Challenges and Opportunities in an Information Dominated Age for
Large-Scale Scientific Knowledge Discovery

Alok N. Choudhary
Northwestern University

Computational scientists must understand results from experimental,
observational and computational simulation generated data to gain
insights and perform knowledge discovery. As systems approach the
petascale range, problems that were unimaginable a few years ago are
within reach. It is rapidly becoming apparent, that as large-scale
computers and instruments become more capable and more widely used the
data generated for subsequent analysis is increasing in size and
complexity.  Scientific analysis and discovery already seems to be
limited not by the speed or capacity of high-performance computers,
but by the speed at which scientists can construct meaningful insights
from this huge amount of data.  The task of managing scientific data
is so overwhelming that scientists spend much of their time managing
the data by developing special purpose solutions, rather than using
their time effectively for scientific investigation and discovery.

In this talk, we first discuss the issues and challenges in scientific
knowledge discovery and scientific data management. We describe a
framework for scientific data management for scalable systems. Then we
present (1) Scalable parallel I/O interfaces and optimizations for
scalable scientific simulations and knowledge discoveries, (2) the use
of high-level information extraction at runtime to optimize I/O and
storage accesses, (3) scalable analytical and mining techniques for
scientific data mining and discoveries, and (4) future directions.


Brief Biography:
Alok Choudhary is a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer
Science and a Professor of Marketing and Technology Industry
Management at Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern
University. He is also the Chair of Computer Engineering and Systems
division. He is the founding director of the Center for Ultra-scale
Computing and Information Security (CUCIS) which involves several
schools, National Labs and universities.  Prof. Choudhary was a
co-founder and VP of Technology of Accelchip Inc., in 2000, which was
eventually acquired by Xilinx.  He received the National Science
Foundation's Young Investigator Award in 1993. He has also received an
IEEE Engineering Foundation award, an IBM Faculty Development award,
an Intel Research Council award, and in 2004. In 2006 he received the
first award for "Excellence in Research, Teaching and Service" from
the McCormick School of Engineering. He is a Fellow of the IEEE. His
research interests are in high-performance computing, data intensive
computing, scalable data mining, computer architecture,
high-performance I/O systems and software and their applications in
many domains including information processing (e.g., data mining, CRM,
BI) and scientific computing (e.g., scientific discoveries). Alok
Choudhary has published more than 300 papers in various journals and
conferences. Alok received his Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer
Engineering from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, in
1989. Choudhary is a Member of the National Academy of Science's
committee on "Impact of High-End Computing on Sciences", which was
formed on behalf of the Office of Science of the U. S. government and
various federal agencies. The goal of this committee is identify
critical areas of HEC for solving most important scientific problems.