February 17, 2011
Supercomputing expert to talk at UW on the future of extreme computing
The director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications will speak at the UW on Tuesday, Feb. 22, on the future of extreme scientific computing.
Thom Dunning
Thom Dunning, a chemistry professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is director of the Blue Waters Project, which is expected to be one of the worlds most powerful supercomputers with a peak performance of 10 petaflops (10 quadrillion calculations per second).
Dunning will speak at 4 p.m. Feb. 22 in 220 Guggenheim. He will provide an overview of what the scientific community and the nation in general can expect from the Blue Waters Project. The project is a joint effort of the University of Illinois, IBM and the Great Lakes Consortium for Petascale Computation and is supported by the National Science Foundation.
It is expected that scientists using Blue Waters will achieve breakthroughs in virtually every field, from predicting the behavior of hurricanes or complex biological systems, to designing new materials at the level of atoms to understanding how the cosmos evolved following the Big Bang.
Dunnings visit is being sponsored by the departments of chemistry, physics, computer science and engineering, and applied mathematics, as well as campus organizations MathAcrossCampus and the eScience Institute.
