7th EDITION & 2nd VIRTUAL INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE
...will explore visionary trends and innovations in high performance computing and computational science
July 19-23, digital
KEYNOTE SPEAKERS
INVITED SPEAKERS
FOCUS ON AFRICA
more speakers to be announced...
Tshiamo Motshegwa
BEng, PhD, Department of Computer Science, University of Botswana
Dr Tshiamo Motshegwa is an academic based at the Department of Computer Science, Faculty of Science at the University of Botswana where he is a lecturer and leads the High-Performance Computing and Data Science Research cluster and the University-Industry-Government cocreation Platform. He received a BEng 1:1 (Hons) in Computer Systems Engineering and a Ph.D. in Computer Science- both at the School of Mathematics, Computer Science and Engineering, City,University Of London, UK.
He has had visiting fellowships at British Telecom Research & Innovation Labs (BTexact Technologies) at Intelligent Business Systems Group, Adastral Park Ipswich, UK and fellowships at the UNESCO International Center For Theoretical Physics (ICTP), Trieste Italy and internship at British Energy Plc, Lancashire, UK.
Dr Motshegwa serves on the Botswana Government's Ministry of Tertiary Education, Science and Technology (MOTE) task team for the Botswana Space Science strategy overarching developments and opportunities in space sciences and technologies. He serves to engage at the Ministry regarding the National Digital Transformation Initiative for research, science , technology innovation ecosystems through cyberinfrastructure for digital revolution, capacity building and digital skills.
Mary-Jane Bopape
Senior manager: Research at the South African Weather Service
Title: Implementation of the SADC Cyber-Infrastructure Framework: focus on weather modelling
Abstract: Weather forecasting beyond the nowcasting timescale relies on the use of numerical weather and climate models. The use of these models is limited on the African continent because they require supercomputing facilities to run over large domains with higher resolution. The availability of supercomputing facilities is however increasing on the continent due national initiatives and regional initiatives such as the Southern African Development Community (SADC) Cyber-Infrastructure (CI) Framework which was approved by the relevant ministers in 2016. The presentation will give an overview of a project focusing on numerical weather prediction (NWP) funded by the South African Department of Science and Innovation and also through the Climate Research for Development (CR4D) fellowship in six SADC countries. Through the project three workshops were held and studies of the sensitivity of heavy rainfall events in all six countries to different aspects of the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model were investigated. A number of peer reviewed articles have resulted from the project, and for some countries these were first ever papers on NWP, while some authors lead the writing of papers for the first time. The presentation will also touch on lessons learnt and proposed way forward.
Mary-Jane Bopape is a senior manager: Research at the South African Weather Service. She holds a PhD degree in meteorology has worked as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Reading. She also worked at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) Natural Resources and Environment (NRE) and Centre for High Performance Computing (CHPC) with a focus on climate change studies. She has received a number of awards including the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS) Next Einstein Initiative (NEI) Fellowship for Women in Climate Change Science, 2019 Climate Research for Development (CR4D) fellowship and 2008 World Meteorological Organization (WMO) award for young researchers. She was recognised by the President of South Africa as a pathfinder in his 9 August 2019 speech on women's day. She served on the Executive council of the South African Society for Atmospheric Sciences (SASAS) for a number of terms and is currently the co-president of the society. She co-supervises a number of postgraduate students in different universities in South Africa.
Onur Mutlu
Professor of Computer Science Information Technology and Electrical Engineering department ETH Zurich
Title: Intelligent Architectures for Intelligent Systems
Abstract: Computing is bottlenecked by data. Large amounts of data overwhelm storage capability, communication capability, and computation capability of the modern machines we design today. As a result, many key applications' performance, efficiency and scalability are bottlenecked by data movement. We describe three major shortcomings of modern architectures in terms of 1) dealing with data, 2) taking advantage of the vast amounts of data, and 3) exploiting different semantic properties of application data. We argue that an intelligent architecture should be designed to handle data well. We show that handling data well requires designing system architectures based on three key principles: 1) data-centric, 2) data-driven, 3) data-aware. We give several examples for how to exploit each of these principles to design a much more efficient and high-performance computing system. We will especially discuss recent research that aims to fundamentally reduce memory latency and energy, and practically enable computation close to data, with at least two promising novel directions: 1) performing computation in memory by exploiting the analog operational properties of memory, with low-cost changes, 2) exploiting the logic layer in 3D-stacked memory technology in various ways to accelerate important data-intensive applications. We discuss how to enable adoption of such fundamentally more intelligent architectures, which we believe are key to efficiency, performance, and sustainability. We conclude with some guiding principles for future computing architecture and system designs.
Onur Mutlu is a Professor of Computer Science at ETH Zurich. He is also a faculty member at Carnegie Mellon University, where he previously held the Strecker Early Career Professorship. His current broader research interests are in computer architecture, systems, hardware security, and bioinformatics. A variety of techniques he, along with his group and collaborators, has invented over the years have influenced industry and have been employed in commercial microprocessors and memory/storage systems. He obtained his PhD and MS in ECE from the University of Texas at Austin and BS degrees in Computer Engineering and Psychology from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He started the Computer Architecture Group at Microsoft Research (2006-2009), and held various product and research positions at Intel Corporation, Advanced Micro Devices, VMware, and Google.
He received the IEEE High Performance Computer Architecture Test of Time Award, the IEEE Computer Society Edward J. McCluskey Technical Achievement Award, ACM SIGARCH Maurice Wilkes Award, the inaugural IEEE Computer Society Young Computer Architect Award, the inaugural Intel Early Career Faculty Award, US National Science Foundation CAREER Award, Carnegie Mellon University Ladd Research Award, faculty partnership awards from various companies, and a healthy number of best paper or "Top Pick" paper recognitions at various computer systems, architecture, and security venues. He is an ACM Fellow, IEEE Fellow for, and an elected member of the Academy of Europe (Academia Europaea).
His computer architecture and digital logic design course lectures and materials are freely available on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/OnurMutluLectures), and his research group makes a wide variety of software and hardware artifacts freely available online (https://safari.ethz.ch/). For more information, please see his webpage at https://people.inf.ethz.ch/omutlu/.
Bryce Meredig
Chief Science Officer and co-founder of Citrine Informatics
Title: Designing next-generation materials with machine learning
Abstract: The development of improved materials is critical to human progress, in areas ranging from space exploration to environmental sustainability. Traditional materials development efforts face difficulty in delivering breakthrough materials at the accelerating pace demanded by consumers, regulators, and society as a whole. In this rapidly changing environment, data-driven approaches such as machine learning (ML) offer the possibility of reducing the timescale of materials innovation. In this talk, I will discuss how machine learning (ML) can accelerate materials design, and how ML can be used in conjunction with physics-based simulations to improve our ability to predict materials properties in silico. I will also address some of the materials science-specific methodological considerations that arise when applying ML to materials design.
Dr. Bryce Meredig is cofounder and Chief Science Officer of Citrine Informatics, a materials informatics platform company, where he leads the External Research Department (ERD). ERD conducts publishable research with collaborators in academia, government, and industry. Dr. Meredig's research interests include the development and validation of physics-informed machine learning methods specific to applications in materials science and chemistry; integration of physics-based simulations with machine learning; and data infrastructure for materials science. Dr. Meredig received his PhD from Northwestern University and BAS and MBA from Stanford University.
Kate Keahey
Senior Scientist, MCS, Argonne National Lab CASE, University of Chicago
Title: Chameleon: Taking Science from Cloud to Edge
Abstract: New research ideas require an instrument where they can be developed, tested - and shared. To support Computer Science experiments such instrument has to support a diversity of hardware configurations, deployment at scale, deep reconfigrability, and mechanisms for sharing so that new results can trigger further innovation. Most importantly -- since science does not stand still - such instrument requires constant adaptation to support an ever increasing range of experiments driven by emergent ideas and opportunities.
The NSF-funded Chameleon testbed for systems research and education (www.chameleoncloud.org) has been developed to provide all those capabilities. The testbed provides many thousands of cores and over 5PB of storage hosted at three sites (University of Chicago, Texas Advanced Computing Center, and Northwestern) connected by 100 Gbps networks. The hardware consists of a large homogenous partitions to facilitate experiments at scale, alongside a diverse set of hardware consisting of accelerators, storage hierarchy nodes with a mix of HDDs, SDDs, and NVMe, high-bandwidth I/0 storage, SDN-enabled networking hardware, and edge devices. To support experiments ranging from work in operating systems through networking to edge computing, Chameleon provides a range of reconfigurability options from bare metal to virtual machine management. To date, the testbed has supported 5,000+ users and 700+ research and education projects and has just been renewed until the end of 2024.
This talk will describe the goals, design strategy, and the existing and future capabilities of the testbed, as well as some of the research and education projects our users are working on. I will also describe how Chameleon is evolving to support new research directions, in particular edge and IoT-based research and applications. Finally, I will introduce the services and tools we created to support sharing of experiments, curricula, and other digitally expressed artifacts that allow science to be shared via active involvement and foster reproducibility.
Kate Keahey is one of the pioneers of infrastructure cloud computing. She created the Nimbus project, recognized as the first open source Infrastructure-as-a-Service implementation, and continues to work on research aligning cloud computing concepts with the needs of scientific datacenters and applications. To facilitate such research for the community at large, Kate leads the Chameleon project, providing a deeply reconfigurable, large-scale, and open experimental platform for Computer Science research. To foster the recognition of contributions to science made by software projects, Kate co-founded and serves as co-Editor-in-Chief of the SoftwareX journal, a new format designed to publish software contributions. Kate is a Scientist at Argonne National Laboratory and a Senior Fellow at the Computation Institute at the University of Chicago.
Sunita Chandrasekaran
Assistant Professor, Department of Computer & Information Sciences, University of Delaware
Sunita Chandrasekaran is an Assistant Professor with the Department of Computer and Information Sciences at the University of Delaware, USA. She received her Ph.D. in 2012 on Tools and Algorithms for High-Level Algorithm Mapping to FPGAs from the School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Her research spans High Performance Computing, interdisciplinary science, machine learning and data science. She is a recipient of the 2016 IEEE-CS TCHPC Award for Excellence for Early Career Researchers in High Performance Computing. Chandrasekaran has been involved in the technical program and organization committees of several conferences and workshops including SC, ISC, IPDPS, IEEE Cluster, CCGrid, WACCPD, AsHES and P3MA.
Neil Thompson
Innovation Scholar MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab and the Initiative on the Digital Economy
Title: The approximate future of computing
Abstract: Technical and economic trends in hardware are pushing computing towards specialization, opening up new opportunities to customize to particular algorithms. But that is only one part of the story. There are also new trends in algorithms re-shaping computing. This talk will survey these big trends and offer some suggestions for what they will mean for the future of computing
Dr. Neil Thompson is an Innovation Scholar at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab and the Initiative on the Digital Economy. He is also an Associate Member of the Broad Institute. Previously, Neil was an Assistant Professor of Innovation and Strategy at the MIT Sloan School of Management, where he co-directed the Experimental Innovation Lab (X-Lab), and a Visiting Professor at the Laboratory for Innovation Science at Harvard. Neil have advised businesses and government on the future of Moore's Law and has been on National Academies panels on transformational technologies and scientific reliability. He did his PhD in Business and Public Policy at Berkeley, where he also did Masters degrees in Computer Science and Statistics. Neil has a masters in Economics from the London School of Economics, and undergraduate degrees in Physics and International Development. Prior to academia, he worked at organizations such as Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories, Bain and Company, The United Nations, the World Bank, and the Canadian Parliament.
Bogdan Rosa
Professor in the Centre of Numerical Weather Prediction at Institute of Meteorology and Water Management - National Research Institute (IMWM-NRI).
Title: Computational challenges in modelling cloud microphysical processes
Abstract: Reliable weather forecasts require an accurate description of cloud microphysical processes. These phenomena cannot be fully resolved in numerical weather predictions (NWP) systems because their characteristic length scales are several orders of magnitude smaller than those defining large-scale atmospheric flows. A common strategy to overcome this problem is to represent only some statistical features of the droplet dynamics by using so-called parameterisations. Particularly important are kinematic and dynamic collision statistics and the droplet settling velocity. Inaccuracies in the parameterization schemes in NWP systems are one of the main sources of the uncertainty of the numerical forecasts. Developing more realistic schemes requires detailed knowledge of these processes at droplet scale. As a multiscale phenomenon, cloud simulation represents one of the most difficult scientific and computational challenges.
Fast progress in high performance supercomputers opened new perspectives to quantify the statistical properties of the atmospheric clouds. From the numerical point of view, the problem comes down to modelling multiphase flows i.e., turbulent flows with a disperse phase. Typically, the continuous phase (air flow) is solved in the Eulerian approach employing Direct Numerical Simulations (DNS) or Large Eddy Simulations (LES). The dispersed phase (droplets) is treated using the Lagrangian approach along with the point-particle assumption. Most previous studies (DNS or LES) were limited to 1-way or 2-way momentum coupling. The important physical phenomenon, such as hydrodynamic interactions between droplets has often been neglected. The reasons for these simplifications are the lack of efficient computational method and the high computing cost of such simulations. In turn, highly accurate fully resolved simulations of turbulence with finite-size particles have become possible only in recent years and are limited to a relatively small number of droplets. Here I discuss the applicability of different computational approaches and their limitations in the context of computing power demand.
Dr. Bogdan Rosa is a Professor in the Centre of Numerical Weather Prediction at Institute of Meteorology and Water Management - National Research Institute (IMWM-NRI).
Bogdan Rosa gained his M.Sc. in physics at the University of Warsaw in 2000, followed by the Ph.D. in 2005. The subject matter of his doctoral research concerned numerical modelling of high-Reynolds-number flows around the airborne ultra-fast thermometer. Afterwards, he spent 3 years as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Delaware, where he was involved in developing parallel computational tools to study cloud microphysical processes. In the meantime, he collaborated with the National Center for Atmospheric Research on modelling multiphase flows and droplet dynamics. Since 2009, Dr. Rosa has been working at IMWM-NRI. Apart of modelling of turbulent clouds his current projects involve adaptation of the numerical model EULAG into an operational weather prediction model of the European COSMO consortium.
In 2018, Dr. Rosa received the habilitation from Wroclaw University of Science and Technology in technical sciences. His scientific achievements include over 20 articles published in peer-reviewed scientific journals and more than 100 papers in conference proceedings. He built upon his expertise in atmospheric processes by working with scientists from Germany, Iran, China, USA, Venezuela, and Japan. Bogdan Rosa has led several national and international projects including three grants from the National Science Centre. Additionally, he was a laureate and leader of several computational projects awarded by Interdisciplinary Centre for Mathematical and Computational Modelling UW.
Jean-Marc Denis
Chair of the Board, European Processor Initiative
Title: Future Supercomputers are game changers for processor architecture. Why?
Abstract: The rise of artificial intelligence in HPCand data deluge, combined with the transition from monolithic applications toward complex workflows combining classical HPC models with AI lead the HPC community, especially the hardware architects to reconsider how the next generation supercomputers are designed. The recent evolutions in the HPC hardware technologies landscape, with more and more accelerators and the end of the X86 domination are also key parameters to be taken into account by the HPC ecosystem from hardware designers to end-users.
In this talk, the transition from existing homogenous to future modular architectures is discussed. The consequences on the general-purpose processor are addressed. These considerations ruled the design of the European low power HPC processor that will be used in the future European Exascale and post-Exascale supercomputers. We also elaborate on the first information related to Rhea, the first European HPC processor.
Since July 2021, Jean-Marc has joined SiPearl, the company designing the European HPC microprocessor, as Chief Strategy Officer.
After five years of research in the development of new solvers for the for Maxwell equations at Matra Defense (France) as mathematician from 1990 to 1995, Jean-Marc Denis had several technical positions in the HPC industry between 1995 to 2004 from HPC pre-sales to Senior Solution Architect.
Since mid of 2004 Jean-Marc has worked at Bull SAS head Quarter (France) where he has started the HPC activity. In less than 10 years, the HPC revenue at Bull exploded from nothing in 2004 to 200M EUR in 2015, making Bull the undisputed leader of the European HPC industry and the fourth in the world. From 2011 to the end of 2016, Jean-Marc has leaded the worldwide business activity with the goal to consolidate the ATOS/Bull position in Europe and to make ATOS/Bull a worldwide leader in Extreme Computing with footprint in Middle-East, Asia, Africa and South America.
From 2018 to 2020, Jean-Marc has been the head of Strategy and Plan at Atos/Bull, in charge of the global cross-Business Unit Strategy and of the definition of the 3 years business plan. In 2016 and 2017, Jean-Marc has been in charge of the definition of the strategy for the BigData Division at ATOS/Bull. From the beginning of 2020 to mi 2021, Jean-Marc has been Chief of Staff of the Innovation and Strategy Division at Atos. In addition, since mid-2018, Jean-Marc has been also elected as Chair of the Board of the European Processor Initiative (EPI).
In parallel to his activities at ATOS/Bull, from 2008 to 2015, Jean-Marc Denis has taught "Supercomputer Architecture" concepts in Master 2 degree at the University of Reims Champagne Ardennes (URCA), France.
Education
- Masters degree in Mathematics (U. of Tours, France, 1989)
- Masters degree in Computer Science (U. of Toulouse, France, 1990)
- Engineering diploma in Computer science, (ENSEEIHT, Toulouse, France, 1990)
Anders Jensen
Executive Director of the European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU)
Anders Dam Jensen has a lifelong interest in supercomputers, dating from his time in university. He started his professional career with 10 years of engineering work developing computing hardware, firmware, and software for embedded systems. He pioneered IEEE802.11 wireless network technology in the nineties while working for Symbol Technologies.
After a decade working with hardcore engineering and product development, Anders shifted into management as he joined Cargolux Airlines International as Director IT. Over the next decade, Anders was instrumental in the spin-off of the Cargolux IT department into CHAMP Cargosystems S.A. With Anders as CTO, CHAMP Cargosystems grew to become the largest supplier of IT services to the air cargo industry.
In 2011, Anders was selected as the Director ICTM for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), responsible for all Information and IT services as well as one of the largest classified networks in Europe. In 2020, Anders was appointed as Executive Director for the European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking, a joint initiative between the EU, European countries and private partners to develop a World Class Supercomputing Ecosystem in Europe with a proposed budget of 8 billion euro. Anders holds a Master of Science Degree as well as a Master of Business Administration degree from Technical University of Denmark. He is based in Luxembourg, married to Mette, and has two children.
Irene Qualters
Associate Laboratory Director for Simulation and Computation at Los Alamos National Laboratory
Irene Qualters serves as the Associate Laboratory Director for Simulation and Computation at Los Alamos National Laboratory, a U.S. Department of Energy national laboratory. She previously served as a Senior Science Advisor in the Computing and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Directorate of the National Science Foundation (NSF), where she had responsibility for developing NSF's vision and portfolio of investments in high performance computing, and has played a leadership role in interagency, industry, and academic engagements to advance computing.
Prior to her NSF career, Irene had a distinguished 30-year career in industry, with a number of executive leadership positions in research and development in the technology sector. During her 20 years at Cray Research, she was a pioneer in the development of high performance parallel processing technologies to accelerate scientific discovery. Subsequently as Vice President, she led Information Systems for Merck Research Labs, focusing on software, data and computing capabilities to advance all phases of pharmaceutical R&D.
Hiroaki Kitano
President at The Systems Biology Institute, Tokyo, a Professor at Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University, Okinawa, a President & CEO at Sony Computer Science Laboratories, Inc., Tokyo, a Representative Director and CEO, Sony AI Inc., Tokyo and an Executive Vice President at Sony Group Corporation, Tokyo
Hiroaki Kitano is a President at The Systems Biology Institute, Tokyo, a Professor at Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University, Okinawa, a President & CEO at Sony Computer Science Laboratories, Inc., Tokyo, a Representative Director and CEO, Sony AI Inc., Tokyo and an Executive Vice President at Sony Group Corporation, Tokyo.
He received a B.A. in physics from the International Christian University, Tokyo, and a Ph.D. in computer science from Kyoto University, Kyoto. Since 1988, he has been a visiting researcher at the Center for Machine Translation at Carnegie Mellon University, USA. His research career includes a Project Director at Kitano Symbiotic Systems Project, ERATO, Japan Science and Technology Corporation, Tokyo, followed by a Project Director at Kitano Symbiotic Systems Project, ERATO-SORST, Japan Science and Technology Agency, Tokyo, a Group Director of Laboratory for Disease Systems Modeling at RIKEN Center for Integrative Medical Sciences, Kanagawa, a visiting professor of Keio University, Kanagawa, a visiting professor of the University of Tokyo, Tokyo, and so on.
Kitano is also an Editor-in-Chief of npj Systems Biology and Applications, and a Founding Trustee of The RoboCup Federation.
Kitano served and is currently serving as scientific advisor for numerous companies and research institutions internationally including ALSTOM, Mitsubishi Chemical Holdings, European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), Imperial College London, Univ. Manchester, and Swiss Systems-X Program.
Kitano received The Computers and Thought Award from the International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence in 1993, Prix Ars Electronica 2000, Japan Design Culture Award 2001, Good Design Award 2001, and Nature's 2009 Japan Mid-career Award for Creative Mentoring in Science, as well as being an invited artist for Biennale di Venezia 2000 and Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) New York at Worksphere Exhibition in 2001. He has been named a fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence for 2021. His research interests include computational biology, artificial intelligence, massively parallel computer, autonomous robot, systems biology, and open energy system.
Roberto Car
Recipient of the 2020 ACM Gordon Bell Prize, Professor at Department of Chemistry, Princeton University
Roberto Car is a theoretical condensed matter physicist and physical chemist. He is known for the ab-initio molecular dynamics method that he introduced with Michele Parrinello, and for electronic structure and simulation studies of disordered systems. Car was born in Trieste (Italy) and graduated from the Milan Politecnico (Technical University of Milan). After postdoctoral appointments at EPFL (Switzerland) and at the IBM TJ Watson research Center, he held physics professor positions at SISSA and at the University of Geneva (Switzerland).
Since 1999 he is professor of chemistry and the Princeton Institute for the Science and Technology of Materials at Princeton University, where he is also associated professor of physics and the Program in Applied and Computational Mathematics.
Car has been awarded numerous prizes, including the 1990 Europhysics Prize, the 1995 APS Rahman Prize, the 2009 Dirac Medal of the ICTP, the 2009 IEEE Fernbach Award, the 2010 Berni J. Alder CECAM Prize for Computational Physics, the 2012 Fermi Prize of the Italian Physical Society, the 2016 ACS Theoretical Chemistry Award, and the 2021 Franklin Medal for Chemistry. Car holds honorary degrees from Italian and Swiss Universities. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA since 2016.
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Testimonials
"I think your decision to have a global online conference was very wise during the circumstances. Seeing somebody talk from his home in Chicago, followed by someone from Cape Town, Namibia, Poland etc was great! This must be the future of many conferences, both for its time and environmental savings possibilities."
"...congrats on a successful conference. You did a superb job responding to the circumstances and pivoting to a virtual event that you provided to all."
"A fascinating conference. Thank you for pulling the virtual format together with professionalism and grace."
"(I) Congratulate (you) that you have a very successful conference! I have attended (remotely, of course) most of the talk. It was a great conference!"
"It was a great experience and so well managed. Congrats to your team. Enjoyful to listen :-) "
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