A publication of the Office of Advanced Simulation & Computing, NNSA Defense Programs
NA-ASC-500-07—Issue 3
May 2007
Return to this issue’s stories
ASC Salutes
John Turner joined Los Alamos (LANL) in 1990, in the area of Nuclear Reactor Safety and Analysis, after completing his Ph.D. in Nuclear Engineering from North Carolina State University. In 1992, he moved to X-Division to work on deterministic radiation transport in the group that would later become CCS-4. During this time, he also contributed, as a founding team member, to the casting simulation effort being initiated in the Fluid Dynamics Group, T-3. This project became Telluride, and is increasingly contributing to the improvement of manufacturing processes at LANL and elsewhere. John departed LANL, in 1997, for a stint at Blue Sky Studios, a computer animation company outside New York City.
At Blue Sky, John contributed algorithmic and performance improvements to the proprietary ray-tracing renderer used to generate all the company’s images, and developed other tools such as a 2D incompressible flow code used to simulate lava flow in the Academy Award-nominated feature film, Ice-Age. In addition to credits on Ice Age, he is also credited on the Academy Award-winning short animated film Bunny.
Returning to LANL and the Telluride project in 2001, John progressed to group leader of CCS-2 and an active involvement in modeling and simulation for the resurgence of nuclear power within the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP). He serves as principal investigator on the Advanced Architecture LDRD-DR, which has developed tools and applications for emerging hybrid and heterogeneous computing architectures such as the use of video cards, Graphical Processing Units (GPUs), and high-performance co-processors. The diversity of John’s experience is well-attuned to the upcoming Roadrunner supercomputer, which will use the Cell Broadband Engine—the Playstation 3 video game console processor—in conjunction with an Opteron-based Linux cluster to reach the 1 petaFLOPS performance goal. In this context, John is leading the Advanced Algorithms and Assessment team, tasked with ensuring that Roadrunner achieves high performance not just on synthetic benchmarks but on applications of scientific interest to LANL. Given John’s experience with hybrid architectures and the diversity of his code-development successes, he is expected to be an invaluable asset in the evolution of Roadrunner and its potential impact on the ASC Program.
DOE Privacy Disclaimer | Sandia Privacy Disclaimer | SAND 2007-3351W
Developed and maintained by Sandia National Laboratories for NA.114