Bilkent University
Department of Computer Engineering
S E M I N A R
High Performance Computing and Its Application to Multi-Scale Modeling
Dr. Hasan Metin Aktulga
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Berkeley, California, USAComputational Science and Engineering (CS&E) is now widely accepted as the third pillar of scientific discovery besides theory and experiment following its success in various academic fields as well as industrial sectors. Problems in CS&E often require huge computing power or processing large amount of data. Consequently, the success of CS&E is intimately related to advances in High Performance Computing (HPC). After reaching teraflop and petaflop scales in 1995 and 2008, respectively, HPC community is now aiming for exascale platforms by 2020 in order to meet the increasing demand and to be able to tackle much harder problems. In the first part of this talk, I will briefly touch on the challenges awaiting for the computer scientists on the road to exascale computing.
In the second part of the talk, I will discuss multi-scale modeling. In particular, I will consider two specific examples. Today, simulations are conducted at all levels accessible to the humankind to understand various phenomena: interactions between quarks, structures of atomic nuclei, interactions among molecules for designing drugs and new materials, global climate change and supernovae to name a few of them. The first example that I will talk about will be our work on the development of PuReMD, a reactive molecular dynamics code, during my PhD studies. Then I will talk about our collaboration with physicists on improving the performance and scalability of MFDn, a nuclear structure calculation code.
Bio: Hasan Metin Aktulga is a postdoctoral research fellow with the Scientific Computing Group at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory since September 2010. He is currently working on large-scale eigenvalue problems arising in the context of ab-initio nuclear structure calculations. He has received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Purdue University under the supervision of Prof. Ananth Grama in August 2010. His thesis title was “Algorithmic Techniques and Numerical Methods in Atomistic Modeling”. He has received his M.S. degree also from Purdue University in 2009 and his B.S. degree from Bilkent University in 2004, all in Computer Science. Hasan Metin Aktulga has represented Turkey in IOI’2000 in Beijing.
DATE: 20 July, 2011, Wednesday @ 13:30
PLACE: EA202