Dan Reed, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Renaissance Computing: The Interdisciplinary Future

Abstract:
Legend says that Archimedes remarked, on the discovery of the lever, "Give me a
place to stand, and I can move the world." As an intellectual lever, computing
allows researchers and practitioners to bring to life theoretical models of
phenomena when economics or other constraints preclude experimentation.
Computing also allows us to capture and analyze the torrent of experimental
data being produced by a new generation of scientific instruments and sensors,
themselves made possible by advances in computing and microelectronics.
Finally, computing, via high-speed networks and distributed collaboration
systems, brings people and talent together across the barriers of time and
space.  Simply put, computing pervades all aspects of science and engineering -
"science" and "computational science" have become largely synonymous. 

However, we face major challenges. Systems built from commodity processors
dominate high-performance computing today, with systems containing thousands of
processors now being deployed.  Similarly, large-scale Grids containing
hundreds of thousands of sites are being contemplated, developed and deployed.
As node counts for multi-teraflop systems grow to tens of thousands, with
proposed petaflop systems likely to contain hundreds of thousands of nodes, we
must rethink traditional assumptions about software scaling and manageability
and hardware reliability.  This talk will examine a set of interdisciplinary
application domains and the implications of those domains for system
scalability, fault tolerance and next generation technology.