A publication of the Office of Advanced Simulation & Computing, NNSA Defense Programs
NA-ASC-500-07—Issue 4
September 2007
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Sandia CSRI Workshop on Mathematical Methods for Verification and Validation
The Computer Science Research Institute (CSRI) of Sandia National Laboratories held a very successful workshop on Mathematical Methods for Verification and Validation (V&V), from August 14 to 16, 2007, at the Hyatt Regency Tamaya Resort. The workshop was chaired by Clayton Webster, the FY08 John von Neumann Fellow, and co-organized by fellow Sandians Scott Collis, Tim Trucano, and David Womble, as well as Prof. Max Gunzburger from the School of Computational Science at Florida State University. The conference Web site can be found at http://www.cs.sandia.gov/CSRI/Workshops/2007/MMVV/.
It is well recognized in the both the academic and laboratory communities that V&V must be an essential component of our research efforts if we expect to amplify our future predictive capabilities and therefore, the focus of this meeting was to emphasize the technical content that is required for successful and consequential V&V. To accomplish this goal, a diverse group of 25 university and 30 NNSA laboratory researchers gathered to consider foundational mathematical, statistical, and computational methods for V&V in complex application areas for predictive computational science. Talks surveyed important themes, including: stochastic sampling, stochastic differential equations (sdes), uncertainty characterization, error estimation, design of computer experiments and reliability of computational science, as well as open research problems in the topics discussed. In addition to talks discussing methods for V&V, we also organized talks aimed at some broad areas of applications where V&V methods have had and will have a significant impact. These topics included astrophysics, hydrology, chemical reactions, and the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP). In total, there were 10 invited one-hour lectures and 12 short “rapid fire” talks. A copy of the program and a downloaded version of each presentation can be found at http://www.cs.sandia.gov/CSRI/Workshops/2007/MMVV/program.html.
A key feature of the workshop was the structured twice-daily discussion sessions. These sessions facilitated interactions among methods experts and applications scientists and proved very beneficial to all those attending. Future directions that methods development should take to be effective for V&V were debated. A consensus emerged that several developments in Uncertainty Quantfication have proved to be very promising and can be specificially beneficial to V&V. The workshop also held a discussion session on the training of scientists in V&V. Serious training is an important issue, both for those who want to specialize in the development of specific V&V methods and also for the general computational science community that want to understand and incorporate V&V methodologies in their work. This session addressed issues such as what courses students need to take to be V&V savvy, the creation of new courses to train students in V&V, and practical mechanisms to give students experience in V&V in realistic settings.
An overview of the presentations and a summary of the discussion sessions will be written in a forthcoming workshop summary white paper by Max Gunzburger, Tim Trucano, and Clayton Webster.
Left to right: Pavel Bochev (Sandia National Laboratories), Max Gunzburger (Florida State University), Qiang Du (Penn State University), Clayton Webster (Sandia National Laboratories), John Burkardt (Virginia Tech University), Yanzhao Cao (Florida A&M University)
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