GSLIS Associate Professor Victoria Stodden will speak at SC15 (formerly Supercomputing), the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis. The conference is an annual meeting of researchers, industry representatives, journalists, and others with an interest in high performance computing. It will be held on November 15-20 in Austin, Texas.
Stodden will deliver her talk titled, “Reproducibility in High Performance Computing,” on Wednesday, November 18.
Abstract: Ensuring reliability and reproducibility in computational research raises unique challenges in the supercomputing context. Specialized architectures, extensive and customized software, and complex workflows all raise barriers to transparency, while established concepts such as validation, verification, and uncertainty quantification point ways forward. The topic has attracted national attention: President Obama's July 2015 Executive Order, "Creating a National Strategic Computing Initiative," includes accessibility and workflow capture as objectives; an XSEDE14 workshop released a report, "Standing Together for Reproducibility in Large-Scale Computing"; on May 5, 2015, ACM Transactions in Mathematical Software began the Replicated Computational Results Initiative; and this conference is host to a new workshop, "Numerical Reproducibility at Exascale,” to name but a few examples. In this context, I will outline a research agenda to establish reproducibility and reliability as a cornerstone of scientific computing.
Stodden is a leading figure in the area of reproducibility in computational science, exploring how we can better ensure the reliability and usefulness of scientific results in the face of increasingly sophisticated computational approaches to research. Her work addresses a wide range of topics, including standards of openness for data and code sharing, legal and policy barriers to disseminating reproducible research, robustness in replicated findings, cyberinfrastructure to enable reproducibility, and scientific publishing practices. At Illinois, she holds affiliate appointments at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), College of Law, Department of Statistics, and Department of Computer Science. Stodden earned both her PhD in statistics and her law degree from Stanford University. She also holds a master’s degree in economics from the University of British Columbia and a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of Ottawa.