Dr. Christopher Chang

As scaling laws and the relentless march of information technology have driven increasing fidelity and scope of simulations, computational science, engineering, and analytics (CSEA) has taken an ever greater role in engineering and investigation. This trend intersects the great challenges of our times at the National Renewable Energy Lab, where CSEA is actively applied to materials discovery, energy-efficient design, Smart Grid technologies, and much more. The new linchpin of this activity is Eagle, NREL’s 8-petaflop, 2100-node compute cluster. I will discuss the architecture of this machine, NREL’s Computational Science Center, research computing, and how trends that we see may shape our future systems.

Biography:

Chris Chang holds a PhD in Biochemistry from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a BS in Biochemistry from Virginia Tech. Chris has additionally completed a postdoctoral study at the University of Florida, on computational chemistry of iron and manganese complexes related to nitrile hydrolysis and oxalate breakdown in biological systems. Chris is currently researching at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in Golden, CO. At NREL, Chris focuses on computing software and workflows, electronic structure, and quantum computing as an emerging technology. Chris is a Senior IEEE and a Computer Society member.

Chris has contributed to 27 scholarly articles and book chapters across such topics as high-performance computing (HPC), hydrogenase, systems biology, electronic structure and chemical bonding, EPR spectroscopy, enzymology, and molecular biology. Chris has received several honors, including a Ruth L. Kirschstein NIH postdoctoral fellowship, NREL Director’s and President’s awards, and most recently Department of Energy recognition for his role in benchmark and performance testing for Eagle, NREL’s latest multi-petaflop high performance computing cluster.