The Confluence of Traditional Scientific Disciplines with
Heterogeneous Computing
Live Q&A session will immediately follow

The current National Science Foundation solicitation for a leadership class computing system lists 34 exemplary research challenges for high performance computing. These challenges are noteworthy for how many involve more than one scientific discipline and will require heterogeneous computing; i.e., simulations spanning multiple time and length scales, linking of data-intensive and compute-intensive computational tasks, and multi-modal analysis of large complex data sets. I will discuss the implications of this disciplinary and computational heterogeneity for hardware and software design, and for the development and utilization of human capital, using problems posed by molecular biology and nanotechnology as examples.

Speaker:
Eric Jakobsson, Ph.D.
Professor, Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Director, National Center for the Design of Biomimetic Nanoconductors
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign


Eric Jakobsson, Ph.D., served as Director of the NIGMS Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology at the National Institutes of Health. He has since returned to his professorial position at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His laboratory does theoretical and computational studies that are designed to elucidate the physical and organizational bases of biological function, with special emphasis on the function of biological membranes. In recent work, he has studied structure-function relationships governing permeation in ion channels, the bases of molecular organization in lipid bilayer membranes, and the functional organization of epithelial membranes.