SCG Members

		Julian Borrill, Member Phone: (510) 486-7308, Fax: (510) 486-5812 Julian is a computational cosmologist, specifically interested in the generation and evolution of primordial perturbations in the very early universe. He is currently working on the development of parallel algorithms for the analysis of the increasingly intractable cosmic microwave background datasets expected over the next 10 years from the BOOMERANG and MAXIMA balloons and the MAP and PLANCK satellites. He has previously worked at Dartmouth College and Imperial College, London. He holds an M.A. in mathematics and political science from the University of Cambridge, an M.Sc. in Astrophysics from the University of London, an M.Sc. in Computer Science also from the University of London, and a D.Phil. in Physics from the University of Sussex.
		Andrew Canning, Member Phone: (510) 486-2962, Fax: (510) 486-5812 Andrew works on the programming and algorithmic developments necessary to run codes on parallel machines, specializing in materials science applications. Along with a team of colloborating scientists at Oak Ridge National Lab, Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, and the University of Bristol (UK), Andrew won the 1998 Gordon Bell Prize for the fastest parallel application, which modeled 1,024 atoms of a metallic magnet. Although the team won for their 657 Gigaflop/s performance level, they subsequently were able to run the application at more than one Teraflop/s. Andrew has a B.S. in theoretical physics and astronomy from the University of Glasgow and a Ph.D. in statistical physics from the University of Edinburgh. For three years he was an employee of Cray Research in Lausanne, Switzerland, developing parallel codes and algorithms for materials science applications on the Cray T3D parallel computer.
		Denis Demchenko, Postdoctoral Researcher Phone: (510) 495-2990, Fax: (510) 486-5812
		Jim Demmel, Member Phone: (510) 486-8662, Fax: (510) 495-2998 Jim received his B.S. in mathematics from Caltech in 1975 and his Ph.D. in computer science from UC Berkeley in 1983. After spending six years on the faculty of the Courant Institute, New York University, he joined the Computer Science Division and Mathematics Department at Berkeley. He has received numerous awards, including the J. H. Wilkinson Prize in Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing (1993) and the SIAG on Linear Algebra Prize (1991 [with W. Kahan] and 1988). Jim is one of the co-authors of the LAPACK Users' Guide.
		Chris Cantalupo, Member Phone: (510) 495-2967, Fax: (510) 486-5812 Chris works on astrophysical data reduction problems; in particular, he works on the analysis of Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) data sets. This research is being fully funded by NASA's Planck Surveyor U.S. Data Analysis project. The CMB data set that will be acquired by the Planck satellite will be massive. The analysis of this data set will require the implementation and development of efficient parallel algorithms. In addition to this code development, Chris is involved in the simulation of Planck data, and the reduction of these simulations in order to test existing codes, reveal the effect of systematic errors and hone the telescope's observing strategy.
		Chris H. Q. Ding, Member Phone: (510) 486-6901, Fax: (510) 486-5812 Chris works on high performance computing algorithm R&D for climate models, and (co)developed vacancy tracking algorithm for array remapping, MPH for integrating multiple components, ZioLib for parallel data I/O. He also works on Bioinformatics: protein fold recognition, protein complex prediction, RNA structure, DNA gene expression analysis, using spectral clustering, principal components, machine learning and statistics. He obtained a Ph.D. from Columbia on building a parallel processor, worked on hypercubes at Caltech and climate data assimilation at JPL before joining LBL in 1996. The lighter side: Fascinated by information retrieval from the Web, he and collaborators proved via closed-form solutions that the ranking of webpages from PageRank (Google) and HITS (IBM) are equivalent to ranking by indegree (# of inbound hyperlinks) assuming the web is a fixed-degree-sequence random graph.
		Tony Drummond, Member Phone: (510) 486-7624, Fax: (510) 486-5812 Tony is working on scientific applications that could potentially benefit from the use of the ACTS Toolkit, supporting the tools installed in the NERSC HPC computers, promoting interoperability of the tools, and marketing them to researchers at DOE labs and universities. Tony spent five years as a postdoc and research assistant at the UCLA Department of Atmospheric Science, optimizing numerical models of the atmosphere. He received his M.S. in Computer Sciences from the University of Tulsa and his Ph.D. in Computer Sciences from the National Polytechnical Institute of Toulouse, France.
		Ming Gu, Member Phone: (510) 495-2851, Fax: (510) 486-5812 Ming is Associate Professor of Mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests include numerical linear algebra, adaptive filtering, system and control theory, and optimization. Ming has received an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, the SIAM Activity Group on Linear Algebra Prize, the NSF CAREER Award, and the Householder Award. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Yale University.
		Parry Husbands, Member Phone: (510) 486-4378, Fax: (510) 486-5812
		Byounghak Lee, Postdoctoral Researcher Phone: (510) 495-2962, Fax: (510) 486-5812
		Xiaoye (Sherry) Li, Member Phone: (510) 486-6684, Fax: (510) 486-5812 Sherry provides support for mathematical libraries on the parallel machines at NERSC. Her current research interests are in design and performance evaluation of numerical algorithms for various high performance architectures. She has diverse experience working in several areas, including parallel computing, sparse linear algebra, combinatorial algorithms, and floating-point arithmetic. Her software development credits include SuperLU and SuperLU_MT, XBLAS, CLAPACK, and ieee_except. Sherry received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from UC Berkeley.
		Osni Marques, Member Phone: (510) 486-5290, Fax: (510) 486-5812 Osni's interests are numerical linear algebra, scientific computation and parallel computing. He collaborates with the Lawrence Berkeley Lab Earth Sciences Division on applications that require the solution of large inverse problems; and also with the UC Berkeley Computer Sciences Division in the study and implementation of algorithms for the solution of problems in numerical linear algebra, in the framework of the LAPACK and ScaLAPACK libraries. He developed several numerical software packages for the solution of sparse eigenvalue problems and sparse linear direct solvers for 2D finite element problems. Before joining LBNL, Osni worked for four years at CERFACS, in Toulouse, France. He holds a Ph.D. in Structural Engineering from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
		Esmond Ng, Group Leader Phone: (510) 495-2851, Fax: (510) 486-5812 Esmond Ng, Group Leader of the Scientific Computing Group, has been involved in the development and implementation of sparse matrix algorithms since 1979, and has been involved in R&D management in scientific computing since 1995. He became one of the co-authors of the well-known sparse matrix package, SPARSPAK, when he was a graduate student at the University of Waterloo. At ORNL, Esmond was one of the first researchers to develop and implement efficient algorithms for sparse matrix computation on parallel computer architectures. He and a colleague, Dr. Barry W. Peyton, worked on sparse matrix algorithms that are specifically designed for computers that have memory hierarchy. Some of the sparse matrix codes they developed have been incorporated into the scientific computing libraries of several computer vendors, as well as in Matlab. Esmond earned his bachelor's, master's, and Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of Waterloo in Canada.
		Peter Nugent, Member Phone: (510) 486-6942, Fax: (510) 486-5812 Peter joined LBNL after four years as a post-doc in the Lab's Physics Division to help strengthen the computational astrophysics activity at LBNL. Peter worked with Saul Perlmutter's Supernova Cosmology Project and used NERSC's Cray T3E and IBM SP supercomputers to perform thousands of supernova simulations. As the theorist in Saul's group, Peter conducted "spectrum synthesis," starting with a theory of an exploding supernova to create a theoretical spectrum and then compare that model with observed data. The goal of the work is to make supernovae a better tool for cosmology. Peter earned his Ph.D. in physics, with a concentration in astronomy, from the University of Oklahoma.
		Ali Pinar, Member Phone: (510) 495-2997, Fax: (510) 486-5812 Ali's research interests are combinatorial scientific computing--the boundary between scientific computing and combinatorial algorithms-- and high performance computing. received his B.S. and M.S. degrees in computer science from Bilkent University, Turkey, and his PhD degree in Computer Science with the option of Computational Science and Engineering from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. During his PhD studies he frequently visited Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico, which had a significant influence on his education and research.
		Joshua Schrier, Postdoctoral Researcher Phone: (510) 486-4735, Fax: (510) 486-5812
		Christof Voemel, Postdoctoral Researcher Phone: (510) 486-7691, Fax: (510) 486-5812
		Lin-Wang Wang, Member Phone: (510) 486-5571, Fax: (510) 486-5812 Lin-Wang earned his Ph.D. in Theoretical Solid State Physics at Cornell University. His research interests include large-scale total energy calculations for material simulations, nanoscale electronic structure calculations, alternatives to local-density approximation methods, and software applications. See Lin-Wang's talk on Concepts on Math Problems in Electronic Structure Calculations.
		Michael Wehner, Member Phone: (510) 495-2851, Fax: (510) 486-6363 Michael is working on a project funded by the DOE Office of Biological and Environmental Research. His primary duties are to maintain and support state-of-the-art climate models on the NERSC facilities, and to coordinate climate modeling activities among NERSC users. His research interests are ensemble climate simulation, dynamical cores of general circulation models, coupled atmospheric oceanic general circulation models, and computational physics on massively parallel processors. Michael received a B.S. in physics from the University of Delaware and an M.S. and Ph.D. in nuclear engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has been involved in climate modeling since 1991.
		Chao Yang, Member Phone: (510) 486-5008, Fax: (510) 486-5812 Chao Yang received his Ph.D. in Computational Science and Engineering from Rice University. He previously worked at NEC Systems Laboratory and at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where he was the recipient of the 1999 Alston Householder Postdoctoral Fellowship.
		Zhengji Zhao, Postdoctoral Researcher Phone: (510) 495-2540, Fax: (510) 486-5812 Zhengji Zhao is currently working with Dr. Juan Meza on the application of numerical optimization techniques to computational nanosciences. She earned her PhD in computational physics at New York University; her MS Degree in computer science at Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences of New York University.

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