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John Michalakes

Senior Scientist

Photo of John Michalakes
Phone: 
(303) 275-4297
Email: 
John.Michalakes@nrel.gov

John Michalakes is a computer scientist and an expert in high-performance computing for earth system applications with NREL's Computational Science Center. He is working with NREL scientists on applying efficient, high-end computing infrastructure to wind energy research and prediction over scales ranging from sub-millimeter at turbine blade surfaces to mesoscale and larger scale atmospheric processes. Michalakes came to NREL from the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) where he led the software effort to design and build the Weather Research and Forecast (WRF) model. He was lead author on an SC'07 Gordon Bell finalist paper wherein WRF is scaled to record parallel threads of execution. Prior to work at NCAR, he worked at Argonne National Laboratory and was on the DOE team that developed the first parallel implementations of the NCAR Community Climate Model. Michalakes has developed tools and techniques for parallelizing large community models and systems of coupled models. His current research includes investigating GPU and other acceleration technology for earth system models.

See more at his personal Web site.

Research Interests 

  • Software architecture and programming models for HPC
  • Model coupling technology
  • Accelerators for scientific applications (e.g., GPU)
  • Application performance characterization and optimization.

Education 

  • 1988 M.S., computer science, Kent State University.

Selected Publications 

  1. Linford, J.; Michalakes, J.; Vaccharajani, M.; Sandu, A. (2009). "Multi-core Acceleration of Chemical Kinetics for Modeling and Simulation." Proceedings SC'09; Portland, Oregon.
  2. Michalakes, J.; Vachharajani, M. (December 2008). "GPU Acceleration of Numerical Weather Prediction." Parallel Processing Letters/World Scientific (18:4); pp. 531-548.
  3. Michalakes, J.; Hacker, J.; Loft, R.; McCracken, M.O.; Snavely, A.; Wright, N.; Spelce, T.; Gorda, B.; Walkup, B. (2007). "WRF Nature Run." Proceedings SC'07/Gordon Bell prize finalist; Portland, Oregon.
  4. Michalakes, J.; Dudhia, J.; Gill, D.; Henderson, T.; Klemp, J.; Skamarock, W.; Wang, W. (2004). "The Weather Research and Forecast Model: Software Architecture and Performance." Proceedings of the Eleventh ECMWF Workshop on the Use of High Performance Computing in Meteorology; October 25-October 29, 2004, Reading, United Kingdom. pp. 156-168.
  5. Michalakes, J. (2000). "The Same-Source Parallel MM5." Journal of Scientific Prog. (8); pp. 5-12.
  6. Michalakes, J.; Baillie, C.; Skålin, R. (1997). "Regional Weather Modeling on Parallel Computers." Parallel Computing (23); pp. 2135-2142.