Introduction to the special issue

Funding

Hemant Shukla is an expert in a wide range of scientific high-performance computing, algorithms, simulations, data processing and instrumentation techniques in the fields of physics and astronomy. Before joining UC Berkeley, he has worked in leading institutions at Caltech, Space Telescope Science Institute and in the industry at Stanford Research Systems. He has conceived and lead the many-core and accelerator-based astrophysics project called ISAAC (Infrastructure for Astrophysics Applications Computing), with Horst Simon as the PI. ISAAC is funded by NSF to lead research and development for accelerating astrophysics applications in simulations, instrumentation and data processing/analysis. He has actively expanded HPC knowledge base through conferences, collaborations and education and public outreach. The ISAAC project on billion-particle angular and spatial correlation which he lead was nominated for the Gordon Bell finalist for SC 2012. He co-founded the International Center for Computational Science (ICCS) to research emerging architectures, and programming models for high-performance computing applied to science and technology. His research covers areas in next-generation radio-interferometry, 21 cm cosmology, Fourier optics, extreme-scale image processing, mission-critical end-to-end simulations, fluid dynamics, radiative transfers, adaptive mesh refinement, N-body, many-core and GPU computing etc. We gratefully acknowledge support for the workshop under the project titled Infrastructure for Astrophysics Applications Computing (ISAAC) funded by the NSF (grant number 0961044).