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[Colloquium] High Performance Computing and Informatics

October 22, 2010

Watch Colloquium: 

M4V file (581 MB)


  • Date: Friday, October 22, 2010 
  • Time: 12noon — 12:50 pm 
  • Place: Centennial Engineering Center, Room 1041

Ron A. Oldfield
Ron A. Oldfield Senior Member Technical Staff Scalable System Software Sandia National Laboratories

Parallel supercomputing platforms have traditionally been used to address complex scientific problems; however, the recent interest in informatics problems, especially related to cyber security and social networking, has motivated the inFormatics community to consider HPC platforms as a viable platform for informatics problems. In this talk, I will discuss some of the challenges associated with deploying informatics codes on capability-class supercomputers, and I will present results from two separate efforts at Sandia: porting a large-scale multilingual document clustering application to Cray XT systems, and development of a hybrid Cray/Netezza platform for fast access to data-warehouse appliances from parallel HPC codes.

Bio: Ron A. Oldfield is a senior member of the technical staff at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, NM. He received the B.Sc. in computer science from the University of New Mexico in 1993. From 1993 to 1997, he worked in the computational sciences department of Sandia National Laboratories, where he specialized in seismic research and parallel I/O. He was the primary developer for the GONII-SSD (Gas and Oil National Information Infrastructure–Synthetic Seismic Dateataset) project and a co-developer for the R&D 100 award winning project “Systemsalvo”, a project to develop a 3D finite-difference prestack-depth migration algorithm for massively parallel architectures. From 1997 to 2003 he attended graduate school at Dartmouth college and received his Ph.D. in June, 2003. In September of 2003, he returned to Sandia to work in the Scalable Computing Systems department. He currently leads the Lightweight File System project and the testing and integration effort of the SciDAC Scalable Systems System Software project. His research interests include parallel and distributed computing, parallel I/O, and mobile computing.