High Performance Grid Computing: Case Studies and Applications
Live Q&A session will immediately follow

Technology and parallel processing have the potential to play significant roles in understanding our environment. The Earth’s biodiversity is immense: science is aware of several million living species, but there are many more that have not yet been identified. We are developing innovative methods to help solve a tricky problem: how many classes or species should we expect to find in a population, given incomplete information? Because it’s not practical to count every organism, researchers sample the population in a certain place and time. By chance, however, members of some species can be missed altogether. To compensate for this, statisticians look at and plot the number of times each species was seen and construct a graphical curve that can be extrapolated back to estimate how many species were observed zero times—that is, the ones completely missed by sampling. In most cases, we are working with populations that contain hundreds or thousands of different species. Some of them appear in the sample many times. Others, though, appear very infrequently. When researchers find that many species are seen only once, or very infrequently, the logic follows that there are other species the researchers didn’t see at all. Parallel processing uses many different computer processors to work on different parts of a problem simultaneously and is one way of increasing the speed at which computers can work, with each processor working on a part of a larger problem. Using the Cornell Theory Center’s parallel processing clusters, Bunge reduced processing time by more than a factor of four thus shortening the time to discovery.

Speaker:
Wolfgang Gentzsch, Ph.D.
Adjunct Professor Duke University Durham and University Charlotte, NC
Visiting Scientist Renaissance Computing Institute at UNC Chapel Hill
Director D-Grid and Open Grid Forum

Wolfgang Gentzsch is head of the German D-Grid Initiative. He also serves on the German Governments ICT2020 Council on Future Information and Communication Technologies for the year 2020. He is member of the standards Open Grid Forum Steering Committee, responsible for coordinating major grid projects around the world. He is Vice Chair of the CEC e-Infrastructure Reflection Group (e-IRG) which targets at building one e-Science infrastructure for Europe. He is adjunct professor of computer science at Duke University in Durham und in Charlotte, and visiting scientist at the Renaissance Computing Institute of the University of Chapel Hill. Wolfgang Gentzsch also serves on US’ President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST).