Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Horst Simon was named Associate Laboratory Director for Computing Sciences at Berkeley Lab in 2004. He represents the interests of the lab’s scientific computing divisions — the NERSC Center and Computational Research — in the formulation of laboratory policy, and leads the overall direction of the two divisions. He also coordinates constructive interactions within the computing sciences divisions to seek coupling with other scientific programs. Simon joined LBNL in early 1996 as director of the newly formed NERSC Division, and was one of the key architects in establishing NERSC at its new location in Berkeley. Simon also is the founding director of Berkeley Lab’s Computational Research Division, which conducts applied research and development in computer science, computational science, and applied mathematics. His research interests are in the development of sparse matrix algorithms, algorithms for large-scale eigenvalue problems, and domain decomposition algorithms for unstructured domains for parallel processing.
Simon’s recursive spectral bisection algorithm is regarded as a breakthrough in parallel algorithms for unstructured computations, and his algorithm research efforts were honored with the 1988 Gordon Bell Prize for parallel processing research. He also is one of four editors of the twice-yearly “TOP500” list of the world’s most powerful computing systems.
David Skinner was the lead high-performance computing (HPC) consultant for the Department of Energy’s first six Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) projects before starting the SciDAC Outreach Center. The INCITE program has since blossomed into a multi-lab allocation process for large-scale computing. In that work and other projects Skinner often focuses on making scientific applications run fast and scale well. The core areas of Skinner’s present HPC research include improving application performance, characterizing scientific workloads, and analysis of emerging architectures.
Skinner heads the NERSC Center’s Open Software and Programming Group at NERSC, which is active in making software deliver for HPC centers and users and in promoting software development practices that enhance reliability and performance in the overall HPC process. His group works on a variety of software related to parallel computing applications themselves as well as HPC center infrastructure software for system monitoring, allocation banking, and Web services. Skinner also publishes scientific research in the areas of molecular dynamics, chemical quantum dynamics and kinetics.
Further Reading:
NERSC Center Web page:
http://www.nersc.gov/
NERSC Center strategic plan:
http://www.nersc.gov/news/reports/LBNL-57582.pdf
NERSC Center newsletter archive:
http://www.nersc.gov/news/nerscnews/
Contact:
Horst Simon
HDSimon@lbl.gov
David Skinner
deskinner@lbl.gov
Practicum Coordinator:
Daniel Martin
DFMartin@lbl.gov
