Upcoming Conferences. Workshops and Festivals
OGF34
March 12-15, 2012 – Oxford, England
OGF Event Programs seek to strengthen existing, and engage new, user communities within OGF, provide a forum to foster new relationships and collaborations based on common interests, and develop best practices and technical specifications related to distributed systems, grids and clouds. In addition to OGF's chartered groups and Birds of a Feather (BoF) sessions, the Program Committee is soliciting proposals for content that support its mission of accelerating grid and cloud adoption in both research and industry. For more information and to register, please visit http://www.ogf.org/OGF34/registration.php.
GlobusWORLD 2012
April 10-12, 2012 – Chicago, Illinois
The 10th annual GlobusWORLD conference will be held April 10-12, 2012 at Argonne National Laboratory. The leading event for Globus users worldwide, GlobusWORLD offers over two days of presentations, tutorials, and networking opportunities for users, developers and resource owners. The 2012 theme is “Move. Store. Collaborate.” Presentations will focus on how Globus technologies help researchers move their data where they need it, store it for easy access, and collaborate with others via simplified sharing and management. For more information on the conference, including highlights and registration information, please visit http://globusworld.org/.
2nd Annual USA Science and Engineering Festival
April 28-29, 2012 – Washington, DC
Building on the success of the inaugural Science Festival in 2010, the 2nd USA Science & Engineering Festival will inspire the next generation of scientists and engineers with school programs and nationwide contests throughout the 2011/2012 school year and this event is the finale expo. The Science Festival is the nation’s largest celebration of all things science and engineering and features over 2,000 hands-on activities and over 150 performances. There will be exciting new programs including a Book Fair, Featured Science & Engineering Authors and a Career Pavilion that includes a College Fair, a Job Fair and a Meet the Scientist/Engineer Networking area.. For more information, please visit http://www.usasciencefestival.org/?utm_source=Everyone&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=December+14th+2011+Newsletter.
2012 Broadening Participation in Data Mining Workshop – Call for Participation
April 27-28, 2012 – Anaheim, California
The primary aim of the workshop is to foster mentorship, guidance, and connections of underrepresented groups in Data Mining, while also enriching technical aptitude and exposure. This workshop provides a venue in which to encourage students from such groups to connect with junior and senior research members in industry, academia, and government. The hope is to create and help grow meaningful lasting connections between researchers, thereby strengthening the Data Mining Community. Workshop sponsors include CRA-W, CDC, NSF, and Robert Bosch. For more information and to apply for the workshop, please visit http://dataminingshop.com/application.php.
NSF-Sponsored Interdisciplinary Workshop on Computational Thinking Through Computing and Music
June 21-22, 2012 – Lowell, Massachusetts
The University of Massachusetts, Lowell Departments of Music and Computer Science are pleased to offer our first NSF-sponsored interdisciplinary Performamatics workshop on Computational Thinking through Computing and Music. The purpose of this workshop is to share our techniques and materials and to provide an environment in which other pairs of professors can work together to develop interdisciplinary relationships and materials of their own to use in courses at their home institutions. Workshop participants are required to attend in interdisciplinary pairs, preferably from the same institution. This will ensure that the workshop itself models interdisciplinary collaboration and produces outcomes that connect directly to participants' own situations. Professors and instructors from 2- and 4-year colleges are encouraged to attend. For more information and to apply, please visit http://teaching.cs.uml.edu/~heines/TUES/ProjectHome.jsp.
International Workshop on Runtime and Operating Systems for Supercomputers (ROSS 2012) – Call for Participation
June 25-29, 2012 – Vienna, Italy
Submission Deadline – March 30, 2012
The complexity of node architectures in supercomputers increases as we cross petaflop milestones on the way towards Exascale. Increasing levels of parallelism in multi- and many-core chips and emerging heterogeneity of computational resources coupled with energy and memory constraints force a reevaluation of our approaches towards operating systems and runtime environments. The International Workshop on Runtime and Operating Systems for Supercomputers provides a forum for researchers to exchange ideas and discuss research questions that are relevant to upcoming supercomputers. For more information and submission guidelines, please visit http://www.mcs.anl.gov/events/workshops/ross/2012/
XSEDE Happenings
Call for Nomination of Speakers for the XSEDE12 Conference
XSEDE is seeking speakers for three sessions during the XSEDE12 conference:
- Keynote and plenary session on Tuesday morning, July 17
- Plenary session on Wednesday morning, July 18
- Awards ceremony at banquet lunch on Thursday, July 19
Of particular interest is a potential speaker with any of the following characteristics or perspectives, someone who …
- Has done leading-edge scientific research with XSEDE
- Has as-yet unmet needs related to advanced cyberinfrastructure and can set goals for XSEDE to try to achieve
- Is a cyberinfrastructure expert
- Can speak about societal benefits from (or needs for) advanced scientific cyberinfrastructure
- Has extensive knowledge of the history of advanced scientific computing and can talk about our community's history
Please forward nominations to xsede12-keyleads@xsede.org. Include the nominee's name, contact information, why you think the person is a good choice, and what he or she might talk about. A copy of a CV is preferred but not required.
Call for SC12 HPC Educators Program Sessions Proposals
Submission Deadline – April 27, 2012
SC12 will continue the tradition of offering a high-quality education program, providing interested attendees with the opportunity to learn from and interact with internationally recognized experts teaching undergraduate and early career students in all areas of computational science and engineering, computer science and engineering, high performance computing, networking, and storage. We invite you to submit a proposal for an HPC Educators Program session to share your experience teaching these topics to undergraduate students, with emphasis on curriculum development and pedagogy. The SC12 HPC Educators Program sessions will run concurrently with the SC Tutorials Program. For more information and submission guidelines, please visit http://sc12.supercomputing.org/content/call-sc12-hpc-educators-program-sessions-proposals.
XSEDE Training News
XSEDE Releases New Online Tutorial on Using the Lustre File System
The Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) project has released a new online tutorial titled "Using the Lustre File System" in CI-Tutor. This tutorial provides users of high-performance computing applications with a basic understanding of the Lustre file system and how to use it to achieve optimal I/O performance. Lustre, a blend of the words Linux and cluster, is open-source storage architecture for cluster computing environments. It is an object-based, parallel-distributed file system that enables scaling to tens of thousands of nodes, petabytes (PB) of storage, and high aggregate throughput up to hundreds of gigabytes per second. These features make Lustre advantageous for many scientific computing applications across a broad range of domains. Lustre file systems are used in computer clusters ranging from small workgroup clusters to large-scale, multi-site clusters. A number of the top supercomputers in the world use it, such as the Kraken XT5 at the National Institute for Computational Sciences/University of Tennessee. Information on XSEDE resources using Lustre can be found on the XSEDE Storage web page. To read further, please visit https://www.xsede.org/new-online-lustre-file-system-tutorial.
Research News and Announcements
UC San Diego Electrical Engineers Build “No-Waste” Laser
A team of University of California, San Diego researchers has built the smallest room-temperature nanolaser to date, as well as an even more startling device: a highly efficient, “thresholdless” laser that funnels all its photons into lasing, without any waste. The two new lasers require very low power to operate, an important breakthrough since lasers usually require greater and greater “pump power” to begin lasing as they shrink to nano sizes. The small size and extremely low power of these nanolasers could make them very useful components for future optical circuits packed on to tiny computer chips, Mercedeh Khajavikhan and her UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering colleagues report in the Feb. 9 issue of the journal Nature. To read further, please visit http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/pressreleases/electrical_engineers_build_no_waste_laser/.
The Blind Codemaker
Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Tel Aviv University, and Google have developed a coding scheme that guarantees the fastest possible delivery of data over fluctuating wireless connections without requiring prior knowledge of noise levels. The system works by creating one long codeword for each message, and then breaking that codeword up into smaller but still effective codewords. "The transmission strategy is that we send the first part of the codeword [and] if it doesn’t succeed, we send the second part, and so on," says MIT professor Gregory Wornell. When the first part, which was too noisy to decode, is combined with the second and any subsequent parts, the system creates a new encoding message for a higher level of noise. Once the receiver has received enough symbols to decode the underlying message, it signals the sender to stop. To read further, please visit http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2012/error-correcting-codes-0210.html.
Kenya ICT Board and Carnegie Mellon University Launch International Software Standard
Researchers at the Kenya ICT Board (KICTB) and Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) launched Chipuka, a certification program for Kenya's software developers in the country that aims to create an international standard for software development skills. The need for such a program arose after KICTB visited Silicon Valley and marketed the country as a software development destination, says Bitange Ndemo, Kenya's permanent secretary at the Ministry of Information. The Chipuka project will run as a trial with 500 developers expected from the first round in April 2013. Ndemo says the number of certified developers should increase to about 1,000 depending on the initial success of the program. "Kenya needs to quantify [its software development industry] and the best way to do this will to build a software certification program that [information technology] firms such as IBM and others will identify with," says CMU's Randal Bryant. To read further, please visit http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/news/software/3336503/kenya-ict-board-cmu-launch-international-software-standard/.
U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE's) Berkeley Lab to Use Climate to Help Cool Exascale Systems
The U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE's) Berkeley Lab has started building a computing center that will one day hold exascale systems. DOE recently gave Congress a report outlining a plan to deliver exascale computing by 2019-2020 and its expected cost. Berkeley's Computational Research and Theory (CRT) facility will use outside air cooling, relying on the Bay Area's cool temperatures to meet its needs about 95 percent of the time, says CRT's Katherine Yelick. The evaporative cooling method involves hot water being transported into a tower where evaporation helps it cool. The 140,000-square-foot building, expected to be ready in 2014, will enable Berkeley Lab to combine offices that are split between two sites, and it will be large enough to house two supercomputers, including exascale-sized systems. The exascale system will be able to reach 1 quintillion floating point operations per second. The Berkeley facility "is very representative of what we have that's best in the United States in research, in innovation," says DOE secretary Steve Chu. To read further, please visit http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9224062/U.S._to_use_climate_to_help_cool_exascale_systems..
NSF Releases Report on Cloud Computing
The National Science Foundation (NSF) recently released a report on the organization's support for cloud computing, describing the research as a vital area of national importance that requires further research and development. The report highlights some of the 125 cloud computing research awards issued by NSF's Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) directorate between 2009 and 2011, in fields such as architecture, algorithms, big data, security and privacy, and green computing. "The CISE directorate is currently considering future directions for cloud computing research under the working title Science and Engineering of Cloud Computing, [which] is intended to address the important questions of how to design correct and efficient future cloud systems, rather than how to utilize existing cloud systems," the report says. The research is a collaboration between various technical areas, including computer systems, networks, security, computer architecture and software, and databases and data-intensive computing. To read further, please visit http://www.cccblog.org/2012/02/07/nsf-releases-report-on-cloud-computing/.
Campus Bridging
An Update on Campus Bridging
The Campus Bridging team has been very busy of late. One of the most important activities has been working with the Architecture and Software Development & Integration teams on pilot projects for testing of the Global Federated File System. XSEDE received 17 excellent applications in response to its call for proposals to participate in a pilot program. The applications were so good that Campus Bridging identified pilot projects that provided the most critical tests of crucial aspects of the new technology.
Currently, they are working on implementation details. Four institutions were selected as pilot projects to allow time to test and refine the tools of the program and document the procedures and lessons learned before a readiness review is conducted by the SD&I team and production is deployed. Two institutions were selected as alternates. Projects not selected as one of the four pilots will be asked to be early adopters of the first candidate production releases of GFFS. For more information on GFFS, please visit http://genesis2.virginia.edu/wiki/Main/GFFS.
Another significant area of activity has been discussion of Campus Bridging requirements related to XSEDE. Campus Bridging, Architecture, and SD&I have developed a document of use cases, which is posted in the Campus Bridging discussion forum. Please view the use cases online at https://www.xsede.org/web/xup/forums/-/message_boards/view_message/236917.
If you are interested in participating in the discussion of Campus Bridging issues, there are several things you can do:
Read the NSF ACCI task force report about Campus Bridging at: http://pti.iu.edu/campusbridging.
See the presentation about Campus Bridging from the SC11 BOF, which is available online at: https://scholarworks.iu.edu/dspace/handle/2022/13986.
Start participating in the XSEDE discussions about Campus Bridging in the online forums at: https://www.xsede.org/web/xup/forums/-/message_boards?_19_mbCategoryId=120607.
If you have questions about Campus Bridging, please contact campusbridging@xsede.org.
Educator Programs and Curriculum
SCRATCH@MIT CONFERENCE
June 25-28, 2012 – Cambridge, Massachusetts
Early Registration – April 1, 2012
Join educators and researchers from around the world to share experiences and imagine the possibilities of Scratch! With Scratch, everyone can program their own interactive stories, games, animations, and simulations -- and share their creations with one another online. More than 2 million projects have been shared on the Scratch website (http://scratch.mit.edu), with thousands of new projects every day. The conference will feature workshops, panels, presentations, demos, and posters on a wide variety of Scratch-related topics, from technologies to pedagogies, from applications to implications. For more information, please visit http://events.scratch.mit.edu/conference/
Thoughts on CS & STEM Higher-ed Enrollments
by Valerie Barr, CSTA Task Force Chair
I've recently come across two perspectives on undergraduate enrollments, one about STEM disciplines, one specifically about CS. Both warrant comment. First, there's a recent posting on the SLATE Moneybox blog that looks at general STEM enrollments. The author, Matthew Yglesias, counterposes efforts to recruit more students into STEM undergraduate majors against the research interests of some STEM faculty and the research funding model that supports many universities. He suggests that there are STEM faculty who do not want to see enrollments grow, based on the following logic (I've added some detail, consistent with his picture): more undergraduates will require that more graduate students will have to work as teaching assistants, which means there will be fewer graduate students available to work on faculty research, which means research will progress more slowly, which means that faculty will have to take more time between grant applications, which means that less research money will come into the universities. To read further, please visit http://blog.acm.org/archives/csta/2012/02/thoughts_on_cs.html.
Google Summer Job Opportunities for Teachers
CAPE Summer Locations & Session Dates:
Mountain View - Session 1: 6/17 - 7/11, Session 2: 7/23 - 8/10
New York - Session 1: 7/9 - 7/27, Session 2: 8/6 - 8/24
Google is looking for excellent educators to teach as part of its Computing and Programming Experiences (CAPE) summer program. Faculty will be an integral part of CAPE Summer's programming and students’ success over the summer, creating a lasting impression on the students as to the relevance of Computer Science in their future career choices.
CAPE LEAD FACULTY
Google is looking for four outstanding middle school/high school level mathematics or computer science teachers to teach one session of 30 eighth-grade students during the summer prior to entering high school.
CAPE ASSOCIATE FACULTY
Google is also looking for eight outstanding middle school/high school level mathematics or computer science teachers (or university students) to co-instruct with the Lead Faculty and another Associate Faculty.
THE CAPE PROGRAM
CAPE Summer is a three-week summer program for eighth graders designed to inspire excitement about computer science through an intensive summer program at Google's campus. CAPE Summer's goal is to inspire a future generation of creators in computing by bringing together some of today's brightest young students and exposing them to the possibilities of information technology in career paths such as software engineering, biology, or art and design. Through interactive workshops and courses, guest speakers and field trips, students learn algorithms, systems thinking, programming and computing theory. At the end of the summer session, students showcase a final project, which utilizes various technologies they have learned from the program. Interested parties should submit their resumes to: cape-faculty-applications@google.com. For more information, please visit http://www.google.com/edu/cape/.
Faculty Opportunities
NSF Offers EFRI Research Experience and Mentoring Supplemental Funding
The National Science Foundation (NSF) Directorate for Engineering (ENG) Office of Emerging Frontiers in Research and Innovation (EFRI) continually seeks to further the progress in EFRI topic areas while broadening participation of underrepresented groups in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. This letter is to call your attention to a pilot opportunity to pursue both of these goals through supplements to active EFRI research awards. PIs and CoPIs with current EFRI research awards may apply for supplemental funding for this Research Experience and Mentoring (REM) pilot program to support costs associated with bringing research assistants into the laboratory over the summer of 2012 to participate in research aligned with the goals of EFRI-supported research, and to continue mentoring the research assistants in the following academic year. Details of the EFRI program may be found at http://nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=13708. For more information, please visit http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2012/nsf12052/nsf12052.jsp?WT.mc_id=USNSF_25&WT.mc_ev=click.
Patent Office Expands Outreach for Innovation Honors
Nomination Deadline – March 31, 2012
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is working to build on the diversity of last year's honorees for the U.S.'s highest award for technological achievement. For the 2012 National Medal of Technology and Innovation, USPTO is expanding its nationwide call for nominees. In 2011, honorees were awarded the medal for a wide variety of achievements. "We want to honor this nation's creative geniuses," says USPTO's Richard Maulsby. "This medal goes to innovators whose talent helps guarantee U.S. leadership in technology across the board." The congressionally authorized medal highlights the national importance of technological innovation to inspire people to pursue technical careers and keep the United States at the forefront of global technology and economic leadership. “There are thousands of U.S. inventors who have produced great ideas," Maulsby says. "This is an opportunity to recognize them and showcase their work.” Detailed information on the requirements for submitting a nomination is available for download at http://www.uspto.gov/about/nmti/guidelines.jsp. For more information, please visit http://www.isa.org/InTechTemplate.cfm?Section=Government_News1&template=/ContentManagement/ContentDisplay.cfm&ContentID=88204.
Student Engagement and Opportunities
Third EU-U.S. Summer School on HPC Challenges in Computational Sciences
June 24-28, 2012 - Dublin, Ireland
Applications Being Accepted
The U.S. National Science Foundation’s Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) project and the European Union Seventh Framework Program’s Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE) are pleased to announce the third International Summer School on High Performance Computing (HPC) Challenges in Computational Sciences. The summer school is designed to foster international and multidisciplinary research collaborations with U.S. and European graduate and postdoctoral scholars. Leading American and European computational scientists and HPC technologists will present a variety of topics, including:
• An overview of EU and U.S. cyberinfrastructure
• HPC challenges by discipline (e.g., bioinformatics, computer science, chemistry, and physics)
• HPC Programming Proficiencies
• Performance Analysis & Profiling
• Algorithmic Approaches & Numerical Libraries
• Data Intensive Computing
• Scientific Visualization
The expense-paid program will benefit advanced scholars from European and U.S. institutions who currently use HPC to conduct research. Further information and application: https://www.xsede.org/web/summerschool12..
Clemson University REU 2012 Summer Program in Data Intensive Computing
June 4- July 27, 2012 - Clemson, South Carolina
Application Review begins March 8, 2012
Applications will be accepted until all positions are filled.
Undergraduate computing, engineering and science students come join this REU summer program on data intensive computing. Students will work in a team environment on one of several projects in areas of complex systems modeling, medical informatics, the Intelligent River project, Next Generation Sequencing, software engineering, and video game development. A key component of this program is the Cyberinfrastructure (CI) Bootcamp, which meets for a few hours each week during the first weeks of the summer. Students will be matched with a faculty mentor during the first weeks of the summer program, and each student will participate in a focused research project. For more information and to apply, please visit http://www.cs.clemson.edu/reu. Please direct questions to Dr. Amy Apon, aapon@clemson.edu
News at 11 – XSEDE Partners in the Spotlight
UC San Diego Professor Kim Barrett Selected President-Elect of the American Physiological Society
Kim E. Barrett, PhD, professor of medicine and dean of graduate studies at the University of California, San Diego, will become president-elect of the American Physiological Society (APS). APS is the nation’s premier nonprofit organization devoted to fostering education, scientific research, and dissemination of information in the physiological science – the study of how molecules, cells, tissues and organs function to create health or disease. Barrett, former Editor-in-Chief of the American Journal of Physiology: Cell Physiology, will assume her new duties at the APS annual meeting being held April 21-25, 2012, in San Diego. To read further, please visit http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/pressreleases/uc_san_diego_professor_kim_barrett_selected_president_elect_of_the_american/.
John Towns to Deliver Keynote at GlobusWORLD 2012
XSEDE's project director John Towns will deliver a keynote address at the 10th annual GlobusWORLD 2012 conference, April 10-12, 2012, at Argonne National Laboratory in the Chicago suburb of Lemont, Illinois. Other keynote presenters include Michelle Butler, NCSA (Blue Waters); and Ian Foster, Globus co-founder. For more information on this conference, please visit http://globusworld.org/.
Who, What, Where - XSEDE Across the Country
Make your plans for XSEDE12
July 16-20, Chicago – Chicago, Illinois
Bridging from the eXtreme to the campus and beyond
Begin making your plans for the annual conference of XSEDE, which is scheduled for July 16-20, 2012, XSEDE12 promises to bring together staff and users for an engaging, productive five days at the Intercontinental hotel on Michigan Avenue, in the heart of the city's downtown and its prime shopping area, the Magnificent Mile. Please bookmark the following link and check back for updates, which will be posted as they become available: https://www.xsede.org//xsede12
Last But Not Least - Odds and Ends of Interest
Log Onto Facebook, Contribute to Scientific Research
Researchers at Victoria University of Wellington, the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, and Cardiff University are developing a cloud computing-based Facebook application that enables users to donate their computing resources to scientific projects. Victoria researcher Kris Bubendorfer says integrating cloud architecture with an existing social network such as Facebook has advantages over other options, such as commercial cloud services, which some research teams use on a pay-as-you-go basis and can be very expensive. "If we can recruit even one percent of current Facebook users to become volunteers, that will have a significant impact on resources available for research," Bubendorfer says. Karlsruhe Institute of Technology researchers are developing rewards and incentives that will encourage Facebook users to sign on for volunteer computing while Cardiff University researchers are developing a business model to support the initiative. "Social networks offer an easy and quick way for scientists to find each other and agree to share resources for the duration of a project," Bubendorfer says. To read further, please visit http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/SC1202/S00017/log-onto-facebook-contribute-to-scientific-research.htm
A Therapist in Your Pocket
Northwestern University researchers are developing Web-based, mobile, and virtual technologies to treat depression and other mood disorders. Examples include a virtual human therapist who will work with teens to prevent depression, a medicine bottle that reminds the user to take antidepressant medication and alerts the doctor if the dosage needs adjusting, and a Web-based social network to help cancer survivors relieve sadness and stress. Northwestern's Mobilyze! smartphone application offers support for people who have depression and intervenes to help them change their behavior. The smart medicine bottle is part of the MedLink system, which includes a mobile app that monitors the patient's depressive symptoms and any medical side effects and will provide specific advice to manage problems. The virtual therapist is being developed with University of Southern California researchers. The therapist will role-play with adolescents and adults to teach social and assertiveness skills to prevent and treat depression. To read further, please visit http://www.northwestern.edu/newscenter/stories/2012/02/therapist-phone-mohr.html.
Contribute to the XSEDE Education Blog Spot
XSEDE News and Information is updated continually. To submit information for inclusion, please send email to amason@ucsd.edu.
