High-throughput science

Hanspeter Pfister

Gordon McKay Professor of the Practice of Computer Science

Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Science

Abstract

1. How did the universe start? How is the brain wired? How does matter interact at the quantum level?
   

2. These are some of the great scientific challenges of our times, and answering them requires bigger scientific instruments, increasingly precise imaging equipment, and ever more complex computer simulations.
   

3. The traditional model is to process the data on a remote supercomputer. However, low data transmission rates, high energy consumption, and the high price of large parallel machines are obstacles for many scientists.
   

4. In this talk I will suggest that commodity high-throughput computing is enabling high-throughput science, where we process massive data streams efficiently and analyze them rapidly, all the way from the instrument to the desktop. I will present an overview of several projects at Harvard that leverage GPUs for high-throughput science, ranging from radio astronomy and neuroscience to quantum chemistry.
   

About the speaker

1. Hanspeter Pfister received his PhD in computer science in 1996 from the State University of New York at Stony Brook and his MS in electrical engineering from ETH Zurich, Switzerland, in 1991.
   

2. Before joining the Harvard faculty, he worked for 11 years at Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories. He is the chief architect of VolumePro, Mitsubishi Electric’s real-time volume-rendering hardware for PCs.
   

3. His research lies at the intersection of visualization, computer graphics, and computer vision and spans a range of topics including scientific visualization, point-based graphics, appearance modeling, face recognition, and computational photography.
   

4. Pfister has taught courses at major graphics conferences including ACM SIGGRAPH, IEEE Visualization, and Eurographics. Chair of the IEEE Visualization and Graphics Technical Committee (VGTC) and editor of the 2006 NIH/NSF Visualization Research Challenges report, he is a senior member of the IEEE Computer Society and member of ACM, ACM SIGGRAPH, and the Eurographics Association.
   

5. During the IIC's life as an Interfaculty Initiative, Pfister served as Director of Visual Computing.