David H. Bailey

"Computo ergo sum."

http://www.davidhbailey.com

Updated: 7 May 2013

Disclaimer

This site is owned and operated by David H. Bailey. Material on this site is provided for research purposes only, and does not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, the University of California, the U.S. Department of Energy or any other organization.

News

Affiliations

Bailey has two affiliations for his professional research work:
  1. Senior Scientist, Computational Research Dept., Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (March 1998 - present). Bailey will retire from LBNL in June 2013, but will continue as an active researcher.
  2. Research Fellow, Department of Computer Science, University of California, Davis (February 2013 - present).

Research overview

High performance computing. Bailey is a leading figure in the field of high-performance scientific computing, with research ranging from numerical algorithms to supercomputer performance studies. He authored a paper on a technique for performing the fast Fourier transform on parallel and hierarchical memory computers that is the now basis of almost all FFT implementations on modern computer systems. His paper "The NAS Parallel Benchmarks" is widely cited in performance studies of scientific computer systems. He currently serves as the assistant lead of the Sustained Performance, Energy and Resilience (SUPER) Institute, an 11-institution research project funded by the Office of Science in the U.S. Department of Energy. He has received both the Sidney Fernbach Award and the ACM Gordon Bell Prize. Among his publications, Bailey recently published (with Robert Lucas and Samuel Williams) the book Performance Tuning of Scientific Applications. In other work at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Bailey leads the Complex Systems Group, overseeing research in diverse areas ranging from cybersecurity to financial mathematics. He serves on the Steering Committee of the Supercomputing conferences, the most prestigious and widely attended conference series in the field.

Computational and experimental mathematics. Bailey is also a leading figure in the field of computational and experimental mathematics, with research applying high performance computing to problems in research mathematics. He is an author of two high-precision computation software packages that are widely used in the field. His best-known paper in this area (co-authored with Peter Borwein and Simon Plouffe) describes a new formula for pi that permits arbitrary digit calculation, which formula was discovered using Bailey's computer implementation of the PSLQ algorithm. In two more recent papers, Bailey, with his colleague Richard Crandall, demonstrated a connection between these formulas and a fundamental question about digit randomness. Bailey received the Chauvenet Prize and the Merten Hesse Prize from the Mathematical Association of America. He has co-authored four books on experimental mathematics. Several feature articles written by Bailey and his colleague Jonathan Borwein have recently appeared in the flagship publications Notices of the American Mathematical Society and the American Mathematical Monthly, the two most widely read periodicals in the field.

Other activities. Bailey and his colleague Jonathan Borwein jointly operate a website devoted to experimental mathematics. Together they write articles on science and mathematics in modern society for their blog (see "Blog" below), for the United States-based Huffington Post (see "Huffington Post articles" below), recently named the world's most influential blog/news site, and for the Australia-based Conversation (see "Conversation articles" below), which also has a wide international following.

Blogs

Bailey writes for two blogs, in addition to articles in the Huffington Post and the Conversation:

Books

Bailey has written one book on performance science, four books on computational and experimental mathematics, a CD-ROM reference. All of these books are available at Amazon.com or directly from the respective publishers. Further information on the experimental math books is available in the Books section of the experimental math website. The performance tuning book is available Here.

Conversation articles

Bailey and his colleague Jonathan Borwein have authored articles for The Conversation, an international forum of academic research and discussion based in Melbourne, Australia. A listing of these articles is available here: Conversation articles.

Experimental Mathematics

Bailey has published numerous research studies in the area of "experimental" (computer-assisted) mathematics, which establish that modern high-performance computer technology can be effectively utilized as a tool for mathematical research. Here is a website with additional information:

High-Precision Software Library

Bailey is a co-author of several software libraries for high-precision computation. These libraries include translation facilities so that one can use, with minor modifications, ordinary Fortran or C++ programs to perform high-precision calculations: http://crd-legacy.lbl.gov/~dhbailey/mpdist.

Huffington Post articles

Bailey and his colleague Jonathan Borwein have authored articles for the Huffington Post, a popular news and information based in the U.S. that was recently named the world's most influential blog/news site in a U.K. Guardian article. A listing of these articles is available here: Huffington Post articles.

Online Papers

Online copies of over 150 of Bailey's technical papers are available here: http://www.davidhbailey.com/dhbpapers

Online Talks

Online copies of many of Bailey's recent lectures are available here: http://www.davidhbailey.com/dhbtalks

Personal Websites

Some articles, papers, photos and other materials not directly related to Bailey's scientific research work are available at these websites:

Photos

Pi

In 1996, Peter Borwein (brother of Jonathan Borwein), Simon Plouffe and Bailey co-authored a paper that presents a new formula for pi:

This formula, now known as the "BBP formula for pi", permits one to compute the n-th binary or hexadecimal digit of pi, without computing the first n-1 digits, by means of a simple scheme that requires very little memory. It was discovered by Simon Plouffe using a computer program written by Bailey that implements a simplified version of Helaman Ferguson's "PSLQ" algorithm. More recently, Richard Crandall and Bailey have shown that there is a connection between the new pi formula and the centuries-old question of normality (ie, statistical randomness of digits in a certain sense) of pi and various other math constants. This work has been featured in recent Science News and Scientific American articles:

Resume

Bailey's detailed curriculum vitae (resume), including a list of publications, is available here: PDF.

Sustained Performance, Energy and Resilience (SUPER) Institute

Bailey is the assistant leader of a multi-institution, DOE-funded research program encompassing high-end performance optimization, automatic performance tuning, energy-efficient computing and resilient computing. Software, papers, talks and other material are available here: http://www.super-scidac.org

Websites of Interest