Ian Foster of Argonne and UChicago to speak at U-M Integrated Computational Materials and Engineering seminar — June 24

ICME Seminar Series

Tuesday, June 24, 2014

3:00PM

2166 Dow

Networking Materials Data

Ian Foster

Argonne National Laboratory & The University of Chicago

Abstract: The US Materials Genome Initiative seeks to develop an infrastructure that will accelerate advanced materials development and deployment. The term Materials Genome suggests a science that is fundamentally driven by the systematic capture of large quantities of elemental data. In practice, we know, things are more complex—in materials as in biology. Nevertheless, the ability to locate and reuse data is often essential to research progress. I discuss here three aspects of networking materials data: data publication and discovery; linking instruments, computations, and people to enable new research modalities based on near-real-time processing; and organizing data generation, transformation, and analysis software to facilitate understanding and reuse. I use these three problems to motivate a discussion of recent results in cloud computing, data publication management, high-performance computing, and related topics. I also discuss activities within the Center for Hierarchical Materials Design (CHiMaD) and plans for a Materials Data Facility Pilot.

Biography: Ian Foster is the Arthur Holly Compton Distinguished Service Professor of Computer Science at the University of Chicago and an Argonne Distinguished Fellow at Argonne National Laboratory. He is also the Director of the Computation Institute, a joint unit of Argonne and the University. His research is concerned with the acceleration of discovery in a networked world. Dr. Foster is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Association for Computing Machinery, and the British Computer Society. Awards include the British Computer Society’s Lovelace Medal, honorary doctorates from the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, and CINVESTAV, Mexico, and the IEEE Tsutomu Kanai award.