SC24 Invited Talks to Spotlight HPC’s Role in AI, Quantum Computing, and Sustainability
ATLANTA, Nov. 7, 2024 — As the high-performance computing (HPC) community gathers in Atlanta for SC24, the world’s largest HPC conference, the event will feature presentations from thought leaders and experts in advanced computing. These discussions will delve into HPC’s impact across science and industry, highlighting fields such as artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and sustainability.
SC24 is set to welcome a diverse range of scientific professionals, each addressing critical and timely topics. Key presentations will explore HPC’s social and societal contributions, including its role in studying chemical processes in living organisms, ensuring AI safety, and advancing robotics.
The SC24 team encourages all attendees with a Technical Program badge to see these talks by distinguished speakers and learn about the exciting and unconventional ways that HPC is creating opportunities for scientific breakthroughs.
All Invited Talks take place in Building A, Level 1, A3, which is on the bottom floor of the convention center.
Tuesday, November 19, 2024
NATIONAL EFFORTS IN HPC
10:30 am–11:15 am EST -- Unlocking the Potential of AI Across America
Tess DeBlanc-Knowles
National Science Foundation (NSF)
Tess DeBlanc-Knowles serves as Special Assistant to the Director for Artificial Intelligence at the National Science Foundation (NSF), where she oversees NSF’s implementation of the Executive Order on the Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence and works across the agency to coordinate AI initiatives and AI policy. In addition, she holds the position of Strategic Advisor for Technology Policy and Strategy within NSF’s Directorate for Technology, Innovation and Partnerships.
Prior to stepping into these roles, Tess spent two years as a senior policy advisor within the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). While at OSTP, she led policy efforts focused on strengthening the nation’s AI innovation ecosystem and co-chaired the National AI Research Resource Task Force. She also led the development of the National Strategy to Advance Privacy-Preserving Data Sharing and Analytics and the National AI Research and Development Strategic Plan: 2023 Update.
Before joining NSF, Tess served as Director for Research and Analysis at the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence (NSCAI). She also spent time as Chief of Staff at the Atlantic Council, at U.S. Special Operations Command, and in the Office of the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction.
11:15 am–12 pm EST -- Computing Research Visioning, Grand Challenges, and Quad Papers
Mary Lou Maher
Computing Research Association
Mary Lou Maher is the director of the Computing Community Consortium at the Computing Research Association (CRA). In this role she directs and manages computing research visioning activities, evaluation, and communications through the participation of the CCC Council and broader computing research community. She gained her research experience as a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Sydney, the University of Maryland, and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. She served as a program director at NSF in the Division of Information and Intelligent Systems. Her research areas include artificial intelligence, human centered computing, HCI, CS education, and AI literacy. She is the author of over 300 publications with an h-index of 62 and 14,000 citations.
INDUSTRIES BENEFITTING FROM HPC
1:30 pm–2:15 pm EST -- Advancing MOD/SIM/HPC Technologies in Industry to Deliver Outcomes
David Kepczynski
Ford Motor Company
David Kepczynski is the Global Chief of Digital Transformation for Product Development at Ford Motor Company. Prior to Ford, David spent 10 years with General Electric, most recently as the Divisional Chief Information Officer for Corporate Digital Technologies and Research, where his teams developed and scaled advanced computing and digital technologies for businesses in healthcare, energy, and aerospace. Before General Electric, he spent more than 20 years with General Motors, leading teams in global digital engineering systems, product development, operations, and manufacturing engineering. He co-chaired the U.S. Department of Energy’s Exascale Computing Project Industry and Agency Council and chaired the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics Digital Engineering Integration Committee. David is an advisor on Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s Technology Board.
2:15 pm–3 pm EST -- Extensions to Exascale Codes to Accelerate Fusion Energy Research
Sean Dettrick
TAE Technologies
Sean Dettrick has developed HPC simulations of fusion plasmas on a litany of now obsolete HPC systems and, having learned his lesson, now prefers to use high-level, open-source libraries and frameworks to develop hardware-agnostic solutions. While working in private industry he has been connected to Department of Energy leadership computing as lead principal investigator on INCITE and ALCC program awards and as a technical representative to the Exascale Computing Project. Sean received a PhD in theoretical physics from Australian National University and worked at the Japan Atomic Energy Research Institute and the University of California, Irvine before joining a VC-funded fusion plasma company, TAE Technologies, where he now acts as Director of Computational Sciences.
Wednesday, November 20, 2024
NON-TRADITIONAL APPLICATIONS OF HPC
10:30 am–11:15 am EST -- How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Data Deluge
Jana Thayer
SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory
Dr. Jana Thayer is the division director for the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) Data Systems at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, responsible for data acquisition, data management, and data analysis for the LCLS facility and development of the next generation data system to support the LCLS-II upgrade. She is the principal investigator for the Intelligent Learning for Light Source and Neutron Source User Measurements Including Navigation and Experiment Steering (ILLUMINE) project which facilitates rapid data analysis and autonomous experiment steering capabilities to support cutting-edge research tightly coupling high-throughput experiments, advanced computing architectures, and novel AI/ML algorithms to significantly reduce the time to science at the light and neutron sources. Jana started at SLAC in 2004, working on the Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope and leading the Large Area Telescope Flight Software Team from 2006 to 2009. Jana has a PhD in elementary particle physics from The Ohio State University and has long nurtured an interest in data acquisition systems and high-performance software in the fields of HEP, astrophysics, and photon science.
11:15 am–12 pm EST -- Pathway to Generalist Robot Autonomy — A Data-Centric Approach
Yuke Zhu
University of Texas at Austin
Yuke Zhu is an assistant professor in the Computer Science Department of the University of Texas at Austin, where he directs the Robot Perception and Learning (RPL) Lab. He is a core faculty member at Texas Robotics, the Machine Learning Laboratory, and the Center for Perceptual Systems. He also co-leads the Generalist Embodied Agent Research (GEAR) Lab at NVIDIA Research, which builds foundation models for embodied agents in virtual and physical worlds, particularly for humanoid robots.
Yuke focuses on developing intelligent algorithms for generalist robots and embodied agents to reason about and interact with the real world. His research spans robotics, computer vision, and machine learning. He received his master’s degree and PhD from Stanford University. His work has won various awards and nominations, including the Best Conference Paper Award at ICRA 2019 and 2024, the Outstanding Learning Paper Award at ICRA 2022, and the Outstanding Paper Award at NeurIPS 2022. He has received the NSF CAREER Award and faculty awards from Amazon, JP Morgan, and Sony Research.
QUANTUM COMPUTING
1:30 pm–2:15 pm EST -- Quantum Computers: The New Supercomputer Partition
Alba Cervera-Lierta
Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC)
Alba Cervera-Lierta is an established researcher at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC-CNS). She earned her PhD in quantum information in 2019 at the University of Barcelona, where she studied physics, and her MSc in particle physics. After her PhD, she moved to the University of Toronto as a postdoctoral fellow. Since October 2021, she has worked at the BSC-CNS and is the coordinator of the Quantum Spain project, an initiative of €22 million that involves 27 Spanish institutions to boost the quantum computing ecosystem by acquiring and operating a quantum computer at the BSC-CNS. Alba is also involved in the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking quantum computing infrastructures as the quantum technician responsible for one of the six sites selected to operate European quantum computers. Her research expertise focuses on near-term quantum computation, quantum algorithms and their applications, and artificial intelligence strategies in quantum physics.
2:15 pm–3 pm EST -- Quantum-Centric Supercomputing: A New Perspective on Computing
Jay Gambetta
IBM
Dr. Jay M. Gambetta is the vice president in charge of IBM’s overall Quantum initiative. He was named an IBM Fellow in 2018 for his leadership in advancing superconducting quantum computing and establishing IBM’s quantum strategy to bring quantum computing to the world, and to make the world quantum-safe.
Under his leadership, IBM was first to demonstrate a cloud-based quantum computing platform; a platform that has grown to become the predominant quantum service utilized by 600,000+ users to run over 3 trillion quantum circuits. These users include 280+ members of the IBM Quantum Network, representing forward-thinking academic, industry, and governmental organizations focused on building a quantum-native ecosystem. IBM Quantum continues to expand in the market by providing Quantum as a service utilizing the IBM Quantum System One and Two series of devices, and to date has deployed over 70 quantum systems online, building the foundations of the quantum industry. In addition, Gambetta was responsible for the creation and early development of Qiskit, the leading open-source quantum computing software development kit, which allows users to build, optimize, and execute quantum circuits on hardware from a multitude of quantum service providers.
Dr. Gambetta received his PhD in physics from Griffith University in Australia. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and IEEE, and has over 130 publications in the field of quantum information science with over 41,000 citations.
Thursday, November 21, 2024
HPC FOR SCIENCE & ENGINEERING
8:40 am–9:20 am EST -- HPC Advancing Science: Highlights 2024
Estela Suarez
SiPEARL
Estela Suarez is a senior principal solution architect at SiPEARL, a role she began in September 2024 while on sabbatical from her positions as joint lead of the Novel System Architecture Design division at the Jülich Supercomputing Centre, and associate professor of high performance computing at the University of Bonn. Her expertise is in HPC system architecture and co-design. As leader of the DEEP project series, Estela has driven the development of the Modular Supercomputing Architecture (MSA), including the implementation and validation of hardware, software and applications. In addition, she has been leading the co-design efforts within the European Processor Initiative since 2018. She holds a master’s degree in astrophysics from the Complutense University of Madrid (Spain) and a PhD in physics from the University of Geneva (Switzerland).
9:20 am–10 am EST -- The Digital Revolution of Earth System Modelling
Peter Dueben
European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF)
Peter Dueben is head of the Earth System Modelling Section at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), developing one of the world’s leading global weather forecast models: The Integrated Forecasting System (IFS). Peter is also an honorary professor at the University of Cologne. Previously, he was the AI and machine learning coordinator at ECMWF and recipient of the University Research Fellowship of the Royal Society, performing research towards the use of machine learning, high-performance computing, and reduced numerical precision in weather and climate simulations. Peter is also coordinator of the WeatherGenerator Horizon Europe project that aims to build a machine-learned foundation model for weather and climate applications, and has been the coordinator of the MAELSTROM EuroHPC Joint Undertaking project.
COMPUTER INDUSTRY INNOVATIONS IN HPC
10:30 am–11:15 am EST -- Herding Llamas: A Sneak Peek Into Meta’s Infrastructure for Generative AI
Pavan Balaji
Meta Platforms
Dr. Pavan Balaji is a Principal Research Scientist at Meta AI, where he serves as the technical lead for two areas: (1) GPU training systems (architectural design, performance analysis); and (2) AI communication libraries for our various hardware systems (GPUs, Meta internal silicon). Dr. Balaji helped build some of Meta’s largest AI supercomputing systems, such as the recent Grand Teton architecture, that power Meta’s internal AI workloads, including recommendation and ranking models and Generative AI models such as Llama.
Before joining Meta, Dr. Balaji held appointments as a Senior computer Scientist and Group Lead at the Argonne National Laboratory and as an Institute Fellow of the Northwestern-Argonne Institute of Science and Engineering at Northwestern University. He contributed to the design and software implementation of a number of projects on communication runtime systems (MPI, UCX), threading models (lightweight threads such as Argobots, OpenMP), and heterogeneous memory systems. Particularly noteworthy are the MPICH project (used by thousands of supercomputers around the world, including the three US Exascale supercomputers (Aurora, Frontier, and El Capitan), the UCX project (R&D100 award winner in 2019), and the Argobots project (R&D100 award finalist in 2020, and a driving piece of software for numerous supercomputers and commercial products such as Intel DAOS).
Dr. Balaji has held several other leadership roles in the community serving on the board of directors or advisory board for numerous domestic and International projects, including UCX (US), Cilkplus (US), EPEEC (Europe), and Exascale Technologies (China). He has also served on the organizing committee for numerous high-profile conferences and journals including IEEE/ACM SC (technical program chair), IEEE Cluster (general co-chair), IEEE/ACM CCGrid (general co-chair, program chair), and IEEE TPDS (associate editor-in-chief).
11:15 am–12 pm EST -- A Story of Sustainable Supercomputing and the Role of Art in HPC
Kirk Cameron
Virginia Tech
Dr. Kirk W. Cameron pioneered sustainable HPC. He is currently a professor and associate vice president of academic affairs at Virginia Tech. His open-source power and energy measurement toolkit, PowerPack (2003), has led to industry-leading benchmarking and his co-founding of the Green500 List and SPECpower. His venture-backed startup, MiserWare (2007–2014), commercialized the world’s most popular free energy management software (grano.la), with half a million users in 160+ countries. His award-winning art installations have appeared in numerous international venues, from Vancouver (SIGGRAPH) to New York City (New York Hall of Science) and, most recently, Washington, D.C. (Smithsonian National Museum of American History). In addition to earning NSF and DOE Career Awards, Dr. Cameron is an ACM Distinguished Scientist and an IEEE Fellow.
Source: Melyssa Fratkin, SC24
