BOULDER, Colo., Jan. 13, 2020 — Dr. Jason Dexter, a working group coordinator for the groundbreaking black hole imaging studies published by Event Horizon Telescope last Spring, will be the second Keynote Speaker at the Rocky Mountain Advanced Computing Consortium’s (RMACC) 10th annual High Performance Computing Symposium, May 19-21, in Boulder.

Dexter, a member of the astrophysical and planetary sciences faculty at the University of Colorado Boulder, will speak on the role of high performance computing in understanding what we see in the first image of a black hole. He is a member of both the Event Horizon Telescope and VLTI/GRAVITY collaborations, which can now image black holes.

Dexter earned his Ph.D. at the University of Washington and was a postdoctoral fellow at UC Berkeley. He served as a research group leader in Germany before joining the CU Boulder faculty last fall. His research focuses on using the light emitted by gas falling into black holes to understand how they grow and to study gravity in the immediate vicinity of the event horizon.

He will join Dr. John Martinis, a UC-Santa Barbara professor and team lead on the Google project that achieved Quantum Supremacy, to Keynote the annual event. Martinis’ keynote will focus on the successful effort – started in 2014 – to build the first useful quantum computer and achieve quantum supremacy using a programmable superconducting processor.

Their appearances continue the annual Symposium’s tradition of showcasing the latest high performance computing achievements in both education and industry. The event is open to the general public.

The largest consortium of its kind, the RMACC is a collaboration among 30 academic and government research institutions in Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, Washington and Wyoming. The consortium’s mission is to facilitate widespread effective use of high performance computing throughout the intermountain region.

Becky Yeager, the RMACC’s executive director, said this milestone 10th anniversary Symposium will provide a wide array of hands-on and lecture style tutorials plus educational, professional and student-focused panels.

“Researchers and faculty can learn about using computational science in the laboratory or classroom,” she said. “And students can learn about career opportunities as well as showcase their own research by entering a poster competition.” Student scholarships to help cover registration fees and travel costs are available thanks to generous support from industry sponsors.

To learn more about the Symposium, how to enter the poster competition, or how to register, visit: www.rmacc.org/hpcsymposium.

About RMACC

Primarily a volunteer organization, the RMACC is a collaboration among 30 academic and research institutions located in Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, Washington and Wyoming.  The RMACC’s mission is to facilitate widespread effective use of high performance computing throughout this 9-state intermountain region.  To learn more about the RMACC and its mission, visit the website: www.rmacc.org/about

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Source: RMACC