Colloquium - Tufo

Until recently science has progressed through a tight interplay between theory and experimentation. With the advent of high-performance computing systems and their general availability to the scientific community, simulation has joined theory and experimentation as the third pillar of science. Computational Science encompasses simulation as well as all of the components, both physical and virtual, required to employ simulation as a means of scientific investigation. In this talk I will provide an overview of the Computational Science activities I have led since coming to Boulder three years ago, focusing on three projects which span the Computational Science spectrum.

The first project is a collaborative effort between UCB, NCAR, UCD, and NSF to acquire a one rack Blue Gene supercomputer (2048 processors, 5.73 TF peak) to investigate and address the technical obstacles to achieving practical petascale computing in geoscience, aerospace engineering, and mathematical applications. The second, funded by the DOE SciDAC program, is to develop a scalable conservative dynamical core for the Community Climate System Model that addresses atmospheric transport issues such as mass conservation and monotonicity preservation using the high-order discontinuous Galerkin method. The final effort is Grid-BGC, a grid-enabled terrestrial carbon cycle modeling environment which is funded by NASA. Grid-BGC leverages grid computing technologies to create a secure, reliable and easy to use distributed computational environment for climate modeling and which is easily extensible to other simulation investigations.