AGENDA

Science in the Cloud

Alexander Szalay

Abstract: The talk will present current trends and challenges facing large scale scientific computations, with a particular emphasis on data-intensive problems. We will argue that in realistic scenarios the data will rarely be co-located, thus we need to address distributed data challenges and analysis strategies.

About Alex Szalay: Alexander Szalay is the Alumni Centennial Professor of Astronomy at the Johns Hopkins University. He is also Professor in the Department of Computer Science. He is a cosmologist, working on the statistical measures of the spatial distribution of galaxies and galaxy formation. He was born and educated in Hungary. After graduation he spent postdoctoral periods at UC Berkeley and the University of Chicago, before accepting a faculty position at Johns Hopkins. In 1990 he has been elected to the Hungarian Academy of Sciences as a Corresponding Member. He is the architect for the Science Archive of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. He is Project Director of the NSF-funded National Virtual Observatory. He has written over 340 papers in various scientific journals, covering areas from theoretical cosmology to observational astronomy, spatial statistics and computer science. In 2003 he was elected as a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2004 he received an Alexander Von Humboldt Prize in Physical Sciences, in 2008 a Microsoft Award for Technical Computing.