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[Colloquium] 21st Century Computing: Ways and Means

January 23, 2007

Watch Colloquium: 

AVI file (367 MB)
Quicktime (139 MB)


  • Date: Tuesday, January 23rd, 2007 
  • Time: 11 am — 12:15 pm 
  • Place: ECE 118

Daniel A. Reed
Renaissance Computing Institute
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Abstract: Legend says that Archimedes remarked, on the discovery of the lever, “Give me a place to stand and I can move the world.” Today, computing pervades all aspects of society. “Science” and “computational science” have become largely synonymous, and computing is the intellectual lever that opens the pathway to discovery in diverse domains. As new discoveries increasingly lie at the interstices of traditional disciplines, computing is also the enabler for scholarship in the arts, humanities, creative practice and public policy.

This talk surveys some of these challenges and opportunities. On the policy front, this includes the new Computing Community Consortium (CCC) and the upcoming PCAST report on the NITRD program. On the technical front, it includes possible approaches to resilient Grid and HPC system design, ranging from intelligent hardware monitoring and adaptation, through low-overhead recovery schemes, statistical sampling and differential scheduling and to alternative models of system software.