National organization selects OSC leader to help direct outreach efforts
Urbana, Ill. (May 5, 2011) – The Great Lakes Consortium for Petascale Computation (GLCPC) announced during their annual board meeting that Steven I. Gordon, Ph.D., interim co-executive director at the Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC), has been selected as president-elect for the coming year.
GLCPC members collaborate to expand the number of faculty, research staff, and students directly engaged with the development petascale computing in a variety of areas, including education, research and outreach.
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Steven I. Gordon, PhD.
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Currently representing the most powerful computers in the world, petascale computing refers to computation done mostly at national labs using a system capable of reaching performance in excess of one petaflop, i.e. one quadrillion floating point operations per second. Petascale computing is used to do advanced computation in fields such as weather and climate modeling, nuclear reaction simulations, cosmology and quantum chemistry.
Gordon is currently the interim co-executive director at OSC and directs the Ralph Regula School of Computational Science (RRSCS). As director of RRSCS, he manages multi-institution programs in computational science at both two- and four-year colleges and universities across the state and has begun new certificate programs aimed at providing similar training for those currently in the workforce.
He has collaborated on a number of national community-wide programs including the Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure Education Program, the EPIC project, and Teragrid.
Gordon has served as The Ohio State University (OSU) representative to the Board of Directors of GLCPC since its inception. Member institutions include universities and colleges, national laboratories, the Southeastern Universities Research Association, educational foundations, and K-12 school districts that are developing educational and workforce development programs to help realize the full potential of petascale computing. To facilitate widespread, effective use of petascale computing, the GLCPC has coordinated multi-institutional efforts to advance research, practice, and education in petascale-class computer and computational science and engineering to real-world problems.
Over the past several years, Gordon has been responsible for a major portion of the SC education program, organizing the workshops on computational science in engineering and computational thinking and providing leadership in the design of the entire program. He is also the editor-in-chief of the new online journal, the Journal of Computational Science Education, which is a publication of the Shodor Educational Foundation.
He has also played a significant role in several programs in Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics education for high school and middle school students, including the Summer Engineering STEM Academy and the Young Women’s Summer Institute.
In addition to his administrative duties, Gordon is a professor in City and Regional Planning and Environmental Science at OSU. He teaches courses in geographic information systems, environmental planning, and environmental modeling and undertakes research in watershed modeling and management.
Gordon graduated cum laude from State University of New York at Buffalo with a bachelor of arts degree. He earned a master’s degree and Ph.D. from Columbia University in geography with a specialization in environmental systems.
The Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC) addresses the rising computational demands of academic and industrial research communities by providing a robust shared infrastructure and proven expertise in advanced modeling, simulation and analysis. OSC empowers scientists with the vital resources essential to make extraordinary discoveries and innovations, partners with businesses and industry to leverage computational science as a competitive force in the global knowledge economy, and leads efforts to equip the workforce with the key technology skills required to secure 21st century jobs. For more, visit www.osc.edu.
