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:

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.