BERKELEY, Calif. -- Applications are now being accepted to attend a workshop on "Robust and High Performance Tools for Scientific Computing" sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy's National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC).

The three-and-a-half-day workshop will present an introduction to the DOE Advanced CompuTational Software Collection (ACTS Collection, http://acts.nersc.gov) for application scientists whose research requires large amounts of computation, a large volume of data manipulation, the use of robust numerical algorithms, or combinations of these. The workshop will be held September 4-7, 2002, at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif.

There is no charge for the workshop, but attendance will be limited and researchers interested in attending must submit an application. Additionally, DOE will fully sponsor a limited number of graduate students and postdoctoral fellows to participate in this event. This support includes round-trip transportation to and from Berkeley, local transportation, lodging, meals and workshop materials. (See below for application details.) Proposals from other research scientists are also encouraged.

The deadline for applications is Tuesday, July 9, 2002. Applications should be submitted using the on-line form at http://acts.nersc.gov/presentations/Workshop2002/application.html.

The workshop will include a range of tutorials on the tools (currently available in the collection and some deliverables from the DOE SciDAC ISICs), discussion sessions aimed to solve specific computational needs by the participants, and hands-on practice using NERSC's state-of-the-art computers. Topics to be covered include:

• Direct and iterative methods for the solution of linear and non-linear systems of equations
• PDEs and multi-level methods
• Numerical optimization
• Structured and unstructured meshes (generation, manipulation and computation)
• Development of high performance computing applications
• Performance monitoring and tuning
• Grid computing

The ACTS Collection comprises a set of tools mainly developed at the Department of Energy's (DOE) laboratories. These software tools aim to simplify the solution of common and important computational problems and have substantially benefited a wide range of scientific and industrial applications. These benefits include not only running applications efficiently in high performing computing environments but also realizing computation that would not have been possible otherwise. Despite these successes, there is still a need for a greater infrastructure to reach out to academia and industry through dissemination and instruction on the state-of-the-art tools for high performance computing environments and simultaneously provide an umbrella for tool developers to receive the feedback from these communities. This workshop is part of an approach to build such an infrastructure.

Application information

The deadline for applications is July 9, 2002. Students and postdoctoral fellows should submit an abstract describing the nature of their work, future plans and/or current needs for computation. A letter of recommendation from the applicant's supervisor also needs to be provided using the recommendation on-line form at http://acts.nersc.gov/presentations/Workshop2002/recommendation.html. The recommendation letter must also arrive no later than July 9, 2002. Other applicants must submit a letter outlining their current work and future plans and needs for computational resources with a list of publications.

Proposals will be reviewed and invitations sent by July 22. For more information on the workshop, please contact Tony Drummond at (510) 486-7624 or Osni Marques at (510) 486-5290. More information about the workshop can be found at http://acts.nersc.gov/presentations/Workshop2002/announcement.html.