Professor Paul Woodward, LCSE and Astronomy, spoke at the October 2005 UNITE conference in Minneapolis

Unite is an organization run by and for the users of Unisys systems. It primarily serves the North American Unisys user community, but also includes international members.

Professor Woodward’s UNITE abstract

Exploiting the ES7000 for Galactic Scalability
Dr. Paul Woodward, Professor of Astronomy
University of Minnesota

Abstract
ES7000 systems have been particularly attractive to customers addressing business needs requiring significant "scale up" solutions. Those challenges also exist in the scientific community, where simulating turbulent fluid flows in stars or in the earth~Rs atmosphere are jobs too big for smaller systems and relatively small memories. Dr. Paul Woodward, Director of the University of Minnesota~Rs Laboratory for Computational Science and Engineering, a part of the University~Rs Digital Technology Center, addresses these types of large scientific computing problems using Windows on his laboratory’s ES7000 day in, day out. The presentation will describe techniques used to achieve near-linear scaling across a 16 Itanium processor ES7000 partition in the solution of scientific simulations on very fine grids requiring massive amounts of computing power. The potential applicability of similar scaling techniques in the solution of other highly scalable computing problems, potentially for your business, will also be examined. Short movie segments extracted from visualizations of some of the resulting simulation studies will be shown (e.g. the development of turbulent shear and mixing gaseous layers).

Speaker Information
Dr. Paul Woodward, Professor of Astronomy at the University of Minnesota, is a Fellow of the Minnesota Supercomputer Institute and Director of the University of Minnesota’s Laboratory for Computational Science and Engineering within the University’s Digital Technology Center.

Dr. Woodward received a B.A. in Mathematics and Physics from Cornell University in 1967 and a Ph.D. in Physics from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1973. He worked for many years at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory before taking, in 1985, his present position as Professor of Astronomy at the University of Minnesota. From the days of his earliest work at Livermore, Woodward has been fortunate to have access to some of the most powerful computers available. In recent years this aspect of his work has led to the development of strategies and techniques for parallel computation on large computing systems, including, most recently, Unisys ES7000 shared memory multiprocessors. Professor Woodward’s research with these systems has focused on the exploration of nonlinear phenomena in fluid dynamics through large-scale computer simulations on grids of up to a billion cells. To make the results of these experiments more easily understandable, Woodward has led the development of powerful scientific visualization systems and software for the extremely large data sets which his numerical experiments have produced.