2012-13 Peebles Memorial Lecture in Information Technology

The 2012-13 Peebles Memorial Lecture in Information Technology was presented by Dr. Paul Messina on April 25, 2013, in Presidents Hall (inside Franklin Hall) at Indiana University. Dr. Messina, Director of Science at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF), presented "Scientific computing - will the lessons learned apply to the future?"

Abstract: Scientific computing has advanced dramatically during the last four decades, despite several upheavals in computer architectures. The evolution of high-end computers in the next decade will again pose challenges as well as opportunities. This talk examined the factors that enabled the advances and speculated about how the lessons learned might be used in grappling with the coming changes.

Bio: Dr. Messina has been Director of Science at the ALCF since 2008. From 2002 to 2004, Dr. Messina served as Distinguished Senior Computer Scientist at Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) and as Advisor to the Director General at the European Organization for Nuclear Research CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research). Previously, Dr. Messina served as founding Director of California Institute of Technology's Center for Advanced Computing Research (CACR), and as Assistant Vice President for Scientific Computing and Faculty Associate for Scientific Computing at Caltech. He led the Computational and Computer Science component of Caltech's research project funded by the Academic Strategic Alliances Program of the Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative. While at Caltech, he also served as co-principal investigator for the National Virtual Observatory and TeraGrid, as chief architect for the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (NPACI), as principal investigator for the Scalable I/O Initiative, as principal investigator for the CASA gigabit network testbed, and as director of the Concurrent Supercomputing Consortium. During a leave from Caltech in 1999 and 2000, he led the DOE-NNSA Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative. In his first association with Argonne from 1973 to 1987, he held a number of positions in the Applied Mathematics Division and was the founding director of the Mathematics and Computer Science Division.

Watch Dr. Messina's lecture (via YouTube).