Algorithms for Dynamic Data Driven Applications Systems (DDDAS/InfoSymbiotics)

Frederica Darema, Air Force Office of Scientific Research, USA

Dynamic Data Driven Applications Systems (DDDAS/InfoSymbiotics) is a paradigm whereby application simulation modeling is dynamically integrated in a feed-back loop with the real-time data-acquisition and control components of the application system. Advanced capabilities can be created through such new computational approaches in modeling and simulations, and in instrumentation methods, and include: enhancing the accuracy of application models; speeding-up the computation and creating decision support systems with the accuracy of full-scale simulations; more efficient and effective instrumentation methods, including dynamic and optimized management of large sets of heterogeneous sensors and controllers. DDDAS/InfoSymbiotics unifies the computational and instrumentation aspects of an application system, and the corresponding application platform becomes the integrated collection of computational and instrumentation platforms, as a unified computational-instrumentation platform. The advent of multicores as the basic computing engines that will be populating the exascale and other high-end and mid-range platforms, as well as the application instrumentation systems (sensors and controllers), together with unprecedented network bandwidth capabilities, create timely opportunities to exploit the new and transformative approaches in application-systems modeling, analysis, and instrumentation discussed here. Important challenges in enabling these capabilities include application algorithms which have good convergence properties under perturbations from dynamic data inputs and highly efficient uncertainty quantification methods. The talk will address opportunities for new capabilities together with corresponding research challenges, and will present illustrative examples from several application areas where DDDAS/InfoSymbiotics promises transformative impact.

Dr. Frederica Darema is with the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR). Prior to that, she held executive level positions at NSF, as Senior Science and Technology Advisor, and Senior Science Analyst, in the Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate at NSF. Dr. Darema received her BS degree from the School of Physics and Mathematics of the University of Athens - Greece, and MS and Ph. D. degrees in Theoretical Nuclear Physics from the Illinois Institute of Technology and the University of California at Davis, respectively, where she attended as a Fulbright Scholar and a Distinguished Scholar. After Physics Research Associate positions at the University of Pittsburgh and Brookhaven National Lab, she received an APS Industrial Fellowship and became a Technical Staff Member in the Nuclear Sciences Department at Schlumberger-Doll Research. Subsequently, she joined the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center as a Research Staff Member in the Computer Sciences Department, and later-on she established a multidisciplinary research group on parallel applications and became the Research Manager of that group. While at IBM she also served in the IBM Corporate Technical Strategy Group, examining and helping to set corporate-wide strategies. Dr. Darema's interests and technical contributions span the development of parallel applications, parallel algorithms, programming models, environments, and performance methods and tools for the design of applications and of software for parallel and distributed systems. In her career Dr. Darema has developed initiatives and programs that are recognized as having "changed the landscape of Computer Science research"; such initiatives include: the Next Generation Systems Program on novel research directions in systems software, and the DDDAS paradigm which has been characterized as "visionary" and "revolutionary". She has also led initiatives on research at the interface of neurobiology and computing, and other across-NSF and cross-agency initiatives and programs, such as those on: Information Technology Research; Nanotechnology Science and Engineering; Scalable Enterprise Systems; and Sensors. During 1996--1998, she completed a two-year assignment at DARPA where she initiated a new thrust for research on methods and technology for performance engineered systems. Dr. Darema was elected IEEE Fellow for proposing the SPMD (Single-Program-Multiple-Data) computational model that has become the predominant model for programming high-performance parallel and distributed computers. Dr. Darema is also the recipient of the IEEE Technical Achievement Award, for her work in pioneering DDDAS. Dr. Darema has given numerous keynotes and other invited presentations in many professional forums.