September 24, 2021
Colloquium Topic: The International Race to Exascale Supercomputing
Supercomputing has become an essential tool for computational science and engineering and such real-world problems as weather prediction, jet design, molecular dynamics, and medical imaging. Such systems also provide unique capabilities for nation-scale intelligence and surveillance. The first terascale and petascale supercomputers were built by Intel and IBM, respectively, at US Department of Energy Labs. Today's fastest supercomputer, Fugaku, is located at Japan's RIKEN Center for Computational Science. Several nations now are in a race to build the world's first exascale supercomputer that will perform an astounding 1018 floating point operations per second. Will the United States maintain its high-performance computing leadership, or are we slipping in our national strategy and investments? Where are our competitors such as China, Russia, Iran, and Europe in their plans to launch an exascale supercomputer? Will China beat the United States and dominate the field of HPC? In this talk, Bader will give an overview of the international race to exascale supercomputing by the leading countries and regions, and provide some insights into competing strategies.
Colloquium Speaker: David Bader
David A. Bader is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Computer Science and founder of the Department of Data Science and inaugural Director of the Institute for Data Science at New Jersey Institute of Technology. Prior to this, he served as founding Professor and Chair of the School of Computational Science and Engineering, College of Computing, at Georgia Institute of Technology.
Dr. Bader is a Fellow of the IEEE, AAAS, and SIAM, and advises the White House, most recently on the National Strategic Computing Initiative (NSCI) and Future Advanced Computing Ecosystem (FACE). Bader is a leading expert in solving global grand challenges in science, engineering, computing, and data science. His interests are at the intersection of high-performance computing and real-world applications, including cybersecurity, massive-scale analytics, and computational genomics, and he has co-authored over 300 scholarly papers and has best paper awards from ISC, IEEE HPEC, and IEEE/ACM SC. Dr. Bader has served as a lead scientist in several DARPA programs including High Productivity Computing Systems (HPCS) with IBM, Ubiquitous High Performance Computing (UHPC) with NVIDIA, Anomaly Detection at Multiple Scales (ADAMS), Power Efficiency Revolution For Embedded Computing Technologies (PERFECT), Hierarchical Identify Verify Exploit (HIVE), and Software-Defined Hardware (SDH). Recently, Bader received an NVIDIA AI Lab (NVAIL) award, and a Facebook Research AI Hardware/Software Co-Design award.
Dr. Bader is Editor-in-Chief of the ACM Transactions on Parallel Computing, and General Co-Chair of IPDPS 2021, and previously served as Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems. He serves on the leadership team of Northeast Big Data Innovation Hub as the inaugural chair of the Seed Fund Steering Committee. In 2021, ROI-NJ recognized Bader on its inaugural list of technology influencers, and in 2012, Bader was the inaugural recipient of University of Maryland’s Electrical and Computer Engineering Distinguished Alumni Award. In 2014, Bader received the Outstanding Senior Faculty Research Award from Georgia Tech. Bader has also served as Director of the Sony-Toshiba-IBM Center of Competence for the Cell Broadband Engine Processor and Director of an NVDIA GPU Center of Excellence. In 1998, Bader built the first Linux supercomputer that led to a high-performance computing (HPC) revolution. He is a cofounder of the Graph500 List for benchmarking “Big Data” computing platforms. He is recognized as a “RockStar” of High Performance Computing by InsideHPC and as HPCwire’s People to Watch in 2012 and 2014.