhances opportunities to showcase some of the most talented academics and researchers, those who may not have such opportunities otherwise. The more we lift up these excellent junior faculty, the more we will be able to encourage women and people of color to pursue an academic career in computer science.”
The lecture series is designed to encourage women and individuals from under-represented groups to pursue academic careers in computer sciences, and to focus on providing speaking opportunities for tenure track assistant professors (or the equivalent) at U.S. institutions in their fourth to sixth year. Lectureships may also be awarded to exceptional junior researchers in U.S. federal or industrial research laboratories in the third to fifth years of their careers, following doctoral/postdoctoral studies.
Events presented in the Dr. Frederica Darema Lecture Series in Computer Science are open to students, faculty, researchers, and others interested in learning about the latest research in computer sciences.