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DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION
FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY /
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Special Features:
RICHARD TAPIA CELEBRATION OF
DIVERSITY IN COMPUTING A SUCCESS
By John Hurley,
Editor-at-Large
This conference, held Oct. 15-18 in Atlanta, was the second in a series of
bi-annual conferences with the goal of promoting and celebrating diversity in
computing in general and, in particular, the efforts of Richard A. Tapia, a
distinguished mathematician and professor in the Department of Computation and
Applied Mathematics at Rice University in Houston, to ensure that there is
diverse representation in academia, industry and government laboratories to
address the computer-related needs of our society.
Tapia said,"I am very happy that this conference has been so well received
by
the computing community and by students from such diverse backgrounds. It is
exciting that the community is seeing the Tapia conference as a promotion of
diversity in the way that the well-established and highly successful Grace
Hopper Conference is viewed as a promotion of gender equity."
At the conference, students representative of all segments of society
embraced
the diverse and complex technological challenges in computing. Innovative and
original research and applications in computer science and engineering were
shared by students and leaders in their respective fields from academia,
industry and government sectors.
The conference was highlighted by many distinguished speakers and
panelists,
including: Warren Washington, chair of the National Science Board; Peter
Freeman, assistant director of the Computer and Information Science and
Engineering Directorate; Margaret Wright, Silver professor of Computer Science
at Courant Institute; Valerie Taylor, department head of Computer Science at
Texas A&M University; Jose Munoz, director of the Simulation and Computer
Science Office in the Department of Energy's Advanced Simulation and Computing
(ASCI) Program; Dan Reed, director of the National Center for Supercomputing
Applications at the University of Illinois; Roscoe Giles, deputy director of
the Center for Computational Sciences at Boston University and co-team leader
for the NSF EOT-PACI activity.
The banquet speaker was Eloy Rodriquez of Cornell University. Rodriquez, a
world leader in plant chemistry, entitled his talk "Computers! I don't need no
Stinking Computers -- Famous Last Words from A Tropical Medicine Drug
Explorer". The Tapia Award for Scientific Scholarship, Civic Science, and
Diversifying Computing went to Carlos Castillo-Chavez, formerly of Cornell
University and currently of Los Alamos National Laboratory and Arizona State
University. The conference co-chairs were Juan Meza of Lawrence Berkeley
National Laboratory and Bryant York of Portland State University. Program
co-chairs were Monica Martinez-Canales and Pamela Williams both of Sandia
National Laboratories.
Grid computing highlights included: Plenary Talk, Valerie E. Taylor,
"Computational Grids: Analyzing the Performance", in which Taylor spoke of the
availability of distributed systems, including Grids, through several
programs. Taylor spoke of the unique challenges presented by Grids in
assessing performance issues that are not applicable to conventional parallel
systems. The talk presented current techniques used to analyze the performance
of Grid Applications.
Additional highlights included the High Performance Grid Computing panel
moderated by Radha Nandkumar, NCSA, featuring Dan Reed, Osni Marques, LBNL,
and Roscoe Giles. The panel presented a view of the growth and maturing of
high performance Grid computing environments and relevant advanced
applications enabled by Grids. In addition, there were discussions about the
unique challenges presented by using the required infrastructure to solve very
large scale problems.
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