Hank Childs Computer Systems Engineer, Visualization Group, Computational Research Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Professional Researcher, Department of Computer Science, University of California, Davis Contact info: Hank Childs Lawrence Berkeley National Lab 1 Cyclotron Road, Mailstop 50F1614 Berkeley, CA 94720-8139 Email: hchilds (at) lbl.gov Phone: +1-510-486-4154 Fax: +1-510-486-5812 At UC Davis: Office: Kemper 3059 Phone: +1-530-752-0152

About Me

Affiliation: I am a member of the visualization group at Lawrence Berkeley Lab and a researcher in the Computer Science Department at UC Davis. I began at Lawrence Berkeley in June of 2009.

VisIt: I am the architect of the VisIt project and also an active developer. VisIt is an end user visualization and analysis tool for very large data. It has become quite popular and has an active user community. I was part of the original development team, along with some very talented people at Lawrence Livermore.

Roles:

• Chief Software Architect of VACET, a center dedicated to visualizing and analyzing large data in the SciDAC program of the Office of Science.
• Visualization lead for the Reactor Campaign for NEAMS, the simulation effort in the Office of Nuclear Energy.
• Member of the NERSC Analytics team, which provides analytics support for NERSC users. NERSC is the flagship high performance scientific computing facility for research sponsored by the Office of Science.
• I will be the Chief Software Architect of an NSF XD visualization center, which was recently announced.

Previous Affiliations: I spent ten years at Lawrence Livermore Lab, from 1999 to 2009. I was part of the ASC program, primarily doing VisIt development, but also as the Shape Characterization lead for the V&V program in ASC. I also had roles in the SciDAC and NEAMS programs that have continued at LBL.

As a student, I worked at IBM in Tucson, AZ, for two stints totalling nine months.

Education:

• BS @ UC Davis, in Math & Computer Science, in 1999
• PhD @ UC Davis, in Computer Science, in 2006
  • Advisor: Nelson Max
  • Thesis: An Analysis Framework Addressing the Scale and Legibility of Large Scientific Data Sets

Recent Web Articles

"Recent" means that I will keep these links here until they go dead.

• VizWorld writeup of our VisIt tutorial at IEEE Visualization 2009. October 11, 2009
• Scientific Computing article on trillion zone runs. August 27, 2009
• VizWorld speculating on the importance/meaning of the trillion zone run articles. August 27, 2009
• Wired article on the Vis Night winners. I did this one. August 19, 2009
• Technology Review article where I'm quoted quite a bit about in situ visualization. August 10, 2009
• LBNL's blurb announcing that I've come to LBNL. July 31, 2009
• HPCwire article on trillion zone runs. June 10, 2009
• VizWorld article on trillion zone runs. June 10, 2009

Presentations

Here's my best effort at collecting the talks I've given over the last few years. I'm sure that I've missed a lot.

I frequently give variations of the same three talks:

• Why Petascale Visualization and Analysis Will Change the Rules
• Overview of the VisIt Project
• VisIt, What Analysis Should We Be Doing?, and How Will We Do It With Big Data?

Keynote Presentations

• REVISE09. Why Petascale Visualization Will Change the Rules, Atlantic City, NJ, October, 2009.
• ICCS 2008. Why Petascale Visualization and Analysis Will Change the Rules, Krakow, Poland, June, 2008.

Invited Presentations

• CScADS 2009. Overview of the VisIt Project, Lake Tahoe, NV, August, 2009.
• Turbulent Mixing and Beyond 2009. VisIt, What Analysis Should We Be Doing?, and How Will We Do It With Big Data?, Trieste, Italy, July, 2009.
• Blue Waters Workshop. Why Petascale Visualization and Analysis Will Change the Rules, Urbana-Champaign, IL, October, 2008.
• CScADS 2008. Why Petascale Visualization and Analysis Will Change the Rules, Snowbird, Utah, July, 2008.
• Fall Creek Falls 2007. Why Petascale Visualization and Analysis Will Change the Rules, Nashville, TN, September, 2007.
• SciDAC 2007. Why Petascale Visualization and Analysis Will Change the Rules, Boston, MA, June, 2007.
• CESC 2007. VisIt: a Flexible Integrated Visualization and Analysis Environment, Washington DC, April, 2007.

Presentations of Technical Papers

• EGPGV 2006. A Scalable, Hybrid Scheme for Volume Rendering Massive Data Sets, Braga, Portugal, May 2006. (Presentation made by Kwan-Liu Ma on behalf of Hank.)
• SpringSim06. Beyond Meat Grinders: An Analysis Framework Addressing the Scale and Complexity of Large Data Sets, Huntsville, AL, April, 2006.
• Vis05. A Contract-Based System for Large Data Visualization, Minneapolis, MN, October, 2005.

Other Presentations

• NERSC Users Group Meeting, NERSC Analytics Accomplishments and Plans, Boulder, CO, October, 2009. (Presentation authors: Jacobsen, Bethel, Childs, & rest of Analytics Group)
• NEAMS PI Meeting, Visualization and Analysis Activities for NEAMS, Germantown, MD, October, 2009.
• Department of Defense Users Group Conference 2009. VisIt, What Analysis Should We Be Doing?, and How Will We Do It With Big Data?, San Diego, CA, June, 2009.
• NEAMS Workshop. VisIt, What Analysis Should We Be Doing?, and How Will We Do It With Big Data?, Argonne, IL, May, 2009.
• SIAM Computational Science and Engineering (CSE09) (Mini-Symposium on Python). VisIt and Python, Miami, FL, March, 2009.
• Louisiana State Colloquium Series. Overview of the VisIt Project, Baton Rouge, LA, October, 2008.
• DOECGF 2008. What's New In VisIt?, Duck, NC, April, 2008.
• JOWOG 34 VisIt and Shape Characterization, Los Alamos, NM, May 2007.
• DOECGF 2007. What's New In VisIt?, Boulder, CO, April, 2007.

Tutorials
I put together a tutorial on how to use the VisIt software. The tutorial varies from session to session, but the loose outline can be found here. The format has two presenters trading off between sections. Big props to my colleagues: Sean Ahern (Oak Ridge National Lab), Jeremy Meredith (ORNL), Dave Pugmire (ORNL), and Allen Sanderson (University of Utah).

• (Upcoming) SC09, Childs & Ahern, Portland, OR, November 2009.
• IEEE Visualization 2009, Childs & Ahern, Atlantic City, NJ, October 2009.
• NERSC Users Group Meeting 2009, Childs, Tech-X Corporation, Boulder, Co, October 2009.
• ACTS Workshop 2009, Childs, Berkeley, Ca, August 2009.
• Tutorial for users at Princeton University and Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, Childs & Sanderson, Princeton, NJ, July 2009.
• SciDAC 2009, Childs & Pugmire, San Diego Supercomputing Center, San Diego, CA, June 2009.
• CScADS 2008, Childs & Meredith, Snowbird, Utah, July 2008.
• SciDAC 2008, Childs & Ahern, Microsoft Research Center, Seattle, WA, July 2008.
• SciDAC 2007, Ahern & Childs, MIT, Cambridge, MA, June 2007.

I have also participated in a non-VisIt tutorial: Visualization of Time-Varying Vector Fields, organized by Christoph Garth.

Publications

Book Chapters

• E. W. Bethel, H. Childs, A. Mascarenhas, V. Pascucci, Prabhat. Scientific Data Management Challenges in High Performance Visual Data Analysis. In A. Shoshani and D. Rotom, eds., Scientific Data Management: Challenges, Existing Technology, and Deployment. Chapman and Hall/CRC Press, 2008
• Benjamin F. Gregorski, David F. Wiley, Hank Childs, Bernd Hamann, Kenneth I. Joy, "Adaptive Contouring with Quadratic Tetrahedra" in Scientific Visualization: The Visual Extraction of Knowledge from Data, 2006.

Journal Articles

• Hank Childs. "Architectural challenges and solutions for petascale postprocessing" in Journal of Physics, Conference Series, volume 78, Proceedings of SciDAC 2007.
• Kenneth I. Joy, Mark Miller, Hank Childs, E. Wes Bethel, John Clyne, George Ostrouchov, Sean Ahern. "Frameworks for Visualization at the Extreme Scale" in Journal of Physics, Conference Series, volume 78, Proceedings of SciDAC 2007.
• Edwin J. Kokko, Harry E. Martz, Jr., Diane J. Chinn, Henry R. Childs, Jessie A. Jackson, David H. Chambers, Daniel J. Schneberk, and Grace A. Clark, "As-Built Modeling of Objects for Performance Assessment", Journal of Computing and Information Science in Engineering, volume 6, issue 4, 2006.

Conference Proceedings

• D. Pugmire, H. Childs, C. Garth, S. Ahern, G. Weber, "Scalable Computation of Streamlines on Very Large Datasets." SC09, Portland, OR, November, 2009
• O. Ruebel, Prabhat, K. Wu, H. Childs, J. Meredith, C.G.R. Geddes, E. Cormier- Michel, S. Ahern, G.H. Weber, P. Messmer, H. Hagen, B. Hamann and E.W. Bethel, "High Performance Multivariate Visual Data Exploration for Extremely Large Data." SC08, Austin TX, November, 2008.
• D. Pugmire, H. Childs, S. Ahern. "Parallel Analysis and Visualization on Cray Compute Node Linux" In Proceedings of the Cray Users Group Meeting, May 2008.
• G.H. Weber, V. Beckner, H. Childs, T. Ligocki, M. Miller, B. van Straalen, E.W. Bethel. "Visualization of Scalar Adaptive Mesh Refinement Data" in: Numerical Modeling of Space Plasma Flows: Astronum-2007 (Astronomical Society of the Pacific Conference Series), volume 385, pp. 309-320, 2008.
• Gunther H. Weber, Vincent E. Beckner, Hank Childs, Terry J. Ligocki, Mark C. Miller, Brian Van Straalen and E. Wes Bethel. "Visualization Tools for Adaptive Mesh Refinement Data" in Proceedings of the 4th High-End Visualization Workshop, 2007.
• Hank Childs, Mark A. Duchaineau, Kwan-Liu Ma, "A Scalable, Hybrid Scheme for Volume Rendering Massive Data Sets", in Eurographics Symposium on Parallel Graphics and Visualization, 2006.
• Hank Childs, Mark Miller, "Beyond Meat Grinders: An Analysis Framework Addressing the Scale and Complexity of Large Data Sets", in SpringSim High Performance Computing Symposium (HPC 2006).
• Hank Childs, Eric S. Brugger, Kathleen S. Bonnell, Jeremy S Meredith, Mark Miller, Brad J Whitlock, Nelson Max, "A Contract-Based System for Large Data Visualization", in Proceedings of IEEE Visualization 2005.
• David Fang, Gunther H. Weber, Hank Childs, Eric S. Brugger, Bernd Hamann, Kenneth I. Joy, "Extracting Geometrically Continuous Isosurfaces from Adaptive Mesh Refinement Data", in Proceedings of 2004 Hawaii International Conference on Computer Sciences.
• David F. Wiley, Hank Childs, Bernd Hamann, Kenneth I. Joy, "Ray Casting Curved-Quadratic Elements", in Data Visualization 2004.
• David F. Wiley, Hank Childs, Benjamin F. Gregorski, Bernd Hamann, Kenneth I. Joy, "Contouring Curved Quadratic Elements", in Data Visualization 2003, Proceedings of VisSym 2003.
• David F. Wiley, Hank Childs, Bernd Hamann, Kenneth I. Joy, Nelson Max, "Best Quadratic Spline Approximation for Hierarchical Visualization", in Data Visualization 2002, Proceedings of VisSym 2002.
• David F. Wiley, Hank Childs, Bernd Hamann, Kenneth I. Joy, Nelson Max, "Using Quadratic Simplicial Elements for Hierarchical Approximation and Visualization", in Visualization and Data Analysis 2002, Proceedings.

Miscellaneous

• E. Wes Bethel, Chris Johnson, Charles Hansen, Claudio Silva, Steven Parker, Allen Sanderson, Lee Myers, Martin Cole, Xavier Tricoche, Sean Ahern, George Ostrouchov, Dave Pugmire, Jamison Daniel, Jeremy Meredith, Valerio Pascucci, Hank Childs, Peer-Timo Bremer, Ajith Mascarenhas, Ken Joy, Bernd Hamann, Christoph Garth, Cecilia Aragon, Gunther Weber, and Prabhat. "Seeing the Unseeable" SciDAC Review, Number 8, pp 24-33. LBNL-472E, Summer 2008.
• E.W. Bethel, C. Johnson, C. Aragon, Prabhat, O. Ruebel, G. Weber, V. Pascucci, H. Childs, P.-T. Bremer, B. Whitlock, S. Ahern, J. Meredith, G. Ostrouchov, K. Joy, B. Hamann, C. Garth, M. Cole, C. Hansen, S. Parker, A. Sanderson, C. Silva, X. Tricoche. "SciDAC Visualization and Analytcs Center for Enabling Technologies -- Strategy for Petascale Visual Data Analysis Success." CTWatch Quarterly, Volume 3, Number 4, November 2007.

Awards

• R&D 100 Award for the VisIt visualization and analysis software. Fellow awardees were Eric Brugger, Sean Ahern, Kathleen Bonnell, Linnea Cook, Jeremy Meredith, Mark Miller, and Brad Whitlock.
• Best Paper Award (in category), with co-author Mark Miller, SpringSim06. Beyond Meat Grinders: An Analysis Framework Addressing the Scale and Complexity of Large Data Sets, Huntsville, AL, April, 2006.
• People's Choice Award, SciDAC Vis Night 2009, for Simulation of the Turbulent Flow of Coolant in an Advanced Recycling Nuclear Reactor. Movie credits go to Hank Childs, Paul Fischer, Aleks Obabko, Dave Pointer, and Andrew Siegel.

Service

• Conference Organization:
• SciDAC 2009, Program Committee, Organizing Committee, and co-Organizer of Vis Night 2009. San Diego, CA, June 2009.
• Department of Energy Computer Graphics Forum (DOECGF), 2009, Technical Chair. Monterey, CA, April 2009.
• Workshop participation:
  • ASCR Visualization and Data Discovery Workshop, June, 2007, Salt Lake City, UT
  • NEAMS Enabling Technologies (led working group on visualization), September, 2008, Livermore, Ca
  • Fusion Exascale Workshop, March, 2009, Washington DC
• Reviewer:
• DOE SBIR Program
• IEEE Visualization conference
• EuroVis conference
• Computer Graphics & Applications