e-mail: Elbert@AmesLab.Gov
A native of Ames, Dr. Elbert received his Bachelor of Science in Chemistry at Iowa State University in 1968 and his Ph.D. in Theoretical Chemistry at the University of Washington in 1973. While a graduate student he developed, along with Larry McMurchie, Steve Langhoff and Prof. Ernest Davidson, one of the first general ab initio electronic structure codes, MELD (McMurchie-Elbert-Langhoff-Davidson), using a CDC 6400. From 1973-1975 he was a Postdoctoral Fellow with Prof. Dr. Sigrid Peyerimhoff at the Institute for Physical and Theoretical Chemistry of the University of Bonn, Germany. Converting MELD to run on an IBM 370/165 in Bonn made him a firm believer in writing portable, modular code.
Returning to Ames in 1975, he developed, in collaboration with Prof. Klaus Ruedenberg, ALIS, the first successful, and portable, Multiconfiguration Self Consistent Field program. ALIS uses the most efficient "standard" four-index transformation known, an algorithm Dr. Elbert developed. Along with Mike Schmidt, he applied the concepts developed in ALIS to the more general program GAMESS. Dr. Elbert's code can also be found in HONDO and MOLPRO (after a stay with Hans-Joachim Werner when he was still at the University of Bielefeld, Germany, in 1988). Throughout the 80's, he worked with just about every kind of computer hardware made: VAXen, PCM's, Cray's, FPS and a zoo of Unix workstations. He managed the acquisition of the first parallel computer at Iowa State, an eight-processor Silicon Graphics 4D/280, in 1988.
In 1992 Dr. Elbert began a two year assignment in Washington, DC, with the Department of Energy's Mathematical, Information, and Computational Sciences Division of the Office of Computational and Technology Research within the Office of Energy Research. During this time he was Executive Director of the ESnet Steering Committee and Program Manager for the High Performance Computing Research Centers run by DOE.
Returning to Ames in 1994, he assumed the duties of Head of the Scalable Computing Lab. While at the SCL he initiated projects to build clusters of workstations using various processors ( MIPS R4600, Intel Pentium Pro and DEC 21164) and network fabrics (ATM, Fast Ethernet, Gigabit Ethernet and Myrinet). This culminated in a series of workshops in 1997. Another innovative project was the development of a wireless network that spans the city of Ames. This system uses inexpensive spread spectrum 915 MHz bridges from Karlnet to provide up to two Megabits of bandwidth into the homes of SCL investigators. This network has been used as a model for linking school buildings in small Iowa towns to the Internet inexpensively.
In the fall of 1997 Dr. Elbert returned to the MICS Division at DOE to manage the Grand Challenge Applications Program. This effort was barely begun when he was lured to the National Science Foundation to direct the new PACI Program (Partnerships for Advanced Computational Infrastructure) within the Advanced Computational Infrastructure and Research (ACIR) Division of the Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Directorate of NSF.
Dr. Elbert is interested in many aspects of high performance computing and communication, including performance analysis (he is a co-author of the R&D 100 Award winning SLALOM), programming paradigms, portability, multimedia, public key cryptography, security, distributed computing, video teleconferencing (he brought the MBONE to Ames Lab and ISU), telecommuting, and community networking.
Contact:Steve Elbert elbert@AmesLab.gov
Page prepared by
Steve Elbert