January 2007
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ASC Salutes

Editor’s note: Each quarter, the ASC Program will feature the outstanding contributions of one of its numerous tri-lab scientists, engineers, and administrators. This month, we proudly present Hank Childs.

The Office of Science’s SciDAC (Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing) Program awarded $2.2M per year for five years to VACET (Visualization and Analytics Center for Enabling Technologies), a multi-institutional center (Livermore, Lawrence Berkeley, and Oak Ridge National Laboratories, UC Davis, and the University of Utah), to meet production visualization needs for Office of Science customers; Livermore’s VisIt software will be the primary deployment vehicle.

Hank Childs

Barely thirty years old, Computer Scientist Henry (Hank) R. Childs has already won an R&D 100 award and is now part of a team that will bridge high-performance computing visualization efforts between the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration and Office of Science.

Childs is one of the computer scientists responsible for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) program VisIt, a data analysis and visualization tool that recently won an R&D 100 award from the trade journal R&D Magazine for being among the top 100 industrial innovations worldwide for 2005. VisIt was developed for Advanced Simulation and Computing (ASC) scientists to study massive data sets. “I interact daily with analysts and code developers to determine what analysis techniques are needed to study their simulations,” said Childs. “We then use VisIt to deliver these metrics to our user community. VisIt provides an infrastructure for processing peta-scale data and is now relatively mature, so it allows us to deploy our efforts quickly and efficiently. Our goal was to go beyond pretty pictures; it was to create a product with techniques for reducing the complexity of the data in a way that allowed our scientists to be confident in their analysis and not be concerned that important data was somehow being lost.” VisIt’s capabilities span data exploration, code debugging, quantitative analysis, movie making, and comparative analysis.

VisIt will be one of the primary deployment vehicles for VACET (the Visualization and Analytics Center for Enabling Technologies), a SciDAC (Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing) center tasked with providing peta-scale visualization and analysis solutions to Office of Science customers. “I think there is strong commonality between the efforts of this center and our ASC efforts, starting primarily with peta-scale visualization and analysis, but also including specific techniques like topological characterization, comparative visualization, statistics-based visualization, and high-dimension data, such as energy groups. It was that commonality that made the partnering so attractive,” said Childs. Despite taking on these new responsibilities, Childs will remain part-time with ASC, pursuing verification and validation work on shape characterization.

Childs began his career with Lawrence Livermore after receiving his Bachelor of Science degree in both math and computer science from the University of California at Davis. After graduating, Childs took a few years off school to marry, start his family, and begin his work at Livermore. With two young children at home, he started the PhD program in April 2000, attending school evenings and weekends, and finished his graduate studies at the end of 2006.