CURRICULUM VITAE
James Ahrens
Director, Information Science and Technology Institute
Los Alamos National Laboratory
Mail Stop T001, Los Alamos, NM 87545, USA
Phone: (505) 667-5797, Fax: (505) 665-4939, Email: ahrens@lanl.gov
BIOGRAPHY
Dr. James Ahrens is the Director of the Information Science and Technology Institute and a senior scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory. As one of six strategic centers within the National Security Education Center, the Institute supports the implementation of the Laboratory’s Information Science and Technology (IS&T) Strategy and promotes a strong sense of community among LANL’s IS&T researchers. The Institute provides outreach to the international community and serves as a mechanism for attracting students, postdocs, visiting scientists, and visiting faculty in information science and technology relevant to the national security missions of the Laboratory.
Dr. Ahrens has extensive management experience as a technical program manager. His primary research interests are visualization, computer graphics, data science and parallel systems. Ahrens is author of over 100 peer reviewed papers and the founder/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 over a two million times, and is in use at supercomputing and scientific centers worldwide. He has over twenty awards as a principal or co-investigator from the U.S. Department of Energy and the U.S. National Science Foundation. These awards have evolved in scope over the course of his career to multi-million dollar, interdisciplinary, data analysis/visualization projects involving multiple partners from academia, laboratories and industry. Ahrens is currently the U.S. Exascale Computing Project’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.
Dr. Ahrens provides leadership to the international visualization and graphics community. In November 2018, he was elected Chair of the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Visualization and Graphics (VGTC). The VGTC is the Visualization and Graphics Technical Committee, the governance body that oversees and sponsors all IEEE visualization and virtual reality conferences including VIS, VR, ISMAR, Pacific Vis, and EuroVis (as a co-sponsor). He is active in conference organization as the general chair for IEEE Visualization in 2017 and as papers chair in 2015 and 2016. He helped start the successful Large Data Analysis and Visualization Symposium (LDAV) held at IEEE Visualization.
Dr. Ahrens received his B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1989 and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Washington in 1996.
EDUCATION
Ph.D. in Computer Science, University of Washington, Seattle, 1996.
M.S. in Computer Science, University of Washington, Seattle, 1992.
B.S. in Computer Science, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 1989.
PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE
Director, Information Science and Technology Institute, Los Alamos National Laboratory, 2020-present
Project Manager / Control Access Manager (CAM) for Data and Visualization for the U.S. Exascale Computing Project (ECP) (~$12 Million in managed projects per year), 2018-present
Project Manager /CAM for Visualization and Data Analysis projects for ECP (~$5 million in managed projects per year), 2016-2018
Scientist 5 - Recognized Authority/International Leader, Los Alamos National Laboratory, 2010 - present
Project Manager for Visualization R&D and Production for LANL's Advanced Simulation and Computing (ASC) program ($4.5 million in managed projects per year), 2013-2016
Scientist 4 - Discipline Authority/National Leader, Los Alamos National Laboratory, 2008 - 2010
Project Manager for Visualization R&D for LANL's ASC program ($1.3 million in managed projects per year), 2009 -2013
Principal Investigator and Investigator for peer-reviewed research proposals (~$30 Million total funding) to the DOE Office of Science, Biology and Energy Research (BER) and Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR) Offices and LANL Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD), 2009-present
Team Lead for the Visualization team, 2005-2008
Technical Staff Member, 1996-2005
Graduate Research Assistant, Summer 1993-1994
Thinking Machines Corporation - Graduate Research Assistant, Summer 1991
General DataComm Incorporated, Intern, Summer 1987-1989
PROFESSIONAL ACTIVITIES
Research Areas and Expertise
Technical expertise in the areas of data science, visualization and parallel systems.
Management experience as R&D project manager and team leader.
Contributions to Open-source Software
Founder and design lead of ParaView, an open-source visualization tool designed to handle extremely large data.
Developed parallel VTK, a parallel visualization software infrastructure. ParaView is built upon parallel VTK.
Co-creator of PISTON a cross-platform software library providing hardware accelerated versions of frequently used operations for scientific visualization and analysis. VTK-m is a toolkit of scientific visualization algorithms for emerging processor architectures that incorporated ideas from three visualization acceleration tools, Dax, PISTON, EAVL.
Founder and design lead of Cinema, an open-source image-based in situ visualization and analysis tool.
Professional Service
Chair, IEEE Visualization and Graphics Technical Committee (VGTC), December 2018-July 2022.
Associate Editor, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Graphics, 2017-present.
Member, Visualization Executive Committee, 2018-2019.
Member, SciVIS Executive Committee, 2016-2019.
General Chair, IEEE Visualization, 2017.
SciVis Papers Co-Chair, IEEE Visualization, 2015-2016.
Executive Committee, SciDAC Scalable Data Management and Analysis and Visualization Institute, 2012-2017.
Guest Editor, IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications - Special Issue on Ultrascale Visualization, 2010.
Member, International Program Committee, IEEE Visualization, 2006-8.
Manuscripts Referee, IEEE Transaction on Visualization and Graphics, 2006 - present.
Conference & Workshop Organization
Organizing committee, “Gap Analysis: Materials Discovery through Data Science at Advanced User Light Sources" Workshop, Santa Fe, NM, October 2018.
Data science working group lead, Los Alamos' Regional Academic Collaboration (ReACt) Information Science, Santa Fe, March 2018.
Co-Workshop Chair with K. Keahey, DOE-sponsored Future of Online Analysis Platform workshop, Future Platform Workshop Report, April, 2017.
Visualization Researchers Lead, DOE Experimental and Observational Data Workshop, 2015.
Co-Founder and Executive Committee, IEEE Large Data Analysis and Visualization Symposium, 2012-2018.
Co-Program Chair, Eurographics Symposium on Parallel Graphics and Visualization, May 2-3, 2010.
Organizer, DOE Office of Science SciDAC 2008 Conference.
Co-Chair, Data analysis and visualization breakout, Office of Science Workshop on “Simulation and Modeling for Advanced Nuclear Energy Systems,” August 2006
Section Leader, Office of Science ASCR Visualization and Data Discovery Workshop, June 2007.
Organizer, DOE Office of Science Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR) PI meeting for Scientific Data Management, Analysis and Visualization for Lucy Nowell, DOE Office of Science Program Manager, Santa Fe, New Mexico, August 16-19, 2010.
Advisory & Review Committees
ASCR planning meeting on in situ data management, January 2019.
Sandia National Laboratory ASC Level 2 Milestone Review Committee, August 2018.
"Restructuring IEEE VIS for the future" workshop, BANFF, Canada, June 2018.
Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) Information, Science and Technology (IS&T) Data Science at Scale Lead, “HPC, Big Data, CyberSecurity” meeting with New Mexico (NM) Senate Staffers and NM University representatives, 2016.
“Frontiers of Visualization” Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) workshop, 2014.
Computing Environment and Life Sciences Directorate (CELS) at Argonne National Laboratory Review Committee, 2012.
J. Ahrens, B. Hendrickson, G. Long, S. Miller, R. Ross, D. Williams, "Data Intensive Science in the Department of Energy", white paper for the Office of Science and Technology Policy, Technical Report LA-UR-10-07088, August 2010.
Los Alamos National Laboratory - Information and Knowledge Sciences Capability Review Area Lead (Data Science at Scale), 2008, 2011, 2014.
DOE SciDAC Ultrascale Institute Advisory Board Member, 2006-2010.
Miscellaneous
U.S. Exascale Computing Project (ECP)’s Data and Visualization Area Project Lead, 2016-present.
Data Visualization and Analytics Exascale Planning Lead for DOE ASC/ASCR, 2011-2015.
DOE NNSA / Commissariat l'Énergie Atomique (CEA) High Performance Computing Visualization Collaboration Lead, 2009-2012.
Data Science Summer School Co-Lead, Summers 2013-2016.
US Department of Energy (DOE) Grant Proposal Reviewer, 2005-present
PEER REVIEWED PUBLICATIONS
39 Book Chapters and Journal Articles
Dr. Ahrens’s publication on ParaView in the Visualization Handbook has received over 1257 citations including citations in Nature Neuroscience, Proceeding of the National Academy of Science, and Public Library of Science. There are over 786 additional citations to ParaView, via its User Guide [ParaView Guide 2004 & 2007], highlighting its use in physics, chemistry, biology and geosciences.
76 Conference and Workshop Publications
[Best Paper Award] K. C. Tsai, R. Bujack, B. Geveci, U. Ayachit, J. Ahrens, “Approaches for In Situ Computation of Moments in a Data-Parallel Environment”, EuroGraphics Symposium on Parallel Graphics and Visualization, 2020.
[Best Paper Award] J.Lukasczyk, E. Kinner, J. Ahrens, H. Leitte, and C. Garth, "VOIDGA: A View-Approximation Oriented Image Database Generation Approach , IEEE 8th Symposium on Large Data Analysis and Visualization (LDAV), 2018.
[Best Paper Award] H. Carr, G. Weber, C. Sewell, J. Ahrens, "Parallel peak pruning for scalable SMP contour tree computation", IEEE 6th Symposium on Large Data Analysis and Visualization (LDAV), 75-84, 2016.
[Best Scientific Visualization & Data Analytics Showcase], F. Samsel, M. Petersen, G. Abram, T. Turton, D. Rogers, J. Ahrens, “Visualizing Ocean Currents and Eddies in a High-Resolution Global Ocean-Climate Model”, Proceeding of International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, & Analysis (SC), Supercomputing, 2015. https://vimeo.com/145875477
h-index 36, 5791 citations (Google Scholar)
PRESENTATIONS
49 Invited Presentations, Panels and Tutorials
Keynote, "Approaches to Massive Scientific Data Visualization and Analysis", 14th International Symposium on Visual Computing (ISVC '19), October 2019.
Keynote, “Supercharging the Scientific Process Via Data Science at Scale”, New York Scientific Data Summit, August 2017.
Keynote, “Supercharging the Scientific Process Via Data Science at Scale”, HPC Day at Virginia Tech, March 2017.
Keynote, “Towards a scalable, platform independent, user-friendly analysis framework for scientific and information oriented applications”, Chesapeake Large Scale Analytics Conference, October 2016.
Plenary presentation, “Supercharging the Scientific Process Via Data Science at Scale”, University of Groningen Centre for Data Science & Systems Complexity Opening Symposium, June 11, 2015.
Plenary presentation, “Implications of Numerical and Data Intensive Technology Trends on Scientific Visualization and Analysis”, SIAM Conference on Computational Science and Engineering, March 14-18, 2015.
Invited Plenary/Luncheon Speaker, "Data-intensive Applications on Numerically-Intensive Supercomputers", Los Alamos Computer Science Symposium, October 2009.
RESEARCH FUNDING
Successful proposed peer-reviewed research projects to numerous agencies including Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science, Biology and Energy Research (BER) and Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR) Offices, and LANL Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) over the past decade. Successful managed long-term multi-institutional, multi-person visualization research and development projects to produce both research publications and usable open-source software solutions to solve complex problems of interest to the Department of Energy.
Dates of the project: 10/2020-10/2024, Role: Co-Investigator, Annual funding: $300K, Project title: RAPIDS2, Funding organization: DOE, Office of Science, Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR), SciDAC
Dates of the project: 10/2018-10/2021, Role: Investigator, Annual funding: $200K, Project title: Non Negative Tensor Factorization, Funding organization: DOE, Los Alamos National Laboratory, LDRD
Dates of the project: 10/2017-10/2020, Role: Co-Investigator, Annual funding: $300K, Project title: RAPIDS - A SciDAC Institute for Computer Science and Data, Funding organization: DOE, Office of Science, Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR), SciDAC
Dates of the project: 10/2017-10/2020, Role: Principal Investigator, Annual funding: $650K/year (400K to LANL), Project title:Sample-based, Perceptually- and Cognitively-driven Visual Analysis of Massive Scientific Data Using an Asynchronous Tasking Engine, Funding organization: DOE, Office of Science, Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR)
Dates of the project: 1/2020-6/2023, Role: Principal Investigator, Annual funding: $3200K (1000K to LANL) Project title: ECP ALPINE: Algorithms and Infrastructure for In Situ Visualization and Analysis, Funding organization: DOE, Exascale Computing Project, Software Technology
Dates of the project: 1/2017-1/2020, Principal Investigator, Annual funding: Phase 1 - $2000K (650K to LANL), Project title: ECP ALPINE: Algorithms and Infrastructure for In Situ Visualization and Analysis, Funding organization: DOE, Exascale Computing Project, Software Technology
Dates of the project: 1/2017-1/2018, Role: Principal Investigator, Annual funding: $1200K, Project title: Cinema: Image-based Visualization and Analysis, Funding organization: DOE, Exascale Computing Project, Software Technology
Dates of the project: 1/2017-1/2018, Role: Principal Investigator, Annual funding: $1100K, Project title: BEE: Virtual Environments Project, Funding organization: DOE, Exascale Computing Project, Software Technology
Dates of the project: Phase 1 - 10/2016-10/2019, Phase 2 - 10/2019-6/2023 Role: Co-Investigator, Analysis Co-Lead, Annual funding: Phase 1 & 2 - $2500K (500K to LANL), Project title: Exasky: Computing the Sky at Extreme Scales, Funding organization: DOE, Exascale Computing Project, Applications
Dates of the project: 10/2016-10/2019, Role: Principal Investigator, Annual funding: $1650K, Project title: Real-time Adaptive Acceleration of Dynamic Experimental Science, Funding organization: DOE, Los Alamos National Laboratory, LDRD
Dates of the project: 10/2015-10/2016, Role: Co-Investigator, Annual funding: $50K/year, Project title: Big Data and Analytics for Induced Seismicity, Funding organization: DOE, EERE-Geothermal Technologies Office and Office of Fossil Energy
Dates of the project: 10/2015-10/2016, Role: Co-Investigator, Annual funding: $150K/year, Project title: Computing the Sky: Simulation and Analysis for Cosmological Surveys , Funding organization: DOE, Office of Science, SciDAC
Dates of the project: 10/2014-10/2017, Role: Principal Investigator, Annual funding: $500K/year (management total of 1000K: U. Texas, Virginia Tech and UNH), Project title: Optimizing the Energy Usage and Cognitive Value of Extreme Scale Data Analysis, Funding organization: DOE, Office of Science, Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR)
Dates of the project: 10/2011-10/2014, Role: Principal Investigator, Annual funding: $725K/year, Project title: Exploration and Evaluation of Exascale In Situ Visualization and Analysis Approaches, Funding organization: DOE, Office of Science, Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR)
Dates of the project: 10/2012-10/2017, Role: Principal Investigator, Annual funding: $400K/year (co-management role of Visualization portion of grant), Project title: SciDAC Scalable Data Management and Analysis and Visualization Institute, Funding organization: DOE, Office of Science, Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR) , SciDAC
Dates of the project: 10/2012-10/2015, Role: Co-Investigator, Annual funding: $115K/year, Project title: SciDAC Computation-Driven Discovery for the Dark Universe, Funding organization: DOE, Office of Science, Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR), SciDAC
Dates of the project: 10/2012-10/2015, Role: Co-Investigator, Annual funding: $80K/year, Project title: SciDAC Plasma Surface Interactions: Bridging from the Surface to the Micron Frontier through Leadership Class Computing, Funding organization: DOE, Office of Science, Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR), SciDAC
Dates of the project: 10/2011-10/2016, Role: Co-Investigator, Annual funding: $100K/year, Project title: Center for Exascale Simulation of Advanced Reactors (CESAR), Funding organization: DOE, Office of Science, Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR), SciDAC
Dates of the project: 10/2011-10/2016, Role: Co-Investigator, Annual funding: $200K/year, Project title: Exascale Co-Design Center for Materials in Extreme Environments, Funding organization: DOE, Office of Science, Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR), Co-Design
Dates of the project: 10/2011-10/2014, Role: Co-Investigator, Annual funding: $200K/year, Project title: Cocomans – Co-design of Next Generation Simulations, Funding organization: DOE, Los Alamos National Laboratory, LDRD
Dates of the project: 6/2010-6/2013, Role: Co-Investigator, Annual funding: $300K/year, Project title: Ultra-scale Visualization Climate Data Analysis Tools (UV-CDAT), Funding organization: DOE, Office of Science, Biology and Energy Research (BER)
Dates of the project: 10/2008-10/2011, Role: Principal Investigator, Annual funding: $750K/year, Project title: Remote Visualization for Petascale and Exascale Simulations, Funding organization: DOE, Office of Science, Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR)
Dates of the project: 10/2009-10/2012, Role: Co-Investigator, Annual funding: $350K/year, Project title: The Dark Universe, Funding organization: DOE, Los Alamos National Laboratory, LDRD
Dates of the project: 10/2009-10/2012, Role: Co-Investigator, Annual funding: $100K/year, Project title: Intelligent Wind Turbines, Funding organization: DOE, Los Alamos National Laboratory, LDRD