Cyberinfrastructure Framework for 21st Century Vision at US National Science Foundation

Speaker:	Dr. Almadena Chtchelkanova
		Program Director
		Directorate for Computer and Information Science
		and Engineering
		National Science Foundation, USA

Title:		"Cyberinfrastructure Framework for 21st Century Vision at
		 US National Science Foundation"

Date:		Monday, 19 July 2010

Time:		3:00pm - 4:00pm

Venue:		Lecture Theatre H (near lifts 27/28), HKUST


Abstract:

National Science Foundation (NSF) is the only agency within the U.S.
government that funds research and education across all disciplines of
science and engineering (except medical sciences). NSF has, for over two
decades, been providing the scientific community with open access to high
performance computing facilities and the associated user support so that
those facilities could be used to enable state-of-the-art, often
transformative, scientific investigations.

Today, every discipline of science and engineering is being revolutionized
by the widespread use of comprehensive cyberinfrastructure (CI).
Computing power, data volumes, and network capacities are all on
exponential growth paths, collaborations are growing dramatically, and all
forms of CI and multiple communities spanning multiple agencies and
international domains often must be brought to bear to address a single
complex grand challenge problem, such as climate change.  All of these
developments are part of a revolutionary new approach to scientific
discovery in which advanced computational facilities (e.g., data systems,
computing hardware, high speed networks) and instruments (e.g.,
telescopes, sensor networks, sequencers) are coupled to the development of
quantifiable models, algorithms, software and other tools and services to
provide unique insights into complex problems in science and engineering.

This talk will give an overview of NSF development and support of a
comprehensive CI essential to 21st century advances in science and
engineering, including petascale, grid and cloud computing.


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Biography:

Dr. Almadena Chtchelkanova is a Program Director at the Directorate for
Computer and Information Science and Engineering at the National Science
Foundation. Dr. Chtchelkanova is in charge of the areas of High
Performance Computing, Compilers, and Parallel and Distributed Algorithms.
She is a Lead Program Director and inter-agency coordinator for High End
Computing University Research Activity (HECURA).

Before joining NSF in 2005 Dr. Chtchelkanova worked for Strategic
Analysis, Inc. as a Senior Scientist providing technical support to
Defense Advanced Research Program Agency (DARPA).

Dr. Chtchelkanova spent four years working at the Laboratory for
Computational Physics and Fluid Dynamics at the Naval Research Laboratory
located in Washington, DC. Dr. Chtchelkanova has considerable experience
in the area of High Performance Computing (HPC) applications. She
developed and implemented portable, scalable, parallel adaptive mesh
generation algorithms for computational fluid dynamics, weather forecast,
combustion and contaminant transport.

Dr. Chtchelkanova holds an MA degree from the Department of Computer
Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin (1996) and a Ph.D. degree in
physics from Moscow State University in Russia (1988).