An Overview of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications
Channel: UQ Research Computing Centre
Date: 2018-08-09

ABSTRACT
From its inception more than 30 years ago as one of the first supercomputer centers for the US National Science Foundation, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) has been a leader in the use of advanced computing to address a broad range of challenges. Today, while NCSA continues to operate one of the world's most powerful supercomputers, called Blue Waters, it also has key roles in large data science projects, a vibrant and growing program of collaboration with industry, a strong software development effort, and a rich program of collaboration with faculty and students on campus. This talk will give an overview of NCSA and cover some of the challenges faced by a supercomputing center in the era of big data and cloud computing and how NCSA has adapted to those challenges.
 
SPEAKER BIO:
William Gropp is Director and Chief Scientist of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and holds the Thomas M. Siebel Chair in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1982. He was on the faculty of the Computer Science Department of Yale University from 1982–1990, and from 1990–2007, he was a member of the Mathematics and Computer Science Division at Argonne National Laboratory. His research interests are in parallel computing, software for scientific computing, and numerical methods for partial differential equations. He is a Fellow of ACM, IEEE, and SIAM and a member of the National Academy of Engineering.