HPCwire: Maccabe Named Director of CSM Division at ORNL

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November 13, 2008

Maccabe Named Director of CSM Division at ORNL

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High-performance computing expert to head Oak Ridge National Laboratory research

OAK RIDGE, Tenn., Nov. 13 -- Arthur Bernard ("Barney") Maccabe, a professor of computer science and chief information officer at the University of New Mexico, will direct the Computer Science and Mathematics (CSM) Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Associate Laboratory Director for Computing and Computational Sciences Thomas Zacharia has announced. Through advanced computing research, CSM supports national priorities in partnership with industry and academia and has programs in basic and applied research in the computational sciences, information technologies, and intelligent systems. Maccabe's appointment will be effective Jan. 5.

On the faculty of the University of New Mexico since 1982, Maccabe is an expert in "lightweight" system software for massively parallel computing systems. In contrast to full-featured operating systems, lightweight operating systems have minimal features, improving the ability of software to scale for use on systems employing thousands of processors.

A principal architect of the Puma, Cougar, and Catamount operating systems, Maccabe developed system software for Sandia National Laboratories' ASCI Red, the world's first supercomputer capable of teraflops, or trillions of floating point operations (mathematical calculations) per second. He brings leadership in scaling system software to CSM, a division with about 200 employees, shortly after an upgrade increased the speed of ORNL's Cray XT Jaguar supercomputer to a peak performance of 1.64 petaflops, or quadrillion floating point operations per second. The upgrade made the Department of Energy (DOE) machine the world's first petaflops system dedicated to open research.

"Barney's vision and leadership will be invaluable in providing petascale computing systems such as Jaguar with the highest quality computational environment and the tools to enable leading-edge scientific research as quickly as possible. He will strengthen university relationships to support ORNL research and in developing the next generation of scientists to work at the laboratory," Zacharia said. "His strong backgrounds in system software and computer science will enable ORNL to support DOE's important missions in climate change, renewable energy, and efficient transportation."

Working with students, teachers, government researchers, and industrial scientists, CSM experts help researchers find solutions to grand challenges in science and engineering by developing next-generation systems and software codes for computational science so investigators can fully utilize high-performance resources such as Jaguar. At CSM Maccabe will develop critical relationships with university researchers, who can use the petascale supercomputer to explore energy use and its consequences, as well as other fields including astrophysics and mathematics.

"One of the big pushes is looking at multiscale sciences," said Maccabe, explaining that DOE's unique petascale computational resources enable high-resolution exploration of systems at small and large time and length scales. "In climate modeling, for example, you can get much better granularity with petascale computing. In materials science, researchers can explore matter on a scale of nanometers [billionths of meters] all the way up to meters. Multiscale resolution is a problem in all disciplines, but it is especially critical in life sciences, climatology, and astrophysics."

Maccabe is author or coauthor of 48 technical publications, including Computer Systems: Architecture, Organization, and Programming, a sophomore-level textbook. Recently he has worked on development of lightweight file systems and chaired a DOE Office of Science initiative called FAST-OS (Forum to Address Scalable Technology for runtime and Operating Systems). He was a member of committees at Sandia and Los Alamos national laboratories providing technical review of facilities similar to CSM.

In 1993 he was a member of the original Message Passing Interface (MPI) forum, a library specification for message passing, proposed as a standard by a broadly based committee of vendors, implementers, and users. In 2003 he was a founding member of LCI (Linux Cluster Institute), an organization that promotes administration of large-scale computing systems through workshops and an annual technical conference.

After receiving his PhD in information and computer sciences from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1982, Maccabe joined the University of New Mexico as an assistant professor of computer science and earned tenure in 1988. He has served as the university's chief information officer since 2007. The recipient of several faculty awards in research and teaching, Maccabe led a research group of about 20 and supervised ten PhD students, including Stephen Wheat, a member of the Sandia team that won the 1994 Gordon Bell Prize.

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