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IMPACT July-August 2012

J U L Y / A U G U S T   2 0 1 2

"What's New in XSEDE" (previously "News from XSEDE") is a monthly e-newsletter providing information on scientific discoveries made possible by the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment, as well as the people, places, and programs involved. XSEDE is a five-year high-performance computing project supported by the National Science Foundation.

XSEDE Scholars earn First Place award in XSEDE12 cluster competition

Five of the six-member winning team in the XSEDE12 cluster competition.

Five of the six-member winning XSEDE Scholars team in the XSEDE12 programming competition.

As part of the inaugural conference, XSEDE12 included a day-long Student Programming Contest, and a group of XSEDE Scholars earned the top honors.

The programming competition engages students and creates an excitement for high-performance computing. Participants attending the Chicago conference in July included high school, undergraduate and graduate students, who formed 11 teams comprised of students from Clark Atlanta University, the University of Michigan, the University of Notre Dame Summer Scholars Program, and the XSEDE Scholars Program. Each team received identical computational resources -- a LittleFe unit running the Bootable Cluster CD software stack -- and a set of 10 problems from various scientific problem domain areas, and they had seven hours to complete solutions to the problem set and submit them to contest organizers. The winners were announced during the awards luncheon held on the final day of the conference.

"This year's XSEDE Scholars were a particularly talented and impressive group of students," said Richard Tapia, director of the XSEDE Scholars program and keynote speaker for XSEDE12.

"I left the XSEDE12 conference energized by these young leaders," he said, "and am very proud that the winning team of the student programming contest was made up of our Scholars."

Tapia also is a mathematician, the Maxfield-Oshman Professor in Engineering, and director of the Center for Excellence and Equity in Education at Rice University and director of the Empowering Leadership Alliance.

The winning team of undergraduate and graduate students included Nancy Carlos, Melissa Estrada, David Manosalvas, Justin Peyton, Grace Silva and Manuel Zubieta. The team was coached by Alice Fisher, XSEDE Scholars manager, also of Rice University. Earning the Second Place award was a team from the University of Michigan.

Three members of the winning team recently talked about their participation in the contest:

"Collaborative work was really important since it allowed us to tackle problems quicker and with a higher level of accuracy, as well as academic diversity, which enabled us to have more than one approach to each problem. ... It was a great learning experience, and I am glad I got to be part of it."
--David Manosalvas

"Since the competition lasted for seven hours, our team made a conscious effort to enjoy the time we had working with each other."
--Manuel Zubieta

"Though my programming experience was minimal, I found it both interesting and challenging to attempt complicated problems."
--Nancy Carlos

Read more about the XSEDE Scholars program arrow to link
Read about the wrapup of XSEDE12arrow to link

SDSC's CIPRES Science Gateway clarifies branches in evolution's 'Tree of Life'

The San Diego Supercomputer Center is making it easier and faster for scientists to use data on evolutionary relationships through the Cyber Infrastructure for Phylogenetic RESearch (CIPRES) Science Gateway. The web-based resource provides access to huge amounts of data and removes some of the barriers to conducting analysis of that data.

A recent success story on the use of the CIPRES gateway involves Massachusetts high school student Arman Bilge, who won First Place in his state's science fair for his map and timeline of the spread of the HIV virus across the Americas. Bilge analyzed the data through simultaneous computing runs on CIPRES.

Read more about the CIPRES Gateway arrow to link

PSC's MARC program builds bioinformatics expertise at minority universities

The Minority Access to Research Careers (MARC) program at Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) has evolved over a period of more than 10 years from individual training in an emerging discipline -- bioinformatics -- to development of curricula and research programs at minority-serving institutions. Through XSEDE, faculty and grad students at these MSIs gain access to data-processing and analysis tools for next-generation sequencing data. The program is helping encourage more underrepresented students to pursue research and careers in bioinformatics.

Read more about the MARC program at PSC arrow to link

Hubble ACS Image of Elliptical Galazy M87.

Hubble ACS Image of Elliptical Galaxy M87, one of the specific galaxies where Karl Gebhardt's team weighed the dark matter content. Dark matter exists in the halo of the galaxy (i.e., the outermost regions). This image shows a jet coming from a black hole at the center of the galaxy.

Reaching, researching between stars

The Hobby-Eberly Telescope Dark Energy Experiment (HETDEX) runs thousands of simulations of a single galaxy on Lonestar at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) to find the one that best matches observations, which shows the most likely distribution of dark matter. "We are learning a lot and are finding a different answer than what most theorists had predicted," says Karl Gebhardt, one of the principal investigators for HETDEX and a professor at the University of Texas at Austin. 

Read more about HETDEX at TACC arrow to link

Fluorish representing nutshell.XSEDE in a nutshell

Following are events, deadlines and opportunities related to XSEDE.