CSE RESEARCH SYMPOSIUM
KEYNOTE ADDRESS

SPEAKER: DR. IAN FOSTER

Mathematics & Computer Science Division
Argonne National Laboratory, Argonne, IL

DATE: Friday, April 18, 1997

TIME: 10:00 AM

PLACE: 335 Grainger Engineering Library

TITLE: Designing and Building Parallel Climate Models

ABSTRACT

The impossibility of meaningful experiments makes numerical modeling a particularly important tool in studies of the earth's climate system. Driven by the need for greater physical resolution, physical realism, and timescales, climate models have historically been among the first applications to exploit new computer architectures. In recent years, a number of groups have addressed the problem of transitioning climate models from vector multiprocessors to scalable parallel computers. In this talk, I describe one such effort, a joint project of Argonne and other laboratories and universities. This project has produced new numerical methods and parallel algorithms suitable for use on parallel computers, and incorporated these new techniques in models capable of executing with high efficiency on multiple parallel platforms. My goal is to describe not only the numerical and algorithmic techniques required to build parallel climate models, but also the software engineering issues that arise when dealing with systems of this complexity. In many respects, the latter problems are harder than the former.

BIOGRAPHY

Ian Foster received his BSc (Hons I) in Computer Science from the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, and his PhD in Computer Science from Imperial College, England. He holds a joint appointment as a Scientist at Argonne National Laboratory and Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Chicago. He is the author of three books and over 100 articles and reports on various topics relating to parallel and distributed computing. Dr. Foster is a member of the Technical Steering Committee for the NSF Center for Research on Parallel Computation and of the Science Team of the DOE's CHAMMP climate modeling program. He also coleads the Globus project, which is developing software infrastructure for high-performance distributed computing.