Staff Transitions & Recognition

Pat Worley

Pat Worley is Retiring

Pat Worley, former Group Lead of the E3SM Performance Group and a dedicated group member since the beginning of the E3SM project will be retiring. Pat is a Distinguished Member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and received DOE’s appreciation award for sustained technical leadership from the Office of Science in 2016. Pat served as a central pillar of the SciDAC Computer Science institutes across several iterations leading application engagement efforts and effectively applied Computer Science research to domain sciences for greater impact. Pat has been involved in DOE climate modeling from its beginning in the Computer Hardware, Advanced Mathematics and Model Physics (CHAMMP) program and through many subsequent iterations of DOE BER and SciDAC climate programs and numerous versions of the climate model from CCM to the present day. Among his many contributions are the first parallel implementations of spherical spectral transforms, the atmospheric physics block/chunking interface, a suite of sophisticated load-balancing algorithms, efficient reproducible sum implementations and the deployment of a comprehensive performance capture and archiving system. The physics block/chunk interface has served CESM and now E3SM well for over a decade, allowing scientists to optimize for cache use, vector length and OpenMP parallelism across several generations of CPU architectures. Using his extensive knowledge of the entire code base, algorithmic background and the data gathered by his profiling tools, Pat showcases unparalleled debugging skills, an instinct to focus on areas of the biggest impact and the initiative to tackle difficult issues. He is a great colleague and a generous mentor to students and early career research staff.

Throughout his time with E3SM, he was recognized for his outstanding work and dedication.

• 2020 E3SM Outstanding Achievement Award
  • “For his meticulous attention to detail and diligence in performing root-cause analysis of seemingly intractable problems and applying his encyclopedic knowledge of E3SM codebase to develop performant solutions.”
  • 2020 ESMD-E3SM Fall Awards 
• 2018 Phase 1 Leadership award
  • “As a thank you for the leadership in the Phase 1 of the project, to all the Group Leads”
  • E3SM Phase 1 Leaders Receive Awards
• Office of Science Award
  • “The Department of Energy recognized Patrick Worley, of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, for his sustained leadership to Office of Science particularly in the Offices of Biological and Environmental Research, Fusion Energy Sciences, and the Advanced Scientific Computational Research’s Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing program.  Dr. Worley navigated multiple generations of disruptive computational architecture changes within the SC leadership computing facilities, using his in-depth knowledge of both hardware and software properties, with persistent attention to algorithmic improvement, scalability and performance.  Dr. Worley was essential to the success and leadership of DOE’s computational climate modeling over decades, from the Computer Hardware Advanced Mathematics and Model Physics to the Accelerated Climate Modeling for Energy. Dr. Worley greatly improved the PIC gyrokinetic plasma turbulence codes and accelerated the science of magnetic confinement. He pioneered mixed MPI / OpenMP / Cuda and developed performance tools for particle domain decomposition and MPI communication patterns.“
  • 2016-16 Office of Science Award for Pat Worley (internal link)

Pat will be sorely missed!!

Holly Davis

Holly Davis is Taking a Leave of Absence

Holly Davis, the Managing Editor of the E3SM Floating Point Newsletter, dedicated editor, science writer, designer, software engineer and scientist will be going on a leave of absence. We will all miss her excellent work, professionalism, warm demeanor and contagious smile!!

A message from Holly Davis:

Dear Colleagues,

A couple of months ago a close family member of mine passed on unexpectedly. As a result, I have additional unforeseen responsibilities which are prompting me to take a leave of absence from my position at LLNL. This was not an easy decision to make since I have enjoyed working with everyone on the E3SM team, but family matters need to take priority at the moment. My leave began on Saturday, November 20, 2021, which precludes me from communicating with you via my LLNL email address, but I’d enjoy staying in touch via LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/hcdavis).

Sincerely,
Holly

Olga Tweedy

Olga Tweedy Joins DOE

AAAS Fellow Olga Tweedy recently joined the DOE Earth and Environmental System Modeling (EESM) program. Her main responsibility is working on the Artificial Intelligence for Earth System Predictability (AI4ESP) initiative.

For additional information see the news story on the Biological and Environmental Research, Earth and Environmental Systems Sciences website titled Olga Tweedy Joins EESM.