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Grand Challenge Consortia
A cornerstone of CRPC application activities is the active participation by
researchers in grand challenge consortia-interdisciplinary collaborations
to address important problems in science and engineering using parallel
computation. These collaborations usually involve CRPC computational
scientists and application researchers outside of the CRPC. In a typical
consortium, annual workshops bring together appropriate computational and
applied scientists, and isolate key algorithm and software issues. The
consortia also involve an exchange of visits, training on and access to
parallel computing facilities, and assistance by the CRPC in the
application of its software and algorithm technologies to the
parallelization of specific applications. Two examples:
- The Keck Center for Computational Biology is a collaborative effort
of the CRPC and computational biologists at Rice University, Baylor College
of Medicine, and the University of Houston. It focuses on innovative uses
of parallel computation in biological research and education. Specific
areas of emphasis include molecular dynamics, X-ray crystallography,
medical imaging, and the human genome project.
- The Geosciences Parallel Computation Project (GPCP) is a
collaboration of researchers from the CRPC, Rice University, the University
of Texas at Austin, the University of Houston, and several corporations in
the petroleum industry that specifically addresses parallel computation in
enhanced oil recovery. Areas of study include flow in porous media, seismic
analysis, optimal well placement, and the development of advanced tools for
parallel scientific programming (included in the section on Fortran
Parallel Programming System, pages 26-28). This project has also resulted
in two very active corporate affiliate programs. Because it was supported
by the State of Texas as part of a matching commitment for the CRPC, the
application projects of the GPCP are further described on pages 47-51.
David Forslund is a theoretical plasma physicist who has worked in space plasma physics, magnetic fusion, laser fusion, and, more recently, computer science. Currently, he is involved in massively parallel computing projects and has developed a distributed particle simulation code in C++ that runs on a network of heterogeneous workstations. As deputy director of the Advanced Computing Laboratory at Los Alamos National Laboratory, he has helped guide the installation and operation of the largest massively parallel supercomputer in the world and led a research project in the practical applications of distributed computing. He has published more than 50 publications in scientific journals and has given numerous invited talks in plasma physics and computer science.
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