The new Frontiers in Computing Systems group, part of Columbia’s Data Science Institute, is hosting an inaugural full-day symposium, with leading speakers and panelists, to highlight the advances and grand challenges in Big Data infrastructure: extreme-scale computing systems (hardware, parallel computing, software, databases) and their application to solve diverse cutting-edge problems in climate and ocean science, population-scale biomedical informatics, genomics, materials science, neuroscience, astrophysics and engineering.
The symposium includes an exciting keynote by Ruchir Puri, the chief architect of IBM’s Watson system, on "Engineering the Future of Cognitive Systems." Other speakers include those developing state-of-art high-performance parallel computers and large-scale Python-based software platforms, as well as experts on computational problems in climate science, astrophysics, and protein folding simulation.
The event will include a keynote talk, lunch, two talk presentation sessions, a networking and poster session, and a panel of experts with audience participation.
KYLE T. MANDLI is an Assistant Professor of Applied Mathematics in the department of Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics. He received his Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics in 2011 from the University of Washington studying multi-layered flow as it applies to storm-surge simulation. His research interests involve the computational and analytical aspects of geophysical shallow mass flows such as tsunamis, debris-flow and storm-surge. This also includes the development of advanced computational approaches, such as adaptive mesh refinement, leveraging new computational technologies, such as accelerators, and the application of good software development practices as applied more generally to scientific software.
Dr. Mandli has been an active member in the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) and the American Geophysical Union (AGU) organizing a number of symposia and workshops on the topics of high performance computing and issues related to wave-propagation problems. He is also one of the primary developers of the open source package ClawPack (Conservation Laws Package) as well as GeoClaw, a package for modeling shallow geophysical flows including storm surge, and PyClaw, a high performance library to do the same in Python.
