Date and Time: April 21 (Thursday)  at 2:45pm
Refreshments: 2:45pm
Talk: 2:55pm

Speaker: Wes Bethel, LBNL
Title:
Exascale Computing Challenges and Volume Rendering Optimizations for Advanced Architectures

Abstract:
Computer simulations of scientific phenomena play a key role in modern science.
Over the years, these computational science projects have benefited greatly
from advances in computational capacity, and this trend is expected to continue
forward into the exascale regime. Due to limits of Moore's Law scaling, the
exascale platform is expected to be significantly different than previous
generations of supercomputers. We will discuss some of the challenges facing
computational science projects that result from these changes, and review
research results from performance optimization studies of a staple scientific
visualization algorithm, raycasting volume rendering, that anticipate some of
the architectural challenges we will face at the node level on an exascale
platform.

Bio:

E. Wes Bethel is a Senior Scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory,
where he engages in and leads a vibrant research program in high performance
visualization and data analysis that aims to facilitate knowledge discovery
from large scientific data produced by computer simulations and experiments
using some of the world's largest computational platforms. He received his
Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California Davis, is a Senior
Fellow at the Berkeley Institute for Data Science, and is an ACM Distinguished
Scientist.