ICYMI: Dr. Victoria Stodden’s Entire SC15 Invited Talk – “Reproducibility in High Performance Computing”

The team behind the SC15 Invited Talks program took on the ambitious goal of recording as many of the Invited Talks as possible so that those who could not attend the session, could still benefit from the content. We will be profiling these sessions over the next several months.  The first video is Dr. Victoria Stodden’s talk on “Reproducibility in High Performance Computing.”

Content Background:

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 29, 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 released a “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.

Speaker Background:

Dr. Victoria Stodden

Dr. Victoria Stodden is an associate professor in the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, with a faculty appointment at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. She completed both her PhD in statistics and her law degree at Stanford University.

Her research centers on the multifaceted problem of enabling reproducibility in computational science. This includes studying adequacy and robustness in replicated results, designing and implementing validation systems, developing standards of openness for data and code sharing, and resolving legal and policy barriers to disseminating reproducible research.

She is the co-chair the Advisory Committee for the National Science Foundation’s Division of Advanced CyberInfrastructure, and is a member of the NSF CISE directorate’s Advisory Committee.