I2 Lab Distinguished Seminar Series
High Performance Computing - Real-World Applications for Coastal Resiliency
Dr. David R. Shaw
Friday, October 5, 2007
9:00AM ~ 11:00AM, Harris Engineering Center 101
Abstract
The HPC˛ provides substantial high performance computing resources for use by its member centers. Raptor is the latest addition to the HPC capabilities, and is a 2048 processor cluster composed of 512 Sun Microsystems SunFire X2200 M2 servers, each with two dual-core AMD Opteron 2218 processors (2.6GHz) and 8 GB of memory (for a total of 4TB). All of the compute nodes are diskless. The system uses gigabit ethernet to connect the 32 nodes in each rack together, and 10 GbE to connect the 16 racks to one another. Raptor has a peak performance of over 10.6 teraflops (trillion calculations per second). On the November 2006 Top 500 Supercomputer Sites list, Raptor debuted as the 115th most powerful computer in the world, and the 18th most powerful computer at any academic site in the United States.
The Northern Gulf Institute (NGI) is a NOAA Cooperative Institute that was initiated in October, 2006, and is a member center within the HPC˛. The NGI is a partnership of five academic institutions and NOAA. The collaboration led by Mississippi State University, includes the University of Southern Mississippi, Louisiana State University, Florida State University, and the Dauphin Island Sea Lab. The NGI defines the Northern Gulf of Mexico region as the upland, watershed, coastal zone, and coastal ocean areas from the Sabine River in Louisiana east to the Suwannee River in Florida.
NGI conducts high-impact research and education programs in the Northern Gulf of Mexico region focused on integration - integration of the land-coast-ocean-atmosphere continuum; integration of research to operations; and integration of individual organizational strengths into a holistic program. The program's goal is to measurably contribute to the recovery and future health, safety, resilience and productivity of the region through sustained research and applications in a geospatial and ecosystem context.
The NGI focuses on four research themes that align with NOAA's research and operational focuses. These themes provide a framework for the activities of the institute. The four NGI Research Themes are:
- Ecosystem-based Management
- Geospatial Data/Information and Visualization in Environmental Science
- Climate Change and Climate Variability Effects on Regional Ecosystems
- Coastal Hazards and Resiliency
Short Bio
David Shaw is the Director of the GeoResources Institute at Mississippi State University, a research and outreach institute focused on understanding Earth's natural and managed systems to provide comprehensive solutions for socioeconomic and environmental requirements. Its vision is to be a world leader in advancing the state-of-the-art in development and integration of spatial technologies and resource management. Initially GRI's focus was in agriculture, forestry, water resources, information technology, visualization of complex datasets, and computational modeling, but recently expanding to include geospatial applications in any suitable domain, such as climate, weather, and oceanography to support state and local government issues, and economic development. He received his Ph.D. from Oklahoma State University in 1985, his M.S. from OSU in 1983, and his B.S. from Cameron University in 1981.
Dr. Shaw began his career at Mississippi State in 1985 as an Assistant Professor of Weed Science. His research focused particularly on optimizing weed management practices to maintain farm productivity while improving surface water protection and management, and development of Best Management Practices for protection of surface waters from pesticides. Because of his developmental efforts in applying spatial technologies to these research areas, MSU appointed Dr. Shaw as the first Director of the Remote Sensing Technologies Center in 1998. More recently, Dr. Shaw has focused on developing applications of spatial technologies in site-specific agriculture and in assessing natural resources. He and his Institute currently work with numerous federal agencies, including NASA, US DOT, USGS, NOAA, DoD, and NSF.
Dr. Shaw has served as the chair of the Operations Board for the High Performance Computing Collaoboratory (HPC˛) since its inception in 2003. The HPC˛, an evolution of the MSU NSF Engineering Research Center for Computational Field Simulation, is a coalition of member centers and groups that share a common core objective of advancing the state-of-the-art in computational science and engineering using high performance computing.
Honors and awards include MSU's highest distinction as a Giles Distinguished Professor in 1998, the Ralph E. Powe Research Award (MSU's highest recognition for research) in 2000, election as a Fellow in the Weed Science Society of America in 2002, the Outstanding Alumnus Award from Cameron University in 1999, and the Grantsmanship Award from the Mississippi Agricultural and Forestry Experiment Station in 1997. He is currently President-Elect of the Weed Science Society of America, and is also MSU's representative on the Council on Ocean Leadership.
Dr. Shaw was recently selected as the Director of the Northern Gulf Institute, the newest NOAA Cooperative Institute, a collaboration led by Mississippi State University, partnering with the University of Southern Mississippi, Louisiana State University, Florida State University and the Dauphin Island Sea Lab. The NGI's primary goal is to develop a research and transition program that fills priority gaps or reduces limitations in current awareness, understanding and decision support between upland-watershed systems, and coastal waters, habitats, resources and hazards.
