Dr. Kary Myers, Statistical Sciences Group, Los Alamos National Laboratory

(Please note this is not the usual IDC seminar time, and the location is Town Hall Committee Room 3)

Presentation slides

Kary Myers

As computer simulations continue to grow in size and complexity, they present a challenging example of big data. Simulation output may exceed both the storage capacity and the available bandwidth for transfer to storage. In this talk I’ll describe an in situ approach — i.e., one that embeds calculations in the simulation itself — for efficiently approximating a complex simulation using piecewise linear fitting. This significantly reduces the data transfer and storage requirements while facilitating post processing and reconstruction of the simulation. I’ll illustrate the method with a massively parallel radiation-hydrodynamics simulation performed by Korycansky et al. (2009) to support NASA’s 2009 Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite mission.

About the Speaker:

Since 2006 Kary Myers has been a scientist in the Statistical Sciences group at Los Alamos National Laboratory. She earned her PhD from Carnegie Mellon’s Statistics Department and her MS from their Machine Learning Department. At Los Alamos she’s been involved with projects examining electromagnetic measurements, large scale computer simulations, and chemical spectra from the Mars Science Laboratory. She serves as an associate editor for the Annals of Applied Statistics and the Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports.