CV

CURRICULUM VITAE   

James Ahrens

Director, Information Science and Technology Institute (ISTI)

Los Alamos National Laboratory

Mail Stop T001, Los Alamos, NM 87545, USA

Phone: (505) 667-5797, Email: ahrens@lanl.gov

Biography

    Dr. James P. Ahrens is the Director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory’s Information Science and Technology Institute. He received in B.S. in computer science in 1989 from the University of Massachusetts, a M.S. and a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Washington in 1992 and 1996. He became a Technical Staff Member in the High-Performance Computing division at Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1996. Dr. Ahrens is well-known as the founder and design lead of ParaView, an open-source visualization tool designed to handle extremely large data.  ParaView is broadly used for scientific visualization, has been downloaded almost three million times, and is in use worldwide at supercomputing centers, national laboratories, universities, and industry. The number of downloads of ParaView has increased on average by thirteen thousand downloads per year for the past twenty years. Dr. Ahrens researched, designed, and developed the key abstractions, approaches and algorithms that support the visualization and analysis of massive scientific data on supercomputers. His work has stood the test of time. Dr. Ahrens research work has been cited over eight thousand times on topics including large scale scientific visualization, rendering, compression, in situ and image-based approaches.  Dr. Ahrens has over thirty-one awards as principal investigator/project lead from across program offices in the Department of Energy. The awards have evolved in scope over the course of his career to multi-million dollar, interdisciplinary projects involving multiple laboratory and academic partners. Dr. Ahrens is recognized for his leadership role as the U.S. DOE Exascale Computing Project’s Data and Visualization lead for seven storage, data management and visualization supercomputing software projects including efforts to make high-impact packages such as HDF5, ParaView, Visit, and MPI-IO exascale-ready. Industry partners such as NVIDIA and Intel have delivered their hardware-accelerated volume rendering (NVIDIA Index) and raytracing (Intel OSPRay) advances in ParaView. Dr. Ahrens’s expertise is sought by laboratory leadership and academia, for example, he was co-chair of the LANL IS&T LDRD Directed Research science committee for the past three years, provided regular briefing on data management for AI/ML, and was an associated editor for the IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics. Dr. Ahrens is a Fellow of the IEEE Visualization Graphics Technical Community (VTGC) Visualization Academy and recipient of the IEEE Golden Core Member Service Award. Dr. Ahrens provides leadership to the international visualization and computer graphics community. From 2019-2022, he was the elected chair of the IEEE VGTC, the governance body that oversees and sponsors all IEEE visualization and virtual reality conferences. Dr. Ahrens is an international authority on visualization and data science, has published 140 peer-reviewed publications and book chapters, and has received multiple best paper awards. 

Education 

     Ph.D. Computer Science, University of Washington, Seattle, 1996

     M.S. Computer Science, University of Washington, Seattle, 1992

     B.S. Computer Science, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 1989

Professional Experience 

     Director, Information Science and Technology Institute, LANL 2020-present

     Scientist 5, Recognized Authority and International Leader, LANL, 2010-present

     Scientist 4, Discipline Authority/National Leader, LANL, 2008-2010

     Team Lead, Visualization Team, LANL, 2005-2008

     Technical Staff Member, LANL, 1996-2005

     Graduate Research Assistant, LANL, 1993

     Graduate Research Assistant, Thinking Machines Inc., 1991

     Intern, General DataComm Inc., Summers 1987-1989

Project Leadership

    Large projects (>=$1M per year)

     Supporting Cutting Edge Information Science & Technology Research… (PI), DOE LANL LDRD, $1.3M to $1.7M, ‘24-‘26

     Data Science Infrastructure Project (PI), DOE NNSA LANL ASC, $1.2M to $2.75M, ‘22-‘25

     ALPINE: Algorithms and Inf. for In Situ Vis…, (L4 PI) DOE Exascale Computing Project [ECP], $2M to $3M, ’17-‘23

     Data and Visualization Portfolio, (L3 PI), DOE ECP, managed 7 projects/$12M, ‘18-‘23

     Cinema: Image-based Visualization and Analysis, (L4 PI), DOE ECP, $1.2M, ’17-’18

     BEE: Virtual Environments Project, (L4 PI), DOE ECP, $1.2M, ’17-’18

     Real-time Adaptive Acceleration of Dynamic Experimental Science, (PI), DOE LANL LDRD, $1.7M, ’16-‘19

     Visualization Portfolio, (L3 PI), DOE ECP, managed 3 projects/$5M, ‘16-‘18

     Visualization Research & Development and Production, NNSA LANL ASC, $4.5M, ’13-‘16

     Visualization Research & Development, NNSA LANL ASC, $1M, ’09-‘13

     Smaller projects (<$1M per year)

     Enabling Cosmic Discoveries in the Exascale Era, (Co-I), DOE SC ASCR SciDAC, $100K per year, ’24-present

     Fighting Fire with Fire: Enabling a Proactive Approach to Wildland Fire, (Co-I), DOE LANL LDRD, $100K, ’22-‘23

     Foundational Research Information Science & Technology Research… (PI), DOE LANL LDRD, $750K, ’21-‘23

     Exasky: Computing the Sky at Extreme Scales, (Co-I), DOE ECP, (co-I), $500K, ’16-‘23

     Computing the Sky: Simulation and Analysis, (Co-I), DOE SC ASCR SciDAC, $500K, ’15-‘16

     Big Data and Analytics for Induced Seismicity, (Co-I), DOE EERE & FE, $50K, ’15-‘16

     Optimizing the Energy Usage and Cognitive Value of Extreme Scale Data Analysis … DOE SC ASCR, (PI), $500K, ’14-‘17

     Non-Negative Tensor Factorization, (Co-I), DOE LANL LDRD, $200K, ’18-‘21

     RAPIDS: Computer Science Institute, (Co-I), DOE SC ASCR SciDAC, $300K, ’17-present

     Sample-based, Perceptually- and Cognitively-driven Visual Analysis of Massive Data… DOE SC ASCR, (PI), $650K, ’17-‘20

     Scalable Data Management and Analysis and Visualization Institute, (Co-PI), DOE SC ASCR SciDAC, $400K, ’12-‘17

     Computation-Driven Discovery for the Dark Universe, (Co-I), DOE SC ASCR SciDAC, $100K, ’12-‘15

     Plasma Surface Interactions, (Co-I), DOE SC ASCR SciDAC,, $80K, ’12-‘15

     Center for Exascale Simulation of Advanced Reactors, (Co-I), DOE SC ASCR Co-Design, $100K, ’11-‘16

     Exascale Co-Design Center for Materials in Extreme Environments, (Co-I), DOE SC ASCR Co-Design, $200K, ’11-‘16

     Exploration and Evaluation of Exascale In Situ Visualization and Analysis Approaches … DOE SC ASCR, (PI), $700K, ’11-‘14

     Co-design of Next Generation Simulations, (Co-I), DOE LANL LDRD, $200K, ’11-‘14

     Ultra-scale Visualization Climate Data Analysis Tools (UV-CDAT), DOE SC BER, (Co-I), $300K, ’10-‘13

     The Dark Universe, (Co-I), DOE LANL LDRD, $350K, ’09-‘12

     Intelligent Wind Turbines, (Co-I), DOE LANL LDRD, $100K, ’09-‘12

     Remote Visualization for Petascale and Exascale Simulations, DOE SC ASCR, (PI), $700K, ’08-‘11

Honors and Awards

     Fellow of the IEEE VGTC Visualization Academy, 2023

      IEEE Golden Core Member, 2023

      Best Paper Award, IEEE Symposium on Parallel Graphics and Visualization, 2020

      Best Paper Award, IEEE Symposium Large Data Analysis Visualization, 2018

      Best Paper Award, IEEE Symposium Large Data Analysis Visualization, 2016

      Best Scientific Visualization & Data Analytics Showcase, IEEE Supercomputing, 2015

Technical Areas of Expertise 

     Visualization and Computer Graphics, Data Science and High-Performance Computing

Founder and Design Lead of Open-Source Software

       ParaView – a visualization tool for extremely large data sets, used worldwide, close to 3M downloads

       Parallel VTK – a HPC parallel infrastructure for ParaView using the Visualization Toolkit (VTK)

       PISTON - a cross-platform, data parallel, GPU-based visualization and analysis library 

       Cinema – an image-based in situ visualization and analysis tool

       Data Science Infrastructure Project - a metadata/data management library for scientific ML on HPC systems

Peer-reviewed Publications

    140 peer-reviewed publications

    h-index of 39, 8569 citations

Google Scholar results for paraview.org

    h-index of 80, 34989 citations 

      This metric documents citations in publications to the website paraview.org. For comparison, the top cited    

      ParaView publication is Chapter 36, of the Visualization Handbook, by Ahrens, Geveci, Law, and is cited 2528   

      times. The 34989 citations capture the much broader impact of ParaView for the scientific community.

Presentations

     9 Keynote and plenary presentations at conferences, symposiums, and university events, ‘09-present

     42 invited presentations, panels and tutorials at conferences and symposiums, ‘98-present

Professional Activities

      Steering and Executive Committees

      Member, EuroVis Steering Committee, ‘22-present

      Director, IEEE Visualization and Computer Graphics Technical Community (VGTC) Executive Committee, ’22-present

      Elected Chair, IEEE VGTC Executive Committee, ’19-‘22 

      Member, IEEE Visualization Executive Committee, ’16-‘19

      Co-Founder and Executive Committee Member, IEEE Large Data Analysis and Visualization Symposium, ’12-‘18

      Member, SciDAC Scalable Data Management, Analysis and Visualization Institute Executive Committee, ‘12-‘17 

      Member, DOE SciDAC Ultrascale Institute Advisory Board, ‘06-‘10

     Academic and Laboratory Review 

      Associate Editor, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Graphics, ’17-‘22

      Scientific Visualization Papers Co-Chair, IEEE Visualization Conference, ’15-16 

      Review committee member, Computing Environment and Life Sciences Directorate Capability Review, ‘12.

      Guest Editor, IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, Special Issue on Ultrascale Visualization, ‘10

      Co-Program Chair, Eurographics Symposium on Parallel Graphics and Visualization, ‘10

      International Program Committee Member, IEEE Visualization, ’06-‘08

      Manuscripts Referee, IEEE Transaction on Visualization and Graphics, ’06-present

      Proposal reviewer, for Offices of the US Department of Energy (DOE), ‘05-present

     Conference and Workshop Leadership

     Co-lead, “Envisioning Science in 2050”, DOE SC ASCR, OSTI Report ID: 1871683, ‘22

      Co-chair, “Future of Online Analysis Platform”, DOE SC ASCR, OSTI Report ID: 1634770, ‘18

      Organizing committee, LANL workshop, “Gap Analysis: Materials Discovery through Data Science…”, ’18

      Participant, “Restructuring IEEE VIS for the future”, BANFF, ’18

      General Chair, IEEE Visualization Conference, ‘17

      Section lead, “Management, Analysis and Visualization of … Data”, DOE SC ASCR, OSTI Report ID: 1525145, ‘15    

      LANL lead on DOE response to White House Big Data and Privacy 90-day study, ’14

      Co-organizer, DOE SC ASCR, Scientific Data Management, Analysis and Visualization PI Meeting, ’10

      Visualization collaboration lead, NNSA/CEA HPC collaboration meeting, ‘09-‘12

      Area lead, LANL IKS Capability Review, Data Science Area, ‘08, ‘11, ‘14

      Co-organizer, DOE SC ASCR, SciDAC PI Meeting, ’08

      Section lead, DOE SC ASCR, Visualization and Data Discovery Workshop, ‘07

      Breakout lead, DOE SC, Simulation and Modeling for Advanced Nuclear Energy Systems, ‘06

     Knowledge transfer to community via reports

      “Assessment of data-management infrastructure needs for … ML and AI”, OSTI Report ID: 2212844, ‘23

      “ECP Software Technology Capability Assessment”, OSTI Report ID: 1888898, ‘22

      “Case Study of In Situ Data Analysis in ASC Integrated Codes”, LANL ASC L2 Milestone, OSTI Report ID: 1091315, ‘13

      “Scientific Discovery at the Exascale”, DOE SC ASCR, OSTI Report ID: 1198987, ‘11

      “Data Intensive Science in the Department of Energy”, white paper for OSTP, OSTI Report ID: 1029569, ‘10

      “Visualization on the Supercomputing Platform”, LANL ASC L2 Milestone, OSTI Report ID: 1048818, ‘10   

       Miscellaneous

      DOE “Q” security clearance

       ORCID: 0000-0001-9378-282X