Past Event: Oden Institute Seminar

LLNL’s Center for Applied Scientific Computing: Pushing the Envelope in HPC for Over 25 years

Jeff Hittinger, Director, Center for Applied Scientific Computing, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Abstract

The Center for Applied Scientific Computing (CASC) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) celebrated its 25th anniversary in 2021.  Over this quarter century, CASC researchers have been leaders in the application of High Performance Computing (HPC) to challenging problems in LLNL’s science and security mission.  This presentation will provide an overview of current research activities in CASC, connecting them back to the history and purpose of the organization as well as discussing the new opportunities ahead in scientific computing.  In addition, CASC’s role in the recent ground-breaking fusion ignition shot on 5 December 2022 at LLNL’s National Ignition Facility (NIF) will be highlighted along with an overview of how this result was achieved. 

Biography

Dr. Jeffrey A. F. Hittinger is the Director of the Center for Applied Scientific Computing (CASC) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), the nexus of research in computational mathematics, computer science, and data science in the Computation Directorate, and is LLNL’s Point of Contact for the US Department of Energy (DOE) Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR) program.  In his technical career, he has primarily focused on applying advanced discretization methods and techniques to plasma physics simulations. Dr. Hittinger has worked on and led projects developing new high-order finite volume methods, including adaptive mesh refinement on mapped, multi-block grids; resilient high-operational intensity discretization techniques for next generation HPC systems; and variable precision computing. He also has developed methods for a posteriori error estimation for calculation verification. His research interests include computational plasma physics, computational fluid dynamics, kinetic simulation, multi-physics coupling and parallel computing. Dr. Hittinger has served on numerous internal and external committees, including co-chair of the US Exascale Mathematics working group and co-chair of the SIAM Computational Science and Engineering conference in 2019.

Dr. Hittinger earned his Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering and Scientific Computing from the University of Michigan in 2000. He also holds a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Lehigh University and an M.S. in Applied Mathematics and an M.S.E. in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Michigan. He joined CASC as a postdoctoral researcher in October 2000 and became a member of the technical staff in April 2002.