Rise of the Super Smart Supercomputers:  How Massively Powerful Computers and Big Data are Transforming Science and Our Lives Dr. Pete Beckman, Senior Computer Scientist and Co-Director of the Northwestern Argonne Institute of Science and Engineering, Argonne National Laboratory Click here for complete details. Tickets - $7 Free on-line ticketing is now available HERE

Enormous supercomputers are being used to accelerate scientific discovery and predict the future. From exploring the secret inner workings of the universe or improving combustion in jet engines to predicting the impact of climate change on future farmlands, supercomputers are helping us address the world's most important problems. The relatively new discipline of computing is changing every corner of scientific discovery as well as our lives. This talk will explain the technologies and computer science fueling a new breed of massive, powerful, and smart computers. From the origins of computing to the world's fastest computers, we will explore the technology that lets cars drive themselves and promises personalized, genome-based medicine.

Pete Beckman is a recognized global expert in high-end computing systems. During the past 25 years, he has designed and built software and architectures for large-scale parallel and distributed computing systems. Peter helped found Indiana University's Extreme Computing Laboratory. He also founded the Linux cluster team at the Advanced Computing Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory and a Turbolinux-sponsored research laboratory that developed the world's first dynamic provisioning system for cloud computing and HPC clusters. Furthermore, he acted as vice president of Turbolinux's worldwide engineering efforts.

Pete joined Argonne National Laboratory in 2002. As director of engineering and chief architect for the TeraGrid, he designed and deployed the world's most powerful Grid computing system for linking production high performance computing centers for the National Science Foundation. He served as director of the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility from 2008 to 2010. He is currently a Senior Computer Scientist and co-Director of the Northwestern Argonne Institute of Science and Engineering. He is also a co-founder of the International Exascale Software Project (IESP).(Bio courtesy of anl.gov)