Large-scale behavioral simulations

As the director of the computational sciences division in the USC Viterbi School of Engineering's Information Sciences Institute (ISI), Robert Lucas directs research in applied mathematics, programming models, compilers, performance analysis, Very Large- Scale Integration (VLSI) design, and battlefield simulation. His previous positions include head of the High-Performance Computing Research Department at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and deputy office director in the Information Technology Office at the Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency (DARPA).

For more than two decades, Lucas has been a leader in the development of parallel solvers for sparse linear systems and has spearheaded a wide range of research in computational science. His distributed memory multifrontal codes have been used in electrical and mechanical engineering codes, both in academe and industry. Most recently, he has developed a distributed-memory eigensolver.

Lucas also is active in the performance engineering of large-scale, scientific and engineering codes. For the Department of Energy's Office of Science, he is the coordinating principal investigator of the Performance Engineering Research Center SciDAC Institute. For DARPA's High-Productivity Computing Systems Program (HPCS), Lucas directs the Petascale Execution Time project, comprising researchers at two Department of Energy laboratories and three universities. He also has participated in the National Science Foundation's Next Generation Software project, using compiler-generated experiments to automate performance tuning.

Lucas and his ISI team work on large-scale behavioral simulations. They recently have demonstrated a two-order-of-magnitude increase in the number of individual entities that can be simulated. Their work has been used successfully by the United States Joint Forces Command in its Urban Resolve experiments and has prompted the broader forces modeling community in the Department of Defense to start using high-end computing systems.