ABSTRACT
Computational scientists must understand results from experimental, observational and computational simulation generated data to gain insights and perform knowledge discovery. As systems approach the petascale range, problems that were unimaginable a few years ago are within reach. It is rapidly becoming apparent, that as large-scale computers and instruments become more capable and more widely used the data generated for subsequent analysis is increasing in size and complexity. Scientific analysis and discovery already seems to be limited not by the speed or capacity of high-performance computers, but by the speed at which scientists can construct meaningful insights from this huge amount of data. The task of managing scientific data is so overwhelming that scientists spend much of their time managing the data by developing special purpose solutions, rather than using their time effectively for scientific investigation and discovery.

In this talk, we first discuss the issues and challenges in scientific knowledge discovery and scientific data management. We describe a framework for scientific data management for scalable systems. Then we present (1) Scalable parallel I/O interfaces and optimizations for scalable scientific simulations and knowledge discoveries, (2) the use of high-level information extraction at runtime to optimize I/O and storage accesses, (3) scalable analytical and mining techniques for scientific data mining and discoveries, and (4) future directions.

BIOGRAPHY
Alok Choudhary is the chair and a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and a Professor of Marketing and Technology Industry Management at Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. He is also the Chair of Computer Engineering and Systems division. He is the founding director of the Center for Ultra-scale Computing and Information Security (CUCIS) which involves several schools, National Labs and universities. Prof. Choudhary was a co-founder and VP of Technology of Accelchip Inc., in 2000, which was eventually acquired by Xilinx. He received the National Science Foundation's Young Investigator Award in 1993. He has also received an IEEE Engineering Foundation award, an IBM Faculty Development award, an Intel Research Council award, and in 2004. In 2006 he received the first award for "Excellence in Research, Teaching and Service" from the McCormick School of Engineering. He is a Fellow of the IEEE. His research interests are in high-performance computing, data intensive computing, scalable data mining, computer architecture, high-performance I/O systems and software and their applications in many domains including information processing (e.g., data mining, CRM, BI) and scientific computing (e.g., scientific discoveries). Alok Choudhary has published more than 300 papers in various journals and conferences. Alok received his Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, in 1989.