Title:	From Supercomputing to Cyberinfrastructure: Evolving the Center
Date:	October 28, 2005 (Friday)
Time:	2:30 p.m. - 3:30 p.m.
Venue:	Room 121, 1/F, Ho Sin-hang Engineering Building, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, N.T.
Speaker:	Mr. John Towns Director, The Persistent Infrastructure Directorate National Center for Supercomputing Applications The University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign USA

ABSTRACT:

For the past several decades supercomputing technologies have rapidly evolved along many axes and have provided successively unprecedented capabilities to the science and engineering community. Several of these technologies have allowed for increased accessibility and ease of use as well as enabling use of distributed resources in various ways. At the heart of these advances has always been a set of leading supercomputing centers providing resources and services to various set of users. However, the world has changed and the core reason for existence of supercomputing centers -- namely to deploy, operate and support "big iron" computing resources -- no longer justified their continued existence. How science is conducted, the emergence of new disciplines needing a broad range of computing resources, and other factors, indicate the needs for supercomputing centers to become centers providing cyberinfrastructure and effective means for harnessing it. In this talk we will briefly discuss some of the driving factor in this evolution and how NCSA is repositioning itself to address the needs of this new world.

BIOGRAPHY:

John Towns is the Director of the Persistent Infrastructure Directorate at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign. He is also a co-Principal Investigator (PI) on the TeraGrid Project, PI of the National Laboratory for Applied Network Research (NLANR) Distributed Application Support Team (DAST) that works with researchers using high-performance network applications and assists in the development of distributed applications and tools, and co-PI on the Computational Chemistry Grid Project lead by the University of Kentucky. His background is in computational astrophysics making use of a variety of computational architectures with a focus on application performance analysis and parallelization. At NCSA, he provides leadership and direction in the support of an array of computational science and engineering research projects making use of advanced computing and data resources. He is co-Managing Director for the Cyberinfrastructure Partnership (CIP, CI-Partnership.org) and a co-founding member of the Steering Committee of the Linux Clusters Institute (LCI, linuxclustersinstitute.org). Among other activities, he plays significant roles in the deployment and operation of computational Grid-related projects in which NCSA is involved. These projects embody the deployment of technologies and services to support the establishment of a Grid computing infrastructure. Towns is a frequent invited presenter on high-performance computing and enabling science and engineering in Grid contexts. He received M.S. degrees in Physics and Astronomy from the University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign in 1990 and 1991 respectively and a B.S in Physics from the University of Missouri - Rolla in 1987.

Enquiries: Miss Temmy So at tel 2609 8444

For more information, please refer to http://www.cse.cuhk.edu.hk/seminar