Robert B. Ross

This is actually somewhat old news, but the Consortium for the Advancement of Scientific Software (CASS) web site is live! CASS is about helping steward scientific computing software and fostering the community of practitioners building these important tools. There are six core member organizations in CASS, of which our SciDAC RAPIDS Institute and partner institute FASTMath are two.

We look forward to continuing to work with the CASS organizations to build ever more capable software for scientific computing.

The Exascale Computing Project (ECP) leadership team was recognized with the DOE Secretary of Energy’s Honor award for their work to create the “first sustainable exascale ecosystem” — hardware, software, and applications working together to enable breakthrough science on exascale computers.

As a leader of one of the technical teams, I get to share in this recognition, but it was the hard work of the Mochi, Darshan, and Parallel netCDF teams that led to our contributions to the success of the project as a whole. Thanks everyone!

The 2024 Workshop on Basic Research Needs for Energy-Efficient Computing for Science, sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR), begins today. The workshop brings together experts in architectures, emerging computing technologies, system software, data management, edge computing, benchmarking, and more to help set research priorities to enable the next generation of computing platforms for science.

I’m honored to co-chair this workshop with Jeff Vetter of Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Thanks to our ASCR program managers for sponsoring this workshop! I’d also like to thank our Organizing Committee (listed below) for all their hard work preparing for the meeting, and thank them in advance for all the work to follow.

• Brad Aimone, Sandia National Laboratories
• George Amvrosiadis, Carnegie Mellon University
• Jim Ang, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
• Hyesoon Kim, Georgia Institute of Technology
• Michel Kinsy, Arizona State University
• George Michelogiannakis, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Earlier this week I had a chance to provide an overview of our RAPIDS Institute to the SciDAC community at the 2023 PI meeting. SciDAC is an amazing program that has been central to my professional career since its inception in 2001 (just after I arrived at Argonne).

I’m very proud of the accomplishments of our team, spanning the areas of scientific data management and data understanding, portability and performance enhancement for scientific codes, and machine learning and AI applied to science problems.

I’m excited to be a part of two newly-funded ASCR projects on distributed resilient systems!

With Ian Foster‘s Diaspora project, we will be investigating methods for building resilient science workflows spanning from HPC platforms to the edge. This is the first time my team will be working with Ian and the Globus folks, and we’re excited about the collaboration.

In Chris Carothers‘ Tachyon project we will be studying methods for modeling scientific infrastructure and workflows with a focus on high energy physics experiments such as DUNE. We’ve been working with Chris and his team for years as part of the CODES parallel discrete event project, and we’re looking forward to continuing the collaboration.

Thanks as always for the support of our program managers at ASCR!

ASCR recently announced $11.4M in new research projects in the area of management and storage of scientific data. We’re fortunate to be a part of two of these new activities. I’m leading one with colleagues at Los Alamos and Carnegie Mellon looking at smart devices and elasticity, while Line Pouchard of Brookhaven is leading another looking at managing provenance data and improving reproducibility of workflows using HPC resources. The former continues the thread of research in our Mochi activity, while the latter will leverage both Mochi and Darshan technologies.

ASCR Discovery is a nice source of information about the work that the DOE Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research. They were recently kind enough to write an article about my career and some of the projects I’m fortunate to be involved with. It’s been a great experience so far!

We’ve very excited that our Mochi HPC service toolkit won the R&D 100 award this year! It was one of three Argonne technologies that received the award this year. This award recognizes revolutionary ideas in science and technology that have been embodied in new products, technologies, or materials.

The Lawrence Award is a mid-career award for exceptional R&D in service of Dept. of Energy mission. I’m deeply honored to receive this award, particularly given how many excellent researchers I know personally within the DOE community. Thanks to all my colleagues who have made this possible, and my family for supporting me throughout my career.

The ceremony was held online (COVID), which was surreal, but the honor and excitement is the same. I’ll have to keep an eye out for my fellow laureates when we’re traveling again!

The SciDAC RAPIDS Institute, along with our sibling Institute FASTMath, has been renewed for a new five-year term under SciDAC-5. RAPIDS and FASTMath continue to serve important roles in connecting science teams with computer scientists and applied mathematicians and developing new technologies to aid in their work.

Both Institutes have incorporated additional AI capabilities into their portfolios in recognition of the importance of this growing area, while RAPIDS retains capabilities to assist in adapting to new platforms, managing scientific data, and visualizing and analyzing large volumes of scientific data.

I’m incredibly excited to continue to lead this talented team with my co-lead Lenny Oliker.