Lab Hosts 85 Researchers at Fifth Bay Area Scientific Computing Day

Eighty-five researchers in computational science and engineering turned out for the Fifth Bay Area Scientific Computing Day held Saturday, March 13, at Berkeley Lab. The meeting is an informal gathering to encourage the interaction and collaboration of researchers in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Rob Schreiber (left) of HP and Alan Laub of DOE and UC Davis relax during the lunch break.

The annual event provides a venue for junior researchers to present their work to the local community, and for the Bay Area scientific computing and computational science communities to exchange views on today's multidisciplinary computational challenges and state-of-the-art developments. The program include technical talks, a roundtable discussion and poster presentations.

Among those attending was Alan Laub, head of DOE’s Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing and former dean of Engineering at UC Davis, who called the meeting “very valuable.”

John Tamaresis of UC Davis, who presented a poster during the program, said he found the event very worthwhile.

“The scientists assembled here today represent teams of people from three major fields - math, computer science and applications,” Laub said. “People from different fields have the opportunity to get together and learn ideas from each other, all on a local scale. It's great listening to the young people in the various fields because you realize that these are the scientists of the future.”

John Tamaresis, a math student at UC Davis who presented a poster, said the event had much to recommend it, including “the variety and quality of the presentations and posters, Phil Colella's enthusiasm for the subject of my poster, a lively discussion about training computational scientists, and deep insights offered to me by Professor Kahan of UC Berkeley.”

The attendees came from industry, research labs and universities. Those represented include Hewlett Packard, Polymath Research Inc., Visual Numerics, LBNL, LLNL, NASA Ames Research Center, Sandia National Laboratories, Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, UC Berkeley, UC Davis, University of San Francisco, UC San Francisco, San Francisco State University, Stanford University, Sonoma State University, Santa Clara University, San Jose State University and St. Mary's College.

The event was organized by Tony Drummond, Parry Husbands, Sherry Li and Osni Marques of the Scientific Computing Group in the Computational Research Division.