ACADEMIA

The U.S. Department of Energy’s Scientific Discovery through Advance Computing (SciDAC) Program will hold its annual meeting for computational scientists on June 25-29 in Denver, Colo. The annual meeting will feature an address by DOE Under Secretary for Science Raymond Orbach, as well as talks and poster presentations by members of the SciDAC community. SciDAC was launched in 2001 to develop new tools and techniques for advancing scientific research through computational modeling and simulation in all mission areas of the Department of Energy’s Office of Science. The scientific computing infrastructure being developed under SciDAC will enable researchers to exploit the ever-increasing capabilities of supercomputers to study some of the most challenging scientific problems. “As many of the original projects reach their culmination and we prepare to announce the next set of projects, the meeting in Denver provides an excellent venue to look at what we’ve accomplished and see what possibilities lie ahead,” said SciDAC Program Director Michael Strayer. “And quite fittingly, the annual meeting has grown to include not only researchers supported by SciDAC, but also scientists who are benefiting from the scientific software advances enabled by the program.” The keynote speaker at the meeting will be John Bell, head of the Center for Computational Sciences and Engineering at DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Using software developed in part under SciDAC, Bell’s group was able to create combustion simulations of a laboratory-scale flame with unprecedented accuracy. Their results were featured last July on the cover of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The 2006 SciDAC meeting will bring together about 300 researchers to highlight specific advances made in many research domains. Invited talks and posters will offer a sample of the scientific computing highlights resulting from the SciDAC program. Attendees will represent different nations, agencies, programs and application domains to highlight recent advances in computational science in important areas, from understanding our universe on its largest and smallest scales, to understanding Earth's climate change and its ramifications for humankind, to developing new energy sources. More information about the SciDAC program can be found at its Web site.