Title: Scientific Big Data: Challenges and Opportunities

Speaker: Prabhat, National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC)

Abstract: Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and NERSC are at the frontier of scientific research. Historically, NERSC has provided leadership computing for the computational science community, but we now find ourselves tackling Big Data problems from an array of observational and experimental sources. In this talk, I will review the landscape of Scientific Big Data problems at all scales, spanning astronomy, cosmology, climate, neuroscience, bioimaging, genomics, material science and subatomic physics. I will present a list of ‘Top 10 Data Analytics’ problems from these domains, and highlight NERSC’s current Data Analytics strategy and hardware/software resources. I will highlight opportunities for engaging with NERSC, Berkeley Lab and the scientific enterprise.

Bio: Prabhat leads the Data and Analytics Services team at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC). His current research interests include scientific data management, parallel I/O, high performance computing and scientific visualization. He is also interested in applied statistics, machine learning, computer graphics and computer vision. Prabhat received an ScM in Computer Science from Brown University (2001) and a B.Tech in Computer Science and Engineering from IIT-Delhi (1999). He is currently pursuing a PhD in the Earth and Planetary Sciences Department at U.C. Berkeley.