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
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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
5) Proposed time line for the first seminars:
- End of April (or as soon as Amber is here): 1st seminar: TBD - quite possibly on cosmology: Peter Nugent or Julian Borrill from LBNL (suggested by Horst Simon, OK from Kavli colleagues)
- Mid of June: 3rd seminar: General talk by someone in the movie/gaming industry (Pixar, NVidia or Electronics Arts)
- Mid/Late June?: sci comp workshop (updated according to Richard on March 9)
- End of June/Early July: 3rd Seminar: Anton Barty (LCLS, Imaging)
- After the summer break: 4th seminar: Mike Huffer (LSST/ATLAS), Todd Martinez (GPU chemistry), David Patterson (Comp Science Prof. LBNL) or FaceBook Data Science would be good candidates. But might skip because too close to holidays (or schedule a bit earlier?)
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ACTION ITEMS:
* SCSC members to decide on the time slot. Is Thursday 3PM OK?
* 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.
UPDATE Mar 9 (Thanks Igor): Anton is interested in giving a talk, but won't be here late May/early June. Quoting Anton: "Our next round of experiments at LCLS will be in late June (I'm scheduled to leave LCLS before July 3). I don't think there's any reason for me to be over SLAC way before then."
* Arno: Wait for feedback from SCSC members, then ASAP contact Cosmology speakers from LBNL and identify the first speaker if Anton Barty is not available (which seems to be the case now).