XSEDE Happenings
XSEDE12 – It’s the Place to Be!!
· There is still time to register!
ALSO: ONE-DAY REGISTRATION now available for Tuesday-Thursday, July 17-19, at $250 per day.
· XSEDE12 gratefully acknowledges media support from HPCwire and International Science Grid This Week.
· Appro will hold a random drawing for a $200 amazon.com gift card at the BOF, "How Did We Get Here? Gordon Design and Planning," on Tuesday, July 17, at 4:45 p.m. in the Illinois Room, 5th floor. Details available at the BOF.
• View the XSEDE12 schedule at https://www.xsede.org/web/xsede12/program/schedule/.
XSEDE Scholars (XSP) Conference Schedule Now Available for XSEDE12
The XSP will be holding special sessions for Scholars during the upcoming XSEDE12 conference. The schedule is listed below. All questions regarding the schedule can be addressed to Alice Fisher at afisher@rice.edu.
XSEDE Scholars Program Schedule During XSEDE12
| Day | Time | Event |
| Sunday, 7/15 | 4-6pm | XSP reception |
| Sunday, 7/15 | 6-8pm | General student program dinner/welcome |
| Monday, 7/16 | 8am-5pm | Student tutorials |
| Monday, 7/16 | 6-7pm | XSEDE Scholars and Faculty Council dinner |
| Monday, 7/16 | 7-8:30pm | Networking session among Faculty Council and Scholars |
| Tuesday, 7/17 | 8am-4pm | Keynote speaker; plenary and technical sessions: https://www.xsede.org/web/xsede12/program/schedule |
| Tuesday, 7/17 | 4-6pm | XSP meeting/dinner: Graduate students talk with undergrads about research in small groups |
| Tuesday, 7/17 | 6pm | Student social event |
| Wednesday, 7/18 | 8am-5pm | Student programming contest |
| Wednesday, 7/18 | evening | Conference reception/poster session (including student posters)/viz showcase |
| Thursday, 7/19 | 8am-1:30pm | Plenary and technical sessions, panel discussions; awards luncheon; closing speaker |
| Thursday, 7/19 | afternoon | Students depart. |
| | | *Light breakfast and lunch will be provided by conference. |
XSEDE12 Student and Mentor Events – Don’t Miss Them!
Two XSEDE12 events open to OSG, Student Engagement and XSEDE Scholar Program student participants and mentors are just around the corner. Each group will come together for a kickoff dinner on Sunday, July 15 in the Camelot Room on the 8th Floor of the Intercontinental Hotel. The event from 6:00pm-8:00pm will feature a buffet dinner in an informal atmosphere. On Wednesday, July 18 from noon-1:oopm, these two groups will again come together for our Meet Interesting People lunch. Students have signed up to sit with a specific mentor to share ideas and learn from their selected computer scientist. If you are a student and have not yet signed up, it’s not too late! Please email amson@ucsd.edu to reserve your space.
Speaker, Emmy Winner Steven Reiner Scheduled to Conclude XSEDE12
Steven Reiner, Emmy Award-winning former producer for "60 Minutes" and current associate professor of broadcast journalism at Stony Brook University, will address the conference attendees on July 19 during the awards luncheon. Reiner will close out the conference with a discussion of why it is important for scientists and researchers to make sure the public understands who they are and what they do, as well as how those researchers can accomplish this.
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/.
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/.
Workshop on Managing Systems Automatically and Dynamically (MAD)
At the USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI October 8-10, 2012 – Hollywood, California
Paper Submission Deadline Extended to July 20, 2012
The complexity of modern systems makes them extremely challenging to manage. From highly heterogeneous desktop environments to large-scale systems that consist of many thousands of software and hardware components, these systems exhibit a wide range of complex behaviors are difficult to predict. As such, although raw computational capability of these systems grows each year, much of it is lost to (i) complex failures that are difficult to localize and (ii) to poor performance and efficiency that results from system configuration that is inappropriate for the user’s workload. The MAD workshop focuses on techniques to make complex systems manageable, addressing the problem’s three major aspects: For more information please visit http://www.linkedin.com/groupAnswers?viewQuestionAndAnswers=&discussionID=132162306&gid=4178444&trk=eml-anet_dig-b_nd-pst_ttle-cn&ut=377CZVOKV4n5k1.
8th IEEE International Conference on eScience
October 8-12, 2012 – Chicago, Illinois
Paper Submission Deadline Extended – July 18, 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. A special emphasis of the 2012 conference is on advances in the application of technology in a particular discipline. Accordingly, significant advances in applications science and technology will be considered as important as the development of new technologies themselves. Further, we welcome contributions in educational activities under any of these disciplines. For more information, including submission guidelines and topics, please visit http://www.ci.uchicago.edu/escience2012/
XSEDE Training at a Glance
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
Application Deadline – June 15, 2012
For more information, please visit http://www.tacc.utexas.edu/summer-institute.
Research Features from Across XSEDE and Campus Champion Partners
University of Tennessee Researchers Tracking White-Nose Syndrome with Kraken
University of Tennessee researchers are using the supercomputer Kraken to explore what the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service calls "the worst wildlife crisis in memory" -- a lethal disease called white-nose syndrome that is devastating North American bat populations. A 2011 study estimated that bats may be worth at least $3 million per year to U.S. agriculture because of the volume of crop-eating insects they consume. “The aim of our research was to project, using the little data that we have, how white nose will spread—if it will spread—across the U.S.,” said Hallam, who explained that while the disease exists in Canada as well, available Canadian geographical information is not detailed and has kept the team from examining the spread of the disease there. While there is still much that is unknown about WNS (and even about bats), Hallam’s team was able to accurately simulate how the disease is currently spreading, giving them insight into how it will spread in the future. Their research has also give rise to methods that may help mitigate WNS. To read further, please visit http://www.nics.tennessee.edu/white-nose-syndrome.
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://www.psc.edu/index.php/newscenter/71-2012press/676-psc-upgrades-bandwidth-and-connectivity-in-west-virginia.
SDSC Achieves Sustained Speeds of 100 GB/s Needed to Support Its ‘Big Data’ Initiatives
The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California, San Diego has completed the deployment of its Lustre-based Data Oasis parallel file system, with four petabytes (PB) of capacity and 100 gigabytes per second (GB/s), to handle the data-intensive needs of the center’s new Gordon supercomputer in addition to its Trestles and Triton high-performance computer systems. Using the I/O power of Gordon, Trestles, and Triton, sustained transfer rates of 100 GB/s have been measured, making Data Oasis one the fastest parallel file systems in the academic community. The sustained speeds mean researchers could retrieve or store 64 terabytes (TB) of data – the equivalent of Gordon’s entire DRAM memory – in about 10 minutes, significantly reducing research times needed for retrieving, analyzing, storing, or sharing extremely large datasets. To read further, please visit http://www.sdsc.edu/News%20Items/PR060412_dataoasis.html.
TACC Researchers Develop Pandemic Preparedness Toolkit
Researchers from UT Austin and TACC developed the Texas Pandemic Flu Toolkit to help public health officials plan for and manage a disease outbreak. Working with a team of UT researchers from biology, mathematics, statistics, engineering and computing, Meyers led the development of the Texas Pandemic Flu Toolkit, a web-based service that simulates the spread of pandemic flu through the state, forecasts the number of flu hospitalizations, and determines where and when to place ventilators to minimize fatalities. The toolkit can be used in emergency situations to guide real-time decision-making. For example, public health officials might use the forecaster tool to determine when a pandemic might crest and what kind of magnitude they might see in terms of infections and hospitalizations, which can then be communicated to local authorities. To read further, please visit http://www.tacc.utexas.edu/news/feature-stories/2012/pandemic-preparedness.
Midwest Growing Hub for HPC, Big Data
With the announcement of a new particle discovery from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), quite possibly the long-sought Higgs boson, we get a glimpse at how advanced networking combines with High Performance Computing (HPC) in the Midwest to form a critical point for discovery and data dissemination. The LHC’s CMS experiment’s massive data sets flow into the U.S. through 10 Gb/s trans-Atlantic network links from the LHC at CERN to the Starlight high-performance network exchange facility in Chicago. From there, it is processed by thousands of cores at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, IL, before being stored in large-scale storage systems. Leveraging advanced networks, such as ESnet and Internet2, the data is transferred to more than 1700 U.S. scientists at 94 institutions for further analysis. The Midwest is leveraging its HPC, supercomputing and advanced networking expertise to continue to build momentum tackling Big Data challenges. To read further, please visit http://www.datanami.com/datanami/2012-07-11/midwest_growing_hub_for_hpc_big_data.html?goback=.gde_4178444_member_133092794.
Educator Curriculum, Opportunities and Information
Special Connected Educator Month Webinars for States & Districts|
Tuesday, July 17 3-4 PM ET
Wednesday, June 25 2-3 PM ET
The US Department of Education has declared August Connected Educator Month, aimed at broadening and deepening educator participation in online communities and networks while providing opportunities for education leaders to work together to move the field forward. CEM will be celebrated with four-plus weeks of online events and activities, including forums, webinars, guided tours, open houses, contests, badges, and more. More than 50 major national education organizations, communities, and companies have committed to participate. There will be special informational and planning webinars for interested school districts offered next week and the week after. This is a terrific opportunity to think about how your district can promote this effort during your “back-to-school” professional development for your teachers/administrators. For access instructions and other information about these webinars please contact Marshal Conley at mconley@air.org.
Doing Apps and Start-Ups While Still in High School
Palo Alto High School students recently founded the Paly Entrepreneurs Club, an extracurricular group for students who want to create start-ups and develop future technologies. The group meets weekly during the school year to discuss their ventures and ideas, explore issues such as money-raising strategies and new markets, and host guest speakers. “I want to build something that is tied to what is happening next,” says Paly member Matthew Slipper. Club members have been working on several projects, such as a social network to help teenagers organize study groups, and a trading network for Bitcoin, a virtual currency. “The goal here is inspirational,” says Aaron Bajor, one of the group's founders. "A great idea can hit you any time. Even if you do not have a great idea yet, if you have capabilities and passion others will want you on their team.” To read further, please visit http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/03/technology/palo-alto-high-club-fosters-would-be-tech-moguls.html.
Student Engagement Opportunities and Information
Tech Companies Announce 'Girls Who Code' Initiative
Four technology firms--Twitter, General Electric, Google, and eBay--say they are joining the "Girls Who Code" organization, which seeks to increase the number of young women in the fields of programming and engineering. The organization will soon launch a mentoring and teaching initiative in New York. Girls Who Code was founded by hedge fund lawyer Reshma Saujani, a former New York deputy public advocate, who plans to begin the coding program in the city this summer. She intends to expand the program to other cities in 2013. Saujani notes that although 57 percent of college graduates are women, only 14 percent of computer science and engineering degrees are awarded to them. Twitter engineer Sara Haider says the company would begin "an eight-week intensive program to teach basic principles of computer science and coding as well as sessions on design, research, and entrepreneurship." To read further, please visit http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/26/tech-companies-announce-girls-who-code-initiative/
Virtual School of Computational Science and Engineering
Science Cloud Summer School (July 30 - August 3, 2012)
Proven Algorithmic Techniques for Many-core Processors (August 13 - 17, 2012)
The Virtual School of Computational Science and Engineering (VSCSE) helps graduate students, post-docs and young professionals from all disciplines and institutions across the country gain the skills they need to use advanced computational resources to advance their research. Often the practical aspects of computational science fall between the cracks, as computer science departments focus on what computer scientists need to know and domain science and engineering departments focus on the applications of computer science to those disciplines. The Virtual School was created to help students fill those knowledge gaps, preparing them to use emerging petascale (and then exascale) computing resources. Participating in the Virtual School also helps students build networks of fellow researchers who they can turn to for support and collaboration. Virtual School courses are delivered simultaneously at multiple locations across the country using high-definition videoconferencing technology. For more information and to register, please visit https://hub.vscse.org/. Questions? Please contact info@vscse.org.
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.
Faculty Opportunities
NSF Call for Proposals: US-China Collaborative Software Research
The NSF Office of Cyberinfrastructure (OCI) and the Division of Computer and Network Systems (CNS) in the Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate (CISE) are interested in encouraging collaborations with China-based researchers who are currently funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, NSFC. This interest is one outcome from the US and China Workshop Series to Build a Collaborative Framework for Developing Shared Software Infrastructure, which was supported jointly by the NSF and the NSFC (workshop website: http://www.nsf-nsfc-sw.org/). US-based researchers with current NSF awards can submit supplemental funding requests to their awards to collaborate with China-based researchers who are currently funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, NSFC. Topics must fit the Software Infrastructure for Sustained Innovation (SI2) program of OCI (http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2011/nsf11589/nsf11589.htm ) in the broad area of software development in support of science and engineering research, or the core programs of the CNS Division of CISE, (http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2011/nsf11555/nsf11555.htm). Supplemental funding requests may include international planning visits, and may include funding for students. For more information, please visit http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2012/nsf12096/nsf12096.jsp?WT.mc_id=USNSF_25&WT.mc_ev=click.
News at 11:00: XSEDE Staff, Students and Partners in the News
Bemley Scholar Justin Wulf Pursues Computer Science Degree at Bethel University
Justin Wulf is a long-time BDPA Twin Cities chapter member with a powerful legacy in our national Student Information Technology Education and Scholarship (SITES) program. He is working towards his computer science degree at Bethel University in St. Paul, Minnesota. Justin used his STEM experiences gained through BDPA to obtain an ongoing internship at Medtronic. Justin competed in national High School Computer Competition (HSCC) championships from 2007-2010. He earned a Jesse Bemley Scholarship from the BDPA Education and Technology Foundation (BETF) as a result of high performance in the 2009 HSCC championship.
Last But Not Least – Computational News of Interest
European Parliament Rejects Anti-Piracy Treaty
An international pact to fight digital piracy has been rejected by the European Parliament, and opponents see this as a triumph of their campaign to discourage Internet strictures. Meanwhile, groups representing media companies and other rights holders say protesters had distorted the debate to make the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) appear more sinister than it was, and the European rejection will hurt initiatives to curb online copyright theft. Copyright owners were hoping that ACTA would give them additional authority to prosecute rights violations, especially in developing nations marked by lax enforcement. The Parliament "has given in to pressure from anti-copyright groups despite calls from thousands of companies and workers in manufacturing and creative sectors who have called for ACTA to be signed in order that their rights as creators be protected," says European Publishers Council executive director Angela Mills Wade. To read further, please visit http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/05/technology/european-parliament-rejects-anti-piracy-treaty.html?_r=1.
New Technology Slashes Data Center Energy Consumption
A new energy-aware plug-in can reduce energy consumption in data centers by more than 20 percent, according to researchers with the European Union-funded Federated IT for a Sustainable Environment Impact (FIT4Green) project. Experts from industry and academia designed the technology to work on top of the current management tools used by data centers to organize the allocation of information and communications technologies resources and turn off unused equipment. The FIT4Green plug-in does not compromise the equipment's compliance with service-level agreements and quality-of-service metrics. The plug-in is designed to work in any data center type, and the savings ranged from 20 percent to as much as 50 percent during testing. To read further, please visit http://cordis.europa.eu/fetch?CALLER=EN_NEWS&ACTION=D&SESSION=&RCN=34795.
Google Glass Launches New Age of Personal Computing
’
Google's recently unveiled computerized eyeglasses could mark the beginning of a new computing era in which wearable computers are common. The Google Glass development effort is all about "doing brand new risky technological things that are really about making science fiction real," says Google cofounder Sergey Brin. He says the next generation of computers likely won't sit on a desk or have keyboards or monitors. Meanwhile, analysts predict that future computers will be incorporated into other items that people use, such as clothing or jewelry. "I believe that in five years we will see many different form factors and brands of wearable computers," says analyst Patrick Moorhead. To read further, please visit http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9228776/Google_Glass_launches_new_age_of_personal_computing?taxonomyId=12
