XSEDE Happenings
Blue Waters and XSEDE Host Extreme Scaling Workshop
July 15-16, 2012 – Chicago, Illinois
The National Center for Supercomputing Applications' Blue Waters and Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) projects are hosting the sixth in a series of Extreme Scaling workshops. Petascale systems provide computational science teams with effective, scalable, sustained petascale computing platforms. Our community expects these systems to provide sustained petascale performance on a broad range of science and engineering applications and algorithms, from applications that are compute-intensive to those that are data- and memory-intensive. The workshop will address algorithmic and applications challenges and solutions in large-scale computing systems with limited memory and I/O bandwidth. The presentations and discussions are intended to assist the computational science and engineering community in making effective use of petascale through extreme-scale systems across the spectrum of local campus-scale to national systems. For more information, please visit https://www.xsede.org/web/xscale/home
XSEDE12- Register Today!
July 16-20, 2012 – Chicago, Illinois
Among the exciting XSEDE12 speakers are Richard Tapia, mathematician, professor, diversity advocate, and 2011 recipient of the National Medal of Science, as well as an international speaker who will be announced soon. The conference also promises valuable networking opportunities.
Registration link: http://www.regonline.com/builder/site/Default.aspx?EventID=1059727
Conference website: https://www.xsede.org/xsede12
Hotel, Parking and Travel info: https://www.xsede.org/web/xsede12/hotel/travel
Upcoming Conferences and Workshops
SDSC Summer Institute: Big Data Supercomputing
August 6-10, 2012 – La Jolla, California
SDSC is expanding upon its successful Gordon Summer Institute program to include both its Gordon and Trestles supercomputers. This is a unique opportunity for participants to focus on specific challenges in their research, such as optimizing a computationally intensive piece of code to make the best use of SDSC’s HPC resources. Current/potential users of SDSC resources are invited to apply. Experience working in a UNIX/Linux environment is essential. The registration fee is $150. Scholarships available to cover on-campus room and board for participants from U.S. academic and non-profit institutions, but not travel to or from the UC San Diego campus. For more information, please visit http://www.sdsc.edu/Events/summerinstitute/.
8th IEEE International Conference on eScience
October 8-12, 2012 – Chicago, Illinois
Abstract submission (required) – July 4, 2012
Paper submission – July 11, 2012
Researchers in all disciplines are increasingly adopting digital tools, techniques and practices, often in communities and projects that span disciplines, laboratories, organizations, and national boundaries. The eScience 2012 conference is designed to bring together leading international and interdisciplinary research communities, developers, and users of eScience applications and enabling IT technologies. The conference serves as a forum to present the results of the latest applications research and product/tool developments and to highlight related activities from around the world. Also, we are now entering the second decade of eScience and the 2012 conference gives an opportunity to take stock of what has been achieved so far and look forward to the challenges and opportunities the next decade will bring. For more information, including submission guidelines and topics, please visit http://www.ci.uchicago.edu/escience2012/
XSEDE Training at a Glance
Data Storage - Architectures and Networking (webinar)
June 26, 20m- 2:00pm12 – 1:00p CT
For more information, please visit https://www.xsede.org/web/xup/course-calendar/-/training/class/44.
I2PC Summer School on Multicore Programming
July 9-13, 2012 – Urbana-Champaign, Illinois
For more information, please visit http://i2pc.cs.illinois.edu/summer.html.
SDSC 2012 UC-HIPSCC International Summer School on AstroComputing
July 9-20, 2012 – La Jolla, California
For more information, please visit http://hipacc.ucsc.edu/ISSAC2012.html.
TACC Summer Supercomputing Institute 2012
July 30- August 3, 2012 – Austin, Texas
For more information, please visit http://www.tacc.utexas.edu/summer-institute.
SDSC Supercomputing Summer Institute
August 4-10, 2012 – La Jolla, California
For more information, please visit http://www.sdsc.edu/Events/summerinstitute/index.html.
For a complete list of past and future XSEDE training opportunities, please visit https://www.xsede.org/web/xup/course-calendar.
Research Features from Across XSEDE and Campus Champion Partners
Purdue University Perfecting Nuclear Weapon Simulations to Show Performance in Molecular Detail
High-performance computing researchers at Purdue University and the U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory are perfecting simulations that show a nuclear weapon's performance in precise molecular detail. The simulations might require 100,000 machines, a level of complexity that is essential to accurately showing molecular-scale reactions taking place over milliseconds. Purdue professor Saurabh Bagchi notes that "due to natural faults in the execution environment, there is a high likelihood that some processing element will have an error during the application's execution, resulting in corrupted memory or failed communication between machines." However, the researchers have developed automated methods to detect a glitch as soon as it occurs. "You want the system to automatically pinpoint when and in what machine the error took place and also the part of the code that was involved," Bagchi says. The researchers created an automated method for clustering the large number of processes into a smaller number of equivalence classes with similar characteristics, which makes it possible to quickly spot and pinpoint problems. To read further, please visit http://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/research/2012/120605BagchiWeapons.html.
SDSC Supercharges its ‘Data Oasis’ Storage System
The University of California, San Diego's San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) recently launched its Data Oasis parallel file system, which has four petabytes of capacity, to handle the needs of its new Gordon supercomputer, as well as its Trestles and Triton high-performance computing systems. "We view Data Oasis as a solution for coping with the data deluge going on in the scientific community, by providing a high-performance, scalable storage system that many of today’s researchers need," says SDSC director Michael Norman. “We are entering the era of data-intensive computing, and that means positioning SDSC as a leading resource in the management of ‘big data’ challenges.” The storage system features a sustained 100 GB/s performance, which was necessary to support the data-intensive computing power of Gordon. “Big data is not just about sheer size, it’s also about the speed of moving data where it needs to be, and the integrated infrastructure and software tools to effectively do research using those data,” Norman says. To read further, please visit http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/pressreleases/sdsc_supercharges_its_data_oasis_storage_system/.
Campus Champion Partner Site University of Michigan explores Human Memory and Artificial Intelligence
University of Michigan professor John Laird describes the state, operator, and result (Soar) cognitive architecture as an artificial intelligence system that functions like a brain to solve problems. He says all matching rules fire in parallel in Soar, while selecting the next operator is the locus of decision making. "What we're trying to do in Soar is combine lots of rules at the same time, so when it's in a given situation, many rules will match, and instead of picking one, it will fire all of them, and instead of those doing actions, say, in the world, instead what they're doing, the first phase of that, is proposing separate actions," Laird notes. He says more memories have been added to Soar so that it can not only analyze rules to ascertain the next course of action, but also access these other memories that supply additional data about what to do next. To read further, please visit http://spectrum.ieee.org/podcast/robotics/artificial-intelligence/human-memory-computer-memory-and-memento.
NSF’s Assembling, Visualizing and Analyzing Program Aims to Create a Tree of All Life
The National Science Foundation's (NSF's) Assembling, Visualizing, and Analyzing the Tree of Life (AVAToL) program aims to build a comprehensive tree of life that brings together everything scientists know about how all species are related. The researchers are creating the infrastructure and computational tools to enable automatic updating of the tree of life, as well as developing the analytical and visualization tools to study it. Assembling the branches for all species of animals, plants, fungi and microbes will require new computational tools for analyzing large data sets, for combining diverse kinds of data, and for connecting vast numbers of published trees into a synthetic whole. AVAToL will enable researchers to go online and compare their trees to others that have already been published. To read further, please visit http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=124386&org=NSF&from=news.
Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center Upgrades Bandwidth and Connectivity in West Virginia
The Three Rivers Optical Exchange (3ROX), the high-performance Internet hub operated and managed by the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC), has significantly upgraded the link between PSC and West Virginia University (WVU). At the same time, WVNET (West Virginia Network), a network organization that serves schools, government and non-profits in West Virginia, has joined 3ROX, which gives West Virginia clients of WVNET a significant bandwidth upgrade as well as access to expanded research and education resources. The new 3ROX link to WVU increases bandwidth 64-fold — from 155 megabits per second (Mbps) to 10 gibabits per second (Gbps). “This is a big step forward for research and education connectivity to WVU,” says Wendy Huntoon, PSC director of networking. The upgrade enhances support for clean-energy related research at the National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL), a U.S. Department of Energy national laboratory with campuses in Morgantown and Pittsburgh. NETL researchers use the 3ROX link to access supercomputing resources at PSC. To read further, please visit http://psc.edu/index.php/newscenter/71-2012press/676-psc-upgrades-bandwidth-and-connectivity-in-west-virginia.
TACC Researcher Develops HPC Utility to Enable Rapid Testing and Porting of Scientific Computing Codes
At certain points in the life-cycle of a scientific computing code — when one changes aspects of an algorithm, adds new capabilities, scales to larger numbers of processors or opts to compute on a different system — it is necessary to test and debug one's code to make sure it operates accurately and efficiently. This aspect of the process can be tedious and time-consuming. Kent Milfeld, research associate at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), high-performance computing instructor, and longtime TeraGrid allocation coordinator, decided to remedy this situation. He created a new utility, idev, which allows users to skip over the most tedious aspect of development — waiting repeatedly in a queue each time they want to run a test. Instead, the "app" allows users to gain interactive access to one or several nodes on a supercomputer to rapidly test and assess the performance of a code on a given system. To read further, please visit http://www.tacc.utexas.edu/news/feature-stories/2012/idev.
Educator Curriculum, Opportunities and Information
The University of Pennsylvania Reaches Thousands Online with Coursera
Twelve University of Pennsylvania professors have agreed to be the first to teach courses as part of Coursera, a new online education platform. Coursera also is working with Princeton University, Stanford University, and the University of Michigan in its initiative to distribute not just math, engineering, and science courses to users, but also an assortment of courses in the humanities and social sciences, taught to thousands of students simultaneously. "We decided that we had to think about how to expand the scale of this, in terms of giving students a great education across disciplines," says Stanford professor Daphne Koller, who co-created Coursera with Andrew Ng. Koller and Ng received $16 million in venture capital from two major Silicon Valley investment companies in April, to go toward Coursera's rollout. Penn professor Robert Ghrist will teach a course in single variable calculus, which is expected to draw over 12,000 students from around the world. To read further, please visit http://www.upenn.edu/pennnews/current/2012-06-07/features/penn-reaches-thousands-online-coursera.
Online Classes See Cheating Go High- Tech
As online classes grow in popularity, the issue of online cheating also may grow in prominence unless courses are designed carefully. Part of the solution involves combating cheating technology with better preventative technology. Blackboard, an education-software company, has developed learning-management software that features a service that checks papers for signs of plagiarism. Blackboard's John Fontaine is developing a new system that could establish a document fingerprint for each student when they turn in their first assignments, and notice if future papers differ in style in suspicious ways. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers are looking for new ways to verify the identity of students online by analyzing each user's typing style to help verify identity. This type of electronic fingerprinting could be combined with face-recognition software to ensure accuracy, says MIT's Anant Agarwal. To read further, please visit http://chronicle.com/article/Online-Courses-Increasingly/132093/.
Student Engagement Opportunities and Information
SDSC 2012 UC-HIPSCC International Summer School on AstroComputing
July 9-20, 2012 – La Jolla, California
This is the third UC-HiPACC International Summer School on AstroComputation. The 2010 school at UCSC was on galaxy simulations and the 2011 school at Berkeley and LBNL was on computational explosive astrophysics. A key feature of the UC-HiPACC summer schools has been the access by all students to accounts on a powerful supercomputer on which the lecturers have put relevant codes and sample inputs and outputs, and the inclusion in the school of workshops each afternoon in which the students can learn how to use these tools. For the 2012 summer school on AstroInformatics, all students will have accounts on the new Gordon data-centric supercomputer at SDSC, and many relevant astronomical datasets and simulation outputs will be put on Gordon's massive FLASH memory for the use of the students. For more information about the workshop, including speakers and topics, please visit http://hipacc.ucsc.edu/ISSAC2012.html.
CSIG’12: Geoinformatics Education and Training for the 21st Century Geoscience Workforce
August 6-10, 2012 – La Jolla, California
The 9th Cyberinfrastructure Summer Institute for Geoscientists (CSIG’12) will be held at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, University of California, San Diego. Funded by the National Science Foundation, the theme for CSIG’12 is “Geoinformatics Education and Training for the 21st Century Geoscience Workforce”, reflecting the emphasis on preparing geoscientists for cyber-enabled research and education. As in prior years, CSIG’12 will include a broad survey of information technologies and their impact on science and education, but also focus on a few key technical topics, with in-depth presentations. Lectures provided by geoinformatics researchers and practitioners will introduce the technical topics and provide descriptions of the state-of-the-art, with examples taken from current geoscience-related cyberinfrastructure efforts. The topics will be chosen from among a broad selection including, data discovery, data access, and data mining; data and system interoperability; services-oriented architecture; workflow systems; use of semantic technologies and development and use of ontologies; high-performance computing; and cloud computing. For more information, please visit http://www.geongrid.org/index.php/education/summer_institute/csig_2012/.
Last But Not Least – Computational News of Interest
New National Supercomputer to Focus on Theoretical Astrophysics and Particle Physics
The University of Leicester recently was selected as one of four sites to host new national high-performance computing (HPC) facilities for theoretical astrophysics and particle physics research. The university is supporting the project by investing in a major upgrade of its data center to host the new facility. "We will now be able to carry out the largest and most detailed simulations of planets, stars, and galaxies that have ever been performed and answer questions that we could not even have asked just a few years ago," says Leicester researcher Mark Wilkinson. The supercomputer will be part of the Science & Technology Facilities Council DiRAC consortium, which provides HPC facilities for United Kingdom-based research institutes. "Leicester has a well-established reputation at the forefront of theoretical astrophysics worldwide and this will secure our position as a major international research center for computational astrophysics," says Leicester professor Andrew King.To read further, please visit http://www2.le.ac.uk/offices/press/press-releases/2012/june/multi-million-pound-new-national-supercomputer-to-perform-astronomical-feats.
Rutgers, University of California, Irvine Partner to Explore the Issue of Emergency Management in Recent Workshop
Rutgers University professor Nabil R. Adam, director of the Information Technology for Emergency Management Research Laboratory, recently led a U.S. Department of Homeland Security workshop focused on emergency management at the University of California, Irvine. The workshop aimed to provide a forum for researchers, subject-matter experts, and practitioners dealing with emergency management to assess the current state of the art, identify challenges, and provide input to developing strategies for addressing those challenges. The workshop discussions led to the realization that emergency management poses unique challenges that require fundamental advances in computing and information science and engineering. Participants noted that there are opportunities to advance not only the state-of-the-art in emergency management, but also computing broadly, including real-time data sensing and analysis, predictive modeling and simulation, human-computer interaction, computer vision and robotics, wireless networks, and social networking. The workshop focused on incident management, resource management, and supply chain management. For more information, please visit http://www.cccblog.org/2012/05/20/emergency-management-incident-resource-and-supply-chain-management/.
University of Nevada, Reno Scientists Design Low-Cost Indoor Navigation System for Blind
University of Nevada, Reno (UNR) researchers have developed Navatar, an indoor navigation system for people with visual impairments. The smartphone-based system combines human-computer interaction and motion-planning research. "Existing indoor navigation systems typically require the use of expensive and heavy sensors, or equipping rooms and hallways with radio-frequency tags that can be detected by a handheld reader and which are used to determine the user’s location," says UNR's Kostas Berkis. Navatar uses two-dimensional architectural maps, which are already available for many buildings, as well as low-cost sensors such as accelerometers and compasses. The system locates and tracks users inside buildings, finding the best path based on their needs, and provides step-by-step instructions to the destination. "To synchronize the location, our system combines probabilistic algorithms and the natural capabilities of people with visual impairments to detect landmarks in their environment through touch, such as corridor intersections, doors, stairs, and elevators," says UNR's Eelke Folmer. To read further, please visit http://newsroom.unr.edu/2012/05/18/university-of-nevada-reno-scientists-design-low-cost-indoor-navigation-system-for-blind/.
