James Ahrens

James Ahrens is a senior scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory. His primary research interests are visualization, computer graphics, data science and high performance computing. Dr. Ahrens is author of over 140 peer reviewed papers that have been cited more than 8500 times. He is the founder/design lead of ParaView, an open-source visualization tool designed to handle extremely large data. ParaView is broadly used for scientific visualization, it has been downloaded close to three million times, and is in use at supercomputing and scientific centers worldwide. 

Director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) - Information Science and Technology Institute (ISTI) 

Dr. Ahrens is the director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory Information Science and Technology Institute.   ISTI is chartered to foster high-quality research efforts, specialized recruiting, and strategy development that will enable LANL’s Information Science & Technology (IS&T) Pillar and advance new IS&T ideas.  ISTI sponsors opportunities for strategic research as well as training and development for students, postdocs, and staff at Los Alamos National Laboratory. These activities include summer school programs, student and postdoc fellow programs, rapid response research calls, university collaborations, training workshops, and seminar talks. More information can be found on the LANL ISTI site.

Lead of the Exascale Computing Project - Data and Visualization Area 

Dr. Ahrens was the U.S. Exascale Computing Project (ECP)’s Data and Visualization lead for seven storage, data management and visualization projects that will be a key part of a vibrant exascale supercomputing application and software ecosystem.  More information can be found on the ECP Website and in the ECP Software Technology Capability Assessment Report. Technical work on the project completed at the end of 2023.

Contact 

Phone: (505) 667-5797, Fax: (505) 665-4939, Email: ahrens at lanl.gov, Web: http://datascience.lanl.gov