IMPACT January 2012
J A N U A R Y 2 0 1 2
News from XSEDE is a monthly enewsletter providing information on scientific discoveries made possible by the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment and the people, places and programs involved. XSEDE is a five-year high-performance computing project supported by the National Science Foundation.
Announcing the XSEDE12 conference Call For Participation
XSEDE invites participation in its inaugural conference, XSEDE12, in the form of papers, panels, posters, visualizations, Birds of a Feather sessions, and tutorials. See details regarding the Call For Participation, including submission guidelines and key dates, via the link below.
XSEDE12 - "Bridging from the campus to the extreme and beyond" -- builds on the success of the recent TeraGrid conferences, offering a full agenda, networking opportunities, and all that the host city of Chicago has to offer. The conference is located at the InterContinental Chicago (Magnificent Mile) and runs from July 16-19, 2012, with XSEDE meetings to follow on July 20. Registration opens in May.
Read more about the CFP 
Read more about XSEDE12
XSEDE's Phil Blood talks about XSEDE in podcast
In this recent podcast from the Research Computing and Engineering (RCE) blog, Phil Blood, senior scientific specialist at PSC, talks about HPC, the transition from TeraGrid to XSEDE, and what XSEDE offers to researchers.
TACC data center heat meets its match in mineral oil submersion system
The Texas Advanced Computing Center is helping test a system for cooling computers via liquid submersion. Although liquid cooling has been around for awhile, TACC is helping to prove that the latest enhancements to the concept from Green Revolution Cooling make it a reasonable, cost-effective alternative to air-cooled systems. The liquid-cooled servers also were showcased during the recent supercomputing conference, SC11, during which a team of students from The University of Texas at Austin earned the best non-GPU-fueled high-performance Linpack (HPL) score in the student cluster competition.
The accompanying photo shows two servers sitting just below the surface of the GreenDEF™ dielectric fluid coolant at the Texas Advanced Computing Center.
Photo by Mike Yetter, Green Revolution Cooling, 2010. Used with permission.
See the video and read more about TACC's liquid cooling system
NCSA helps filmmakers show dangers of 'space junk'
A new IMAX movie showing the dangers of orbiting "space junk" includes visualizations produced at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. TeraGrid resources were used to compile data and create the simulation on which the visualizations were based..
Read more about NCSA and 'Space Junk 3D'
PSC collaborates with SGI on shared-memory enhancement
Through a collaborative effort of the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center and SGI, enhancements to the NSF-funded Blacklight during the past year increased its productivity and effectiveness as a national HPC and XSEDE resource.
Read more about the PSC-SGI collaboration
Gordon supercomputer makes big debut at SDSC; uniquely facilitates handling large amounts of data
Scientific problems are becoming more complex, involve larger teams of researchers, include increasing amounts of data, and require more powerful supercomputers to make use of that data. The San Diego Supercomputer Center's new supercomputer, Gordon, an XSEDE resource, makes use of flash memory to speed up the process of accessing and analyzing data and will help further the study of earthquakes, asteroids, the financial market, and climate change, and much more. Pictured in front of Gordon are SDSC Director Michael Norman (right) and SDSC Assistant Director Allan Snavely (left).
Photo by K.C. Alfred, San Diego Union-Tribune.
Read San Diego Union-Tribune story on Gordon debut
See Fox News video about Gordon
Fungi and renewable fuels: NICS helps researchers look to nature for answers about efficient biofuel production
Kraken -- an XSEDE resource -- and Athena supercomputers at the National Institute for Computational Sciences are helping scientists discover effective ways to produce biofuels from plants.
Read more about biofuel research enabled by NICS
PRACE and XSEDE prepare for HPC summer school in Dublin
The Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE) and XSEDE have collaborated to offer the third European-U.S. Summer School on HPC Challenges in Computational Sciences. The school is intended to help graduate students and postdocs learn more about HPC and foster new partnerships among the presenters and attendees. The event runs June 24-28, 2012, in Dublin, Ireland.
Details and application will be available soon -- check for link on XSEDE homepage
XSEDE in a nutshell
Following are events, deadlines and opportunities related to XSEDE: