Scott Klasky

111 College Place

Syracuse University

Syracuse, New York, 13244-4100

Home: (315) 652-3133

Work: (315) 443-1690

Email: scott@npac.syr.edu

Research Interests

For the last nine years I have designed several major computer codes in the areas of physics, computer science, and numerical analysis. My main areas of expertise are in designing large-scale codes in the area of computational science, and designing visualization software to support these codes. I have lead teams of researchers to develop state-of-the-art computer codes in the area of high performance scientific computing/physics. I have expertise in solving large scale Partial Differential Equations (PDE's), particularly for numerical relativity, using state-of-the-art techniques (Adaptive Mesh Refinement) as well as in designing collaborative visualization tools, to be used over the Internet. I have worked with hyperbolic solutions to Einstein's equations, as well as write Multi-grid codes to help solve the Initial Value Problem of the “Binary Black Hole Grand Challenge Alliance”.

My latest interests are in designing a computational toolkit, which would allow researchers to develop numerical codes using “basic” toolkit components, and visualize the output from these codes in a user-friendly fashion. By allowing the infrastructure to be collaborative, I envision a system, which will allow researchers to effectively produce high-quality parallel code, in a much easier fashion than today's researchers develop these codes.

Experience

Senior Research Scientist

12/95 to present

NPAC, Syracuse University, Syracuse

Project Leader for five major computational research efforts:

• Scientific Data Visualization (http://kopernik.npac.syr.edu:8888/weather/). Project leader to develop a “state-of-the-art” visualization toolkit for computational researchers and students. This project has gained vast interest due to its usability, scalability, etc. This code is written in 100% Java and includes such features as collaborations, user-definable-filters, displaying 1D, 2D, 3D plots in a variety of modes. In addition users can animate graphs of all rank. Additional information can be found at the web site.

• SV2: Collaborative Scientific Visualization for Voluminous Data A follow on project to the Scientific Visualization project. The research done in this effort will focus on developing near-real-time collaborative scientific visualization for large-scale computing. A paper has just been submitted to Java for High Performance Network computing.

• Binary Black Hole Grand Challenge (http://www.npac.syr.edu/projects/bh/). Team leader of the “ADM team” to design accurate and stable three-dimensional black hole evolution codes. (http://www.npac.syr.edu/restricted/projects/bh/PROGRESS/CODES/ADM/adm.html ) Management duties include software engineering, code development, code testing and leadership of the effort.

• Rome Lab Weather Project (http://kopernik.npac.syr.edu:8888/weather/). Project leader of small team of graduate students to bring visualizations of current U.S. weather, and supercomputing forecasts using state-of-the-art web technologies. Developing a collaborative visualization system for multi-dimensional codes that will run over the Internet. Technologies involved in these codes include Java, VRML 2.0, collaboration tools (TANGO), weather forecasting service codes (Unidata’s LDM), etc.

• Financial modeling (http://terminator.npac.syr.edu:4761/Demo/history2.html/). Involved with a collaboration of business & academic collaborators to develop a Monte Carlo code to price options for multiple American underliers. Technologies involved with this project include: Monte Carlo simulations, Subterfuge, sampling historical data, and variance reduction techniques.

• Management and Supervision of graduate and undergraduate students: In the last 2 years at NPAC, I have supervised 3 undergraduates in the Research Experiences for Undergraduates in High Performance Computing at NPAC (http://www.npac.syr.edu/REU/). I have also supervised 1 Ph.D. student in physics, 1 Master’s student in Computer Science, and 1 Ph.D. student in Computer Science. In addition I have supervised 5 other graduate student projects since I have been at Syracuse.

Post Doctorate Fellowship
09/94 to 12/95

University of Texas, Austin

Designed several numerical tools for the solution of large-scale PDE’s including:

• A three-dimensional elliptic PDE solver for the initial value solution of the coalescence of two black holes. This code used state-of-the-art numerical techniques including: Multi Level Adaptive Techniques, Adaptive Mesh Refinement, Deferred Correction.

• General multi-dimensional interpolation schemes, for use on parallel and vector machines.

• Lead an effort to start the Texas black hole evolution group.

• Lead the design effort for multigrid support in the Distributed Adaptive Grid Hierarchy effort. Developed several efficient, parallel codes for this effort.

Research Associate
06/94 to 09/94

Center for Relativity, University of Texas, Austin

• Designed a large scale PDE elliptic solver for the initial value problem for general relativity.

Research Associate
09/89 to 06/94

Center for High Performance Computing, University of Texas, Austin

Worked on visualizations for medical imaging including:

• Designed visualization techniques to show MRI’s and CAT scans in three dimensions.

• Implemented a visualization technique to map from an abstract mathematical model, to the human body to display the spread of head and neck cancer.

Junior Physicist
1987,1988

Plasma Physics Laboratory, Diagnostics Division, Princeton University

• Designed a large-scale computer system for the diagnostic spectroscopy group working on plasma physics, which is still in use today. Large portion of the coding went into the reliability and reusability of this code.

Junior Engineer
1986

Dyna East Corporation, Philadelphia PA

Worked on a two-dimensional finite-element code to help design non-nuclear warheads. Major effort went into design of boundary conditions to help stabilize the existing codes.

Education

Ph.D., Physics
1994

University of Texas, Austin (Supervisor: Dr. Richard Matzner)

B.S., Physics
1989

Drexel University, Philadelphia

Computer Experience

Hardware

• Silicon Graphics, Cray (C90, T90, T3D, T3E, J90, YMP, Origin 2000), Sun, IBM SP2, Dec. Alpha clusters, VAX, Intel IPSC, IBM RS6000, IBM PC with Windows NT, Windows 95, Linux, Apple Macintosh.

Software Languages

• Fortran 77, Fortran 90, C, C++, Java, Perl, Maple, GL, Dore, SGI’s explorer, AVS, VRML, MPI, HPF.

Honors and Awards

Phi Beta Kappa Honors Society
1991

University of Texas, Austin

Senior Honorable Mention
1989

Drexel University, Philadelphia

Member and President of Sigma Pi Sigma, Physics Honor Society

Drexel University, Philadelphia

Proposals

Principal Investigator

WebFlow: A Visual Problem Solving Environment for Wide-Area, Heterogeneous, Distributed High Performance Computing. A proposal to the National Science Foundation: New Technologies Program, June 14, 1996. With G. Fox, W. Furmanski, T. Haupt, S. Klasky, M. Chen, J. Cowie, J. Browne, M. Parashar.

DCPL: High Level Descriptor-driven Integration of Prototyping, Communication, and Large Parallel Linear Solvers for Learning and for Simulation of Physical Systems. A KDI proposal to the National Science Foundation, May 1998. With M. Choptuik, G. Fox, R. Matzner, R. van de Geijn.

Co-Investigator on several funded Cray grants.

Recent Publications

• “Gravitational Wave Extraction and Outer Boundary Conditions by Perturbative Matching”, with A. Abrahams et al., Phy Rev Lett., Vol 80, Issue 9, pp 1812-1816 (1998).

• “Java based Collaborative Scientific Visualization" (w/ B. Ki), Concurrency: Practice and Experience, accepted 1998.

• “Boosted 3-dimensional Black-Hole Evolutions with Singularity Excision”, w/ G.B. Cook et al., Phys. Rev Lett, Vol 80, Number 12 (1998).

• “Schwarzschild-Perturbative gravitational wave extraction and outer boundary conditions (w./ Abrahams et. Al.), submitted to Phys. Rev. Letters 1997.

• “Stable Characteristic Evolution of Generic Three-Dimensional Single-Black-Hole Spacetimes”, with Gomez et al., Phys Rev Lett. Vol 80, Number 18, pp. 3915-3918 (1998).

• “The Binary Black Hole Grand Challenge ADM code”, (w/ Huq et. Al.) submitted to Phys. Rev. D, 1997.

• “Collaborative Scientific Visualization” (w/ B. Ki) Concurrency: Practice and Experience, November 1997.

• “Multigrid- An Approach in HPF” (w/ U. Dittmer)

• “Multigrid support with the DAGH package: Specifications and Applications” (w/ M. Choptuik et al.), Site report, 1995.

• “A Technique for Tracking Apparent Horizons,” (w/ M. Huq et al.), Site Report 1996.

• “A Parallel Implementation of Multi-Grid in one dimension” (w/ R. Guenther), (Site report, 1994).

• “Visualizing Complex Patterns in the Spread of Head and Neck Cancers,” (w/ L. Gray et al.), The International Journal of Supercomputer Applications 7, 167 (1993).

• “Three-dimensional initial data for the collision of two black holes,” (w/ G. Cook et al.), Physical Review D47, 1471 (1993).

• “Properties of gravitational “solitons” “, (w/ J. Centrella et al.), Physical Review D43, 379 (1991).

Recent Invited Talks
1995-1997

I have given over 30 talks over the last 3 years, including:

• “SV2: A collaborative Scientific Visualization framework”, University of Texas, Austin, Binary Black Hole Grand Challenge, 1998.

• “10 Easy? Steps to Model a black Hole”, Syracuse University Physics Colloquium, 1998.

• “New Features and enhancements in Scivis”, Los Alamos BBH Grand Challenge meeting, 1997.

• “Evaluating Java for the use of scientific data visualization”, ACM 1998 Workshop on Java for high performance computing, 1998.

• “An Overview of the binary black hole grand challenge effort”, Syracuse Astronomical Society, 1997.

• “NPAC’s Scientific Visualization System (Scivis), Supercomputing 1997.

• “NPAC’s Scientific Visualization System (Scivis), NAVO, 1997.

• “NPAC’s Scientific Visualization System (Scivis), University of Southern Mississippi, 1997.

• “An overview of Scivis”, ACM 1997 Workshop on Java for Science and Engineering Computation June 21-97 PPoPP Las Vegas, 1997.

• “Current Status Report on the ADM code in the Binary Black Hole Grand Challenge Effort”, Los Alamos Workshop, 1997.

• “Stability Problems in the ADM code”, Penn State University, 1997.

• “An Overview of NPAC’s Scivis System”, Penn State University, 1997.

• “Status and Future of 3D codes”, Syracuse University, 1996.

• “Computational resource requirements”, Syracuse University, 1996.

• “Current Status Report of the ADM Code in the Binary Black Hole Grand Challenge Effort”, Syracuse University, 1996.

• “Syracuse & Texas effort on the collaborative hyperbolic ADM code”, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 1996.

• “TX’s large scale black hole evolution code, imposing outer boundary conditions”, University of Pittsburgh, 1996.

• “The Initial value problem of General Relativity, numerical solutions”, Syracuse University, 1996.

• “Advanced Computational Techniques in numerical relativity”, University of Texas @Austin, 1995.

• “High accuracy Interpolators”, University of Texas @Austin, 1995.

• “DAGH toolkit wish-list”, University of Texas @Austin, 1995.

Ph.D. Supervisor

• Richard A. Matzner, University of Texas at Austin.

References

• Richard A. Matzner, University of Texas at Austin. (512-471-5062), richard@ricci.ph.utexas.edu

• Matthew W. Choptuik, University of Texas at Austin. (matt@newton.ph.utexas.edu) (512-471-1541)

• Ed Seidel, Max Planck Institute, e (+49-331-27537-13)