This session will examine how astrophysical problems are attacked computationally and describe actual experience of technical approaches in various environments.

Moderator: Dr. James Webster
Division Chair/Curator Physical Sciences,
 Department of Earth & Planetary Sciences,
American Museum of Natural History

Dr. Mordecai-Mark Mac Low
Assistant Curator, Department of Astrophysics,
American Museum of Natural History

Dr. Dinshaw Balsara
National Center for Supercomputing Applications,
University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign

Dr. Romeel Dave
Princeton University

Dr. Jarrod Hurley
Postdoctoral Fellow, Division of Physical Sciences,
American Museum of Natural History

Dr. Miguel Avillez
Research Fellow in Astrophysics, Division of Physical Sciences,
American Museum of Natural History

This session will address the various methods of implementing cluster/parallel systems. The presentations will span the range of potential systems from tightly integrated ("big iron") multi-processor systems to "Beowulf" clusters, to loosely integrated low bandwidth "screen saver" approaches.

Moderator: Dr. Francis C. Lees
Chief Information Officer
American Museum of Natural History

William Blake
Vice President, High Performance Technical Computing,
Compaq

Caroline Kovac
Vice President of Life Sciences,
IBM

Dr. Quinn Snell
Brigham Young University, The DOGMA Project

Dr. Arsi Vaziri
Advanced Supercomputing Division,
NASA

Daniel Janies
Research Scientist, Division of Invertebrate Zoology,
American Museum of Natural History

As we move away from sequential to parallel systems, we change the manner of casting problems. This session will explore the ways in which our thinking about scientific problems changes in a parallel framework, and how the interaction between hardware and software has shaped their evolution.

Moderator: Dr. Darrel Frost
Associate Dean of Science for Collections,
American Museum of Natural History

Dr. Andrew Pohorille
Director, Center for Computational Astrobiology,
Ames Research Center, NASA

Dr. Vijay Pande
Department of Chemisty,
Stanford University, Fold@Home

Dr. Stanley Burt
Director of the Advanced Biomedical Computer Center,
National Cancer Institute

Dr. Richard Stevens
Co-Director, Computation Institute,
University of Chicago

This session will present specific achievements using parallel systems, such as the assembly of the sequence of the human genome.

Introduction by:

Daniel Huson
Senior Scientist, Celera

Robert M. Greenberg
Chairman and Chief Creative Officer,
R/GA