GADA'06 Keynote speaker

Daniel S. Katz
Louisiana State University and Jet Propulsion Laboratory

http://www.cct.lsu.edu/~dsk/

Data-Oriented Distributed Computing for Science: Reality and Possibilities

Keynote slides

Abstract

As is becoming commonly known, there is an explosion happening in the amount of scientific data that is publicly available. One challenge is how to make productive use of this data. This talk will discuss some parallel and distributed computing projects, centered around virtual astronomy, but also including other scientific data-oriented realms. It will look at some specific projects from the past, including Montage ( http://montage.ipac.caltech.edu/), Grist ( http://grist.caltech.edu/, OurOcean ( http://OurOcean.jpl.nasa.gov/), and SCOOP ( http://scoop.sura.org/), and will discuss the distributed computing, Grid, and Web-service technologies that have successfully been used in these projects.

Speaker Bio

Daniel S. Katz joined Louisiana State University (LSU) in May 2006 as the Assistant Director for Scientific Computing Systems and Software at the Center for Computation & Technology (CCT), and as an Associate Research Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department.  He is also a Principal Member of the Information Systems and Computer Sciences staff at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), California Institute of Technology. Previous roles at JPL, which he joined in 1996, include: Supervisor of the Parallel Applications Technologies group, Area Program Manager of High End Computing in the Space Mission Information Technology Office, and Applications Project Element Manager for the Remote Exploration and Experimentation (REE) Project. From 1993 to 1996 he was employed by Cray Research (and later by Silicon Graphics) as a Computational Scientist on-site at JPL and Caltech, specializing in parallel implementation of computational electromagnetic algorithms.

His research interests include: numerical methods, algorithms, and programming applied to parallel, distributed, and embedded computing, and fault-tolerant computing. He received his B.S., M.S., and Ph.D degrees in Electrical Engineering from Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, in 1988, 1990, and 1994, respectively. His work is documented in numerous book chapters, journal and conference publications, and NASA Tech Briefs. He is a senior member of the IEEE, designed and maintained the original website for the IEEE Antenna and Propagation Society, and serves on the IEEE Technical Committee on Scalable Computing's Executive Committee, the IEEE Technical Committee on Parallel Processing's Executive Committee, and the steering committee for the IEEE Cluster and IEEE Grid conferences.