Welcome

Sig Hecker

Siegfried S. Hecker is the Director of Los Alamos National Laboratory, in Los Alamos, New Mexico, a post he has held since January 1986. Dr. Hecker joined the Laboratory as a Technical Staff Member in the Physical Metallurgy Group in 1973 and subsequently served as Chairman of the Center for Materials Science and Division Leader of Materials Science and Technology. He began his professional career at Los Alamos in 1968 as a Postdoctoral Appointee. From 1970 to 1973, he worked as a Senior Research Metallurgist at General Motors Research Laboratories. He earned his Ph.D. in metallurgy from Case Western Reserve University in 1968.

Dr. Hecker received the Department of Energy's E. O. Lawrence Award for Materials Science in 1984. In 1985, he was cited by Science Digest as one of the year's top 100 innovators in science. In October of 1989, he delivered the Distinguished Lecture in Materials and Society for the American Society for Metals. The American Institute of Mining, Metallurgical, and Petroleum Engineers awarded him the James O. Douglas Gold Medal in 1990.

Among the scientific organizations in which Dr. Hecker serves is the Leadership/Applications to Practice Committee of the Metallurgical Society, the Board of Directors of the Council on Superconductivity for American Competitiveness, and the Board of Advisors of the Santa Fe Institute. Public-service agencies in which he is active include the

University of New Mexico Board of Regents, the Board of Directors of Carrie Tingley Hospital in Albuquerque, the Los Alamos Area United Way Campaign, and the Los Alamos Ski Club, of which he is President.

Welcome to Los Alamos and to New Mexico. I think most of you know that it was in 1983—in fact, seven years ago this week—that we held the first Frontiers of Supercomputing conference here at Los Alamos under the sponsorship of Los Alamos National Laboratory and the National Security Agency (NSA) to assess the critical issues that face supercomputing. Today we are here to make a national reassessment of supercomputing. The expanded number of sponsors alone, I think, reflects the increased use of supercomputing in the country. The sponsors of this conference are NSA, Los Alamos National Laboratory, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation, and the Supercomputing Research Center.

I want to make a few brief remarks, both about the conference, as well as computing at the Laboratory. I found it very interesting to go back and look through the first Frontiers of Supercomputing book. Several things haven't changed at all since the last conference. K. Speierman, in his conference summary, pointed out very nicely that increased computational power will allow us to make significant advances in science, particularly in nonlinear phenomena. Supercomputing, we pointed out at the first conference, also will improve our technology and allow us to build things more efficiently. That certainly remains ever so true today. Indeed, leadership in high-performance computing is obviously vital to U.S. military and economic competitiveness.

In the preface to Frontiers of Supercomputing (Metropolis et al. 1986), the conference participants indicated that it will take radical changes in computer architecture, from single to massively parallel processors, to keep up with the demand for increased computational power. It was also fascinating that the authors at that time warned that the importance of measures to more effectively use available hardware cannot be overemphasized, namely measures such as improved numerical algorithms and improved software. Once again, these comments remain ever so true today.

However, there are a number of things that have changed since 1983. I think we have seen a substantial increase in parallel processing. At the Laboratory today, the CRAY Y-MPs are the workhorses for our computations. We have also made great progress in using the massively parallel

Connection Machines, from Thinking Machines Corporation, to solve demanding applications problems.

I think all the way around, in the country and in the world, we have seen a revolution in the computing environment, namely, that the personal computer has come into its own—to the tune of about 50 million units in the decade of the 1980s. That number includes one user, my eight-year-old daughter, who now has computational power at her fingertips that scientists wish they would have had a decade or two ago. Also, the trend toward high-power scientific workstations, networking, and ultra-high-speed graphics will forever change the way we do computing.

Another thing that hasn't changed, however, is the insatiable appetite of scientists who want more and more computing power. Seven years ago we had a few CRAY-1s at Los Alamos, and, just to remind you, that was only seven years after Seymour Cray brought serial number 1 to Los Alamos back in 1976. Today we have about 65 CRAY-1 equivalents, plus a pair of Connection Machine 2s. Nevertheless, I constantly hear the cry for more computational horsepower. At Los Alamos, that need is not only for the defense work we do but also for many other problems, such as combustion modeling or enhanced oil recovery or global climate change or how to design materials from basic principles.

However, a fundamental change has occurred. I think today, to remain at the forefront of computing, we can't simply go out and buy the latest model of supercomputer. We clearly will have to work smarter, which means that we'll have to work much more in conjunction with people at universities and with the computer and computational equipment manufacturers.

Therefore, I look forward to this reassessment in Frontiers of Supercomputing II, and I think it will be an interesting week. Typically, it's the people who make a conference. And as I look out at the audience, I feel no doubt that this will be a successful conference.

It is my pleasure this morning to introduce the person who will officially kick off the conference. We are very fortunate to have Senator Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico here. Senator Bingaman also played a similar role at the conference in 1983, shortly after he was elected to the United States Senate.

Senator Bingaman grew up in Silver City, a little town in the southern part of the state. He did his undergraduate work at Harvard and received a law degree from Stanford University. He was Attorney General for the State of New Mexico before being elected to the United States Senate.

I have had the good fortune of getting to know Senator Bingaman quite well in the past five years. He certainly is one of the greatest

advocates for science and technology in the United States Congress. He serves on the Senate Armed Services Committee and also on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. On the Armed Services Committee, he heads the Subcommittee on Defense Industry and Technology. In both of those committees, he has been a strong advocate for science and technology in the nation, and particularly in Department of Defense and Department of Energy programs. In the Armed Services subcommittee, he spearheaded an effort to focus on our critical technologies and competitiveness, both from a military, as well as an economic, standpoint. And of course, there is no question that supercomputing is one of those critical technologies.

Thus, it is most appropriate to have Senator Bingaman here today to address this conference, and it's my honor and pleasure to welcome him to Los Alamos.

Reference

Frontiers of Supercomputing , N. Metropolis, D. H. Sharp, W. J. Worlton, and K. R. Ames, Eds., University of California Press, Berkeley, California (1986).