Present: Henry van den Bedem, Joe Blaylock, Arno Candel, Igor Gaponenko, Chris O'Grady, Vineet Rawat, Bebo White
At the start of the meeting, Arno presented the following collection of candidates:
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Candidates as of March 7 2011:
Horst Simon suggests:
* himself (Deputy Lab director – LBNL, Director NERSC) – Status of HPC in the US
* Peter Nugent (Group leader - LBNL) – Cosmology (OK from Ralf Kaehler and Tom Abel)
* Julian Borrill (Staff scientist - LBNL) – Cosmology (OK from Ralf Kaehler and Tom Abel)
* Jamie Sethian (Prof. - UC Berkeley) – General Applied Math and Sci Comp
* Filipe Maia (Postdoc - LBNL) – GPUs/Hawk (Igor: might be too technical)
* Jim Demmel (Prof. - UC Berkeley) - Optimizing Performance by Avoiding Communication
* Andrew Canning (Sen. Staff - LBNL) - Mat Science on Many Core Architectures (PARATEC)
* Sam Williams (PhD08 - LBNL) - Auto-Tuning Memory-Intensive Kernels for Multicore
Jakec Becla suggests:
* Jeff Hammerbacher (wall street, facebook, cloudera,
see http://www.accel.com/bio/jeffhammerbacher.php
* Oliver Ratzesberger (director of eBay analytics)
Travis Brooks suggests:
* Facebook Data Science group (friends visualization etc)
* Eugene Kim (Wikimedia strategic planning)
Igor Gaponenko suggests:
* David Patterson (CS Prof. - UC Berkeley)
Co-founder of ParLab @ UC Berkeley, Led the design of RISC 1 -> SPARC, Leader of RAID project. National Academy of Engineering, National Academy of Sciences, etc.
Henry van den Bedem suggests:
* Tony DeRose from Pixar http://graphics.pixar.com/people/derose/index.html.
* Mohammed AlQuraishi (Stanford) “De novo inference of protein-DNA energy potentials using compressed sensing"
Bebo White suggests:
* Danese Cooper – Wikimedia CTO
* Leo Paporte (leoville.com) – Online Social Media
* Jeff Johnson – Book “Designing with the Mind in Mind” (About Interfaces)
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During the meeting, a few new recommendations were made:
Henry suggested:
* Mike Huffer (SLAC, RCE for LSST/ATLAS)
* Todd Martinez (SLAC, GPUs for chemistry)
* SUNCAT (SLAC, catalysts for clean energy created using computational methods)
Igor suggested:
* Anton Barty (DESY Germany, work on LCLS imaging):
http://www.nature.com/nphoton/journal/v2/n7/pdf/nphoton.2008.128.pdf
MEETING OUTCOME:
1) We agreed that while the content should stay mostly in line with SLAC's research programs, a healthy mix of more general (but still strongly computing related) talks from outside speakers would greatly improve the changes for overall success. Ratio 2:1 or so.
2) Frequency: Monthly OK, gives us freedom to sprinkle in the occasional surprise speaker
3) Time and location does not have to be strictly fixed, since it's monthly, people might forget / don't care. We prefer the Kavli auditorium, if available.
4) Which day?
Monday: ruled out because of weekly colloquium at 4PM
Tuesday: OK?
Wednesday: ruled out because of weekly LCLS seminar (around 3PM)
Thursday: 3PM OK?
Friday: ruled out because of proximity to weekend
Proposed time line for the first seminars:
- End of April (or as soon as Amber is here): 1st seminar: LCLS: Ideally, Anton Barty on imaging (suggested by Igor, seems ideal to us)
- Mid of May: 2nd seminar: Cosmology: Peter Nugent or Julian Borrill from LBNL (suggested by Horst Simon, OK from Kavli colleagues)
- End of May: sci comp workshop
- Mid of June: 3rd seminar: General talk by someone in the movie/gaming industry (Pixar, NVidia or Electronics Arts)
- Mid of July: 4th seminar: Mike Huffer (LSST/ATLAS), Todd Martinez (GPU chemistry), David Patterson (Comp Science Prof. LBNL), FaceBook Data Science would all be suitable candidates. But might skip because too close to holidays (or schedule a bit earlier?)
Action items:
* Henry to check with Pixar
* Igor to check with Anton Barty - since from Germany collaborating with LCLS: it's not clear that he will be here at the end of April/Early May, then we might use him as a "Joker" in between regular talks.
* Arno: As soon as possible, contact Cosmology speakers from LBNL and identify the first speaker if Anton Barty is not available.