Brookhaven National Laboratory announced today that Adolfy Hoisie will chair its newly formed Computing for National Security department, which is part of Brookhaven’s new Computational Science Initiative (CSI).

“We see a huge potential to make a positive impact on the nation’s security by bringing our unique extreme-scale data expertise to bear on challenges of national importance,” said CSI Director Kerstin Kleese van Dam in the announcement. “The formation of this new department in CSI is our first step in this direction.”

Worries over computer and cyber attack need little introduction. The rapid growth in internet traffic and users and the voluminous data exchanges required between organizations to conduct business make the protection of the nation’s critical assets—including power grid infrastructure, telecommunication networks, and nuclear power stations—a big data–real-time analysis challenge.

Hoisie is an experienced and familiar name in the HPC community. Most recently he was founding director of the Department of Energy’s Center for Advanced Technology Evaluation (CENATE) based at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. He first joined PNNL as a laboratory fellow in 2010, and went on to direct the Advanced Computing, Mathematics, and Data Division, and serve as PNNL’s lead for DOE’s ASCR programs.

“Adolfy is a long-time principal investigator in DOE’s Advanced Scientific Computing Research(ASCR) programs,” said Kleese van Dam. “At Brookhaven, he will continue in this capacity and contribute to solving computing challenges faced by other federal agencies, including those within the Department of Defense, such as the Defense Threat Reduction Agency and Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and the National Nuclear Security Administration. In addition, he will work closely with me and my leadership team to further CSI’s overall computing endeavors.”

Brookhaven describes the scope of the effort as, “From field-programmable gate arrays (configurable computing devices) integrated with traditional central processing units, and quantum computing that takes advantage of the way the tiniest of particles behave, to neuromorphic computing that mimics the neural networks of the human brain, these architectures are someday expected to perform operations much more quickly and with less energy. Ensuring the optimal performance of these architectures and achieving the timescales needed for different national security applications requires evaluating new hardware technologies and developing the needed system software, programming models, and analytical software in tandem.”

Link to announcement: https://www.bnl.gov/newsroom/news.php?a=212363