Erik Draeger
Group Leader, Center for Applied Scientific Computing
Lecture Information:
- November 18, 2022
- 2:00 PM
- Zoom (must register in advance to join)
Speaker Bio
Dr. Erik Draeger is the Deputy Director of Application Development for the Exascale Computing Project, as well as the Scientific Computing group leader at the Center for Applied Scientific Computing (CASC) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. He received a PhD in theoretical physics from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in 2001 and has over a decade of experience developing scientific applications to achieve maximum scalability and time to solution on next-generation architectures. Erik has been a finalist for the ACM Gordon Bell Prize five times since 2005 and won the prize in 2006. https://people.llnl.gov/draeger1
Description
Want to follow cancer cells through a patient’s bloodstream? Design new materials that will result in better, more efficient batteries? Predict the experiments most likely to produce clean fusion energy? Or the drugs most likely to cause heart arrhythmias? With a big enough supercomputer, you can do all these things and more. And no one has bigger supercomputers than the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). In this talk, I will describe the role computer simulation plays in scientific discovery from the perspective of a researcher at a DOE national laboratory. The need for, and impact of, large-scale supercomputing will be highlighted with an overview of application problems researchers are currently tackling in physics, biology, chemistry and materials science. I will also share my perspective on the need for a diversity of strengths and skill sets in research collaborations, and why you may find yourself solving problems you never knew you cared about. Finally, I will discuss how the rise of accelerator based computing presents unique opportunities to rethink old approaches and solve problems that were previously thought to be intractable.