Since joining Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in 2000, Dr. Ghaleb Abdulla has established himself as a visionary leader in data-driven research, championing projects that thrive on collaboration and innovative data sharing. Over more than two decades, he has forged strategic partnerships with universities and research institutions, greatly expanding LLNL’s influence in high-performance computing (HPC) and large-scale data analysis.

Dr. Abdulla’s expertise has been instrumental in a series of groundbreaking initiatives. He played a pivotal role in the AQSim project, enabling approximate queries over massive simulation datasets to accelerate scientific discovery. As a major contributor to the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, he helped design a multi-petabyte database, facilitating unprecedented astronomical data collection and analysis.

At the National Ignition Facility, Dr. Abdulla applied advanced machine learning techniques to inspect and predict optics damage, significantly enhancing operational reliability and efficiency. He has also harnessed state-of-the-art data management and analytics to improve HPC energy efficiency, advancing LLNL’s commitment to sustainable computing.

Demonstrating the global impact of his work, Dr. Abdulla recently led a project with the Cancer Registry of Norway, developing personalized cancer prevention and treatment strategies. By integrating pattern recognition, machine learning, and time-series statistical analysis, his team advanced the understanding of cervical cancer screening data, directly improving public health outcomes.

Dr. Abdulla also led the Earth System Grid Federation—an international collaboration that manages a global climate database serving thousands of users across six continents. His leadership ensured that vital climate data remains accessible to researchers worldwide, supporting critical Earth system science and policy decisions.

Currently, Dr. Abdulla serves as a Subject Matter Expert, to help transform the Department of Energy’s National Security Enterprise (DOE NSE) through digital transformation initiatives. In this role, he is developing comprehensive data strategies, establishing data governance structures and policies, and designing enterprise architectures to support robust data management, sharing, and analytics.

Dr. Abdulla holds a PhD in computer science from Virginia Tech and continues to inspire innovation and collaboration in every endeavor he undertakes.

Doctoral Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA Computer Science, Ph.D. 1998

Masters Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA Computer Science, M.S. 1993

Undergraduate Yarmouk University, Jordan Electrical and Computer Engineering, B.S. 1984

Selected Publications:

1. Soper, B. C., Nygård, M., Abdulla, G., Meng, R., & Nygård, J. F. (2020). A hidden Markov model for population‐level cervical cancer screening data. Statistics in Medicine, 39(25), 3569-3590. 2. Jiang, M., Gallagher, B., Chu, A., Abdulla, G., & Bender, T. (2020, January). Exploiting Spark for HPC Simulation Data: Taming the Ephemeral Data Explosion. In Proceedings of the International Conference on High Performance Computing in Asia-Pacific Region (pp. 150-160). 3. Kelly Kochanski, Divya Mohan, Jenna Horrall, Barry Rountree, Ghaleb Abdulla, “Deep learning predictions of sand dune migration,” Computer Science, Mathematics, ArXiv, 2019 4. J Gaylord, S Ruppert, G Abdulla, D Laney – “DOE Data Day Workshop Report,” 2019 – osti.gov 5. Marathe, Aniruddha and Zhang, Yijia and Blanks, Grayson and Kumbhare, Nirmal and Abdulla, Ghaleb and Rountree, Barry L., “An empirical survey of performance and energy efficiency variation on Intel processors,” Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Energy Efficient Supercomputing, SC17 6. Marathe, Aniruddha and G. Abdulla and B. L. Rountree and K. Shoga, “Towards a Unified Monitoring Framework for Power, Performance and Thermal Metrics: A Case Study on the Evaluation of HPC Cooling Systems,” in 2017 IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium Workshops (IPDPSW), pp. 974-983, 2017 7. T. Patki, N. Bates, G. Ghatikar, A. Clausen, S. Klingert, G. Abdulla, and M. Sheikhalishahi, “Supercomputing centers and electricity service providers: a geographically distributed perspective on demand management in Europe and the United States,” in International Conference on High Performance Computing. Springer, 2016, pp. 243–260 8. N. Bates, G. Ghatikar, G. Abdulla, G. A. Koenig, S. Bhalachandra,M. Sheikhalishahi, T. Patki, B. Rountree, and S. Poole, “Electrical grid supercomputing centers: an investigative analysis of emerging opportunities and challenges,” Informatik Spektrum, vol. 38, no. 2, pp. 111–127, 2015 9. Abdulla, G. M. “Determining Risks: Insight to the Norwegian Cervical Cancer Data” NLS days, Sweden, September 14’th, 2016 10. Delmar B. Davis, Hazeline U. Asuncion, Ghaleb Abdulla, and Wren Carr “Towards Recovering Provenance with Experiment Explorer,” The Fifth International Conference on Information, Process, and Knowledge Management (2 th), February 24 – March 1, 2013, Nice, France 11. Delmar B. Davis, Hazeline U. Asuncion, Ghaleb Abdulla “Experiment Explorer: Lightweight Provenance Search over Metadata” TaPP 2012 : 4th USENIX Workshop on the Theory and Practice of Provenance

 

• DOE Secretary’s Appreciation Award 2017
• Outstanding mentor award, 2017
• Emerging Leadership (LLNL) 2004
• Service Award (LLNL) 2005
• Spot Award (LLNL CASC Division)