Dan Reed to discuss NITRD program recommendations at SC07 BoF

Published: October 26, 2007

A Birds of a Feather session at SC07 will examine U.S. research initiatives, their focus and how they need to change in order to ensure that important scientific questions are answered and that the nation maintains a global leadership position science and technology.

The BoF, Federal Activities Impacting Long Term HEC Strategies, takes place on at 12:15 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 14 in rooms C3 and D1-3 at the Reno-Sparks Convention Center.  It will feature presentations by Dan Reed, director of the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI); Phillip Colella, of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; and George Strawn of the National Science Foundation.

Reed, a member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), co-authored the recently published report Leadership Under Challenge: Information Technology R&D in a Competitive World, which assesses the United State’s global competitiveness in networking and information technology and provides recommendations aimed at ensuring that the federal Networking and Information Technology R&D (NITRD) Program is appropriately focused and implemented. NITRD is a $3.1 billion program that includes 14 federal agencies. Reed will discuss the recommendations of the PCAST report, which include rebalancing the NITRD portfolio, revamping IT education and training programs, re-prioritizing some NITRD topics and improving interagency planning and coordination.

The National Academies study Toward Better Understanding the Potential Impact of High-End Capability Computing on Science and Technology also will be discussed at the BoF.

Reed also will deliver the keynote address at the International Workshop on Performance Analysis and Optimization of High-End Computing Systems. The workshop will be held Sunday, Nov. 11, in room A9 of the Reno-Sparks Convention Center. Reed’s talk, Optimizing the Computing Cloud, will look at the challenges of performance analysis and reliability as we move into the era of the ubiquitous computing cloud that delivers computing, data analysis, search and retrieval, collaboration tools and other services. 

Other RENCI activities at SC07 include:

  • BoF: Developing Applications for Petascale Computers, 5:30 p.m. – 7 p.m., Tuesday, Nov. 13, rooms A2 – A5.  Reed, Thom Dunning, director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, and Ed Seidel, director of the Center for Computation and Technology at Louisiana State University, will host a session that addresses major issues related to petascale computing, including application capabilities and algorithms, libraries, programming techniques and performance analysis and optimization.
  • BoF: Evaluating Petascale Infrastructure: Benchmarks, Models, and Applications, 5:30 p.m.  – 7 p.m., Wednesday, Nov. 14, rooms A3 and A4. Reed, Rob Fowler, RENCI’s chief domain scientist for HPC, and Allan Snavely of the San Diego Supercomputer Center will lead a discussion on recent progress in evaluating the performance, reliability, energy efficiency and usability of petascale computing systems and in developing applications that scale effectively on these systems. Vendors, funding agencies, infrastructure operators, application developers, and others interested in the design, operation and use of large systems are encouraged to attend.
  • Poster Session: RENCI researchers will present several posters in the Ballroom lobby beginning at 5:15 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 13: Performability Modeling for Scheduling and Fault Tolerance Strategies for Grid Workflows(Lavanya Ramakrishnan, Dan Reed); An Open Framework for Scalable, Reconfigurable Performance Analysis(Todd Gamblin, Rob Fowler, Dan Reed).
  • Education program: RENCI Research Assistant Emma Buneci will present a poster, A Framework for Qualitative Performance Analysis of Large-Scale Scientific Applications, as part of the SC Education Program, which begins Saturday, Nov. 10.