Special Section: 2010 Copper Mountain Conference

Abstract

The biennial Copper Mountain Conference on Iterative Methods was held April 4–9, 2010. This meeting included more than 140 presentations covering many scientific computing areas, such as uncertainty quantification, optimization, Markov chains, saddle-point systems, inverse problems, direct factorizations, Krylov methods, algebraic multigrid, software frameworks, and advanced computer architectures. A partial list of the represented application domains included acoustic scattering, material science, circuit simulation, neutron transport, image processing, magnetohydrodynamics, and porous media flow. Howard Elman (University of Maryland) and Ray Tuminaro (Sandia National Laboratories) served as co-chairs. Management services were provided by Annette Anthony of Front Range Scientific Computations, Inc. The Conference is gratefully for financial support from the Department of Energy, IBM, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories, and the National Science Foundation. The Copper Mountain Conference is organized in cooperation with the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM). Submissions to this special section were open to the public. This was advertised in advance on web sites of the SIAM Journal on Scientific Computing (SISC) and the Copper Mountain Conference. The collection of papers in this section all center on iterative methods. However, many diverse topics are covered spanning contributions with a theoretical orientation to those that are more applied or driven by a specific application area. Additionally, several papers are highly influenced by current computer architecture trends. Some of the submissions also appeared in the student paper competition, a unique event at the Copper Mountain conferences that has proven to be a successful forum for presenting the latest results in the field. We have had increasingly strong participation from talented recent Ph.D. holders and current Ph.D. students in this competition. I wish to thank the guest editorial board, the SIAM/SISC staff, and the referees for their hard work to help meet deadlines. Special acknowledgment is due to Mitch Chernoff (SIAM Publications Manager) and Heather Blythe (SIAM Senior Publications Coordinator) for their efforts on this special section. We hope that this special section will continue to foster new developments in this important area of research. The diversity of topics clearly demonstrates the significant impact of iterative methods across many scientific computing areas and the need for continued research.