HPC Happenings
SURA Launches Research Data Management Tool
SURA has launched an institutional tool for Research Data Management (RDM), developed by a working group formed with the Association of Southeastern Research Libraries (ASERL). The working group brings together CIOs and library professionals from SURA member institutions to explore collaborations for improving their ability to manage the rapidly growing volume of research data. The working group produced an institutional “Step-By-Step Guide to Data Management,” which is being used to identify gaps in existing RDM processes and guide future efforts of the group. The group has also built a discipline specific metadata scheme directory to assist researchers in finding existing metadata models for their research data. Materials associated with the work of this group are available on the ASERL/SURA RDM WiKi: http://www.lib.ua.edu/wiki/sura/ A copy of the guide can be found at: http://sura.org/news/docs/RDMStepGuide101512.pdf
SDSC’s Introduction to Scientific Visualization Webcast a Success!
Visualization is largely understood and utilized as an excellent communication tool by researchers. This narrow view often keeps scientists from using and developing visualization skill sets. This tutorial provides a grounds-up understanding of visualization and its utility in error diagnostic and exploration of data for scientific insight. When used effectively, visualization can provide a complementary and effective toolset for data analysis, which is one of the most challenging problems in computational domains. The goal of this tutorial was to bridge these gaps by providing end users with fundamental visualization concepts, execution tools, and usage examples. The presentation slides and training videos can be found at http://www.sdsc.edu/Events/gordonviz2012/.
SC12 BoF for Women in Computing: Policies and Practices to Promote a Diverse Workforce
Organizations compete to recruit and retain the best talent to achieve its mission focus, whether in academia, industry or federal agencies. Demographics show an increasingly diverse workforce, but often workplace policies lag behind and can be exclusionary. Not surprisingly, successful policies and practices that encourage diversity are beneficial to all employees, as they convey the organization’s recognition that people are its most valuable asset. Clear policies that are equally applied encourage diversity in the workplace. In this BOF, participants will share management strategies and experiences that have been successful at creating a diverse environment and are productive for all employees. For more information, including time and place, please visit http://sc12.supercomputing.org/schedule/event_detail.php?evid=bof206
Now on the Web: XSEDE-related Presentations and Events at SC12
The XSEDE project and its staff members are well represented in the technical program and on the exhibit floor at SC12. The link below includes the schedule for all known speakers, presenters, events and booths related to XSEDE. Please submit any additional XSEDE-related information for this page to Susan McKenna, mckennas@ncsa.illinois.edu. To view the XSEDE-related presentations and events, please visit https://www.xsede.org/xsede-sc.
HPC Call for Participation for Upcoming Workshops
FUTURE Computing 2013 - Call for Papers
May 27-June 1, 2013 - Barcelona, Spain
Submission Deadline – December 30, 3012
FUTURE COMPUTING 2013, The Fifth International Conference on Future
Computational Technologies and Applications. The topics suggested by the conference can be discussed in term of concepts, state of the art, research, standards, implementations, running experiments, applications, and industrial case studies. Authors are invited to submit complete unpublished papers, which are not under review in any other conference or journal. Before submission, please check and conform with the Editorial rules at http://www.iaria.org/editorialrules.html. For a list of topics and submission details, please visit http://www.iaria.org/conferences2013/CfPFUTURECOMPUTING13.html. To submit a paper, please visit http://www.iaria.org/conferences2013/SubmitFUTURECOMPUTING13.html.
3rd IHPCES Call for Papers
June 5-7, 2013 - Barcelona, Spain
Submission Deadline – January 15, 2013
The 3rd International Workshop on Advances in High-Performance Computational Earth Sciences: Applications and Frameworks (IHPCES) has opened the call for papers, with a deadline of Jan. 15, 2013. IHPCES is co-chaired by Yifeng Cui, research scientist at SDSC and member of XSEDE ECSS. The workshop facilitates communication between earth scientists, applied mathematicians, and computational and computer scientists. It also presents a unique opportunity for participants to exchange advanced knowledge, insights and science discoveries. Co-chair Cui encourages XSEDE researchers and users to participate by submitting a paper reflecting current research in the area of computational science. IHPCES 2013 is held in conjunction with the 13th International Conference on Computational Science (ICCS2013. For more information, please visit http://hpgeoc.sdsc.edu/IHPCES2013/index.html.
Upcoming Conferences and Workshops
EDUCAUSE
November 6-9, 2012 - Denver, Colorado
The EDUCAUSE Annual Conference is the premiere gathering for higher education IT professionals. It provides content and exploration of today's toughest technology issues facing campuses around the world, and convenes some of the brightest minds in the community. When colleagues from around the world converge with some of the most innovative corporate solution providers, you have an event that creates invaluable networking opportunities and professional development. For more information, please visit http://www.educause.edu/annual-conference.
SC12
November 10-16, 2012 - Salt Lake City, Utah
Exhibition - November 12-15, 2012
For 24 years, SC has been at the forefront in gathering the best and brightest minds in supercomputing together, with our unparalleled technical papers, tutorials, posters and speakers. SC12 will take a major step forward not only in supercomputing, but in super-conferencing, with everything designed to make the 2012 conference the most ‘you' friendly conference in the world. We're streamlining conference information and moving to a virtually real-time method of determining technical program thrusts. No more pre-determined technical themes picked far in advance. Through social media, data mining, and active polling, we'll see which technical interests and issues emerge throughout the year, and focus on the ones that interest you the most. For more information and to register, please visit http://sc12.supercomputing.org/content/exhibitor-prospectus.
2013 Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing Conference – Call for Participation
February 7-9, 2013 – Washington, DC
Application Deadline – November 25, 2012
• Panel Proposals Submissions- www.tapiaconference.org/2013/participate.html
• BoF Proposal Submissions - www.tapiaconference.org/2013/participate.html
• Workshop Proposal Submissions - www.tapiaconference.org/2013/participate.html
• Doctoral Consortium Submissions – www.tapiaconference.org/2013/dc.html
• Poster Proposal Submissions - www.tapiaconference.org/2013/participate.html
• Scholarship Applications – Available October 15, 2012
The 2013 Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing Conference has issued a call for participation, inviting submissions for panel discussions, student research posters, birds-of-a-feather sessions and workshops. Additionally, applications are now being accepted for the Doctoral Consortium and student scholarships to attend the conference. Confirmed speakers include Vint Cerf (Google VP and ACM President), Armando Fox (UC Berkeley), Anita Jones (University of Virginia), Jeanine Cook (New Mexico State University), Annie Anton (Georgia Tech), and Hakim Weatherspoon, (Cornell University), among others. For more information, please visit the http://tapiaconference.org/2013/.
Research Features from Across XSEDE and Campus Champion Partners
IBM’s Watson Turns Medic: Supercomputer to Diagnose Disease
IBM's supercomputer Watson is learning to use its language skills to help doctors diagnose patients. "It's a machine that can read everything and forget nothing," says physician Larry Norton at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York. Watson handles medical questions by drawing on information from medical journals and clinical guidelines. In order to test the new application, Watson was given 188 questions that it had not seen before and achieved about 50 percent accuracy. To improve that percentage, Watson is currently absorbing tens of thousands of medical records concerning treatments and outcomes associated with individual patients. After being provided with data on a new patient, Watson looks for information on those with similar symptoms, as well as the treatments that have bee successful in the past. Watson is now answering basic questions based on the treatment guidelines that are published by medical societies and is showing very positive results, according to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center doctor William Audeh. To read further, please visit http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21528796.400-watson-turns-medic-supercomputer-to-diagnose-disease.html.
Hands-On Supercomputing at TACC
The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) recently hosted the 6th annual Summer Supercomputing Institute (SSI). The week-long institute introduces researchers to the role of supercomputing in 21st century science, teaches the basics of simulation, modeling, and data-driven science, and provides a hands-on experience with TACC's supercomputing resources. At the event, University of Texas at San Antonio researcher Almoutaz El Hassan discussed how he is developing rainfall-runoff modeling tools to help officials manage issues such as flood management and water conservation. El Hassan plans to use supercomputing to create models with more accurate abilities to predict runoff and to integrate visualization into the modeling process. "We wanted to create a training experience where diverse groups of people interested in supercomputing could learn from our instructors and from each other," says TACC's Chris Hempel. To read further, please visit http://www.tacc.utexas.edu/news/feature-stories/2012/ssi.
An NSF-Israel Collaboration in Computer Science
The U.S. National Science Foundation and the United States-Israel Binational Science Foundation recently announced the U.S.-Israel Collaboration in Computer Science (USICCS), which aims to support collaborative research projects that lead to new knowledge in foundational areas of computer science. The USICCS program supports transformative research projects that advance the design and analysis of algorithms. The main goal is to understand the fundamental limits of resource-bounded computation and to find efficient solutions within those limits. USICCS also supports research on the design and analysis of new algorithms in parallel and distributed models. The program seeks new techniques for the design and analysis of algorithms in areas such as cryptography, computational geometry, computational biology, game theory, and numerical, symbolic, and algebraic computing. To read further, please visit http://www.cccblog.org/2012/08/30/a-u-s-israel-collaboration-in-computer-science/.
Educator News and Curriculum
Free Processing Workshop for Teachers at SIGGRAPH 2013
July 21, 2013 – Anaheim, California
The annual ACM SIGGRAPH 2013 conference is offering a free professional development experience for computer science high school teachers sponsored by the SIGGRAPH Education Committee. The workshop is entitled Processing: Teaching Java and Graphics Programming Fundamentals Through Art and Game Creation. The 3-hour workshop will introduce the basics of Processing and a series of specific creative projects that have been developed and honed in a high school setting in order to teach fundamental programming concepts as well as fundamental graphics concepts. Workshop participants will be provided copies of all labs assignments, sample code for each lab and related instructional materials for use in their own classrooms as well as instructions for obtaining the Processing environment, freely downloadable from Processing.org for several platforms. Please visit http://buildingsteam.org/ and follow the link for ACM SIGGRAPH Education Committee 2013 Workshop to complete an interest form to receive additional information in the spring.
Teaching Robots to Learn Like Little Children
Scientists at the University of Bielefeld's research institute for Cognition and Robotics want to develop machines that can adapt to human behavior and learn from people. They are working to teach iCub, a child-like robot, how to understand both visual and acoustic information as it is expressed by people. "If in future we want robots to behave in a flexible manner, without having to program them first, we'll still have to teach them things," says Bielefeld computer scientist Lars Schillingmann. "And we can do that by programming them to recognize what we're saying and showing them." Schillingmann says iCub should learn like children learn from adults, including by listening, imitating, and trying things out. The researchers hope that iCub will be able to do more than just recognize the properties ascribed to a particular object, or only copy certain procedures in the future. To read further, please visit http://www.dw.de/teaching-robots-to-learn-like-little-children/a-16186525-1.
Student Engagement Opportunities and Information
L'Oréal USA Fellowships For Women In Science 2013 Fellowship Program Application Process Opens November 5, 2012
The program is entering its tenth year and since its launch in 2003, L'Oréal USA's Fellowship program has recognized and rewarded 45 extraordinarily talented young women scientists engaged in breakthrough research projects at leading universities and research institutions across the country. The L'Oréal USA Fellowships For Women In Science awards five post-doctoral women scientists with grants of up to $60,000. Applicants are welcome from a variety of fields, including the life and physical/material sciences, technology (including computer science), engineering and mathematics. For more information and to apply, please visit http://www.lorealusa.com/_en/_us/ on November 5, 2012.
The Richard Tapia Conference Offers Scholarships
Application Deadline – November 25, 2012
Scholarships will be available again this year to attend the 2013 Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing Conference, February 7-10 in Washington, D.C. The financial assistance helps ensure the attendance of those who would otherwise be unable to participate and encourages diversity in conference attendance. The application form is expected to be posted online within the next few days, and the deadline for submission is Nov. 25. Scholarships are generally awarded to students and mentors who also will be presenting at the conference and cover travel, hotel accommodations, meals, and conference registration. For more information and to apply, please visit http://tapiaconference.org/2013/scholarships.html.
Gender Gap in IT Labor Market Remains Wide: Survey
Thirty-five percent of 2,400 information technology (IT) manager worldwide claim to have no women in IT management roles in their organization, and 24 percent have no women on any of their technical teams, according to a Harvey Nash survey. Additionally, despite the fact that 50 percent of college graduates are women, very few of them pursue careers in IT, says Harvey Nash USA president and CEO Bob Miano. However, high-profile women executives in the tech industry can serve as examples of what other women can achieve, according to Manilla.com CIO Beth Devin. The survey also showed that 59 percent of respondents consider women good at promoting team cohesion and morale, compared to just 49 percent of men. To read further, please visit http://www.eweek.com/c/a/IT-Management/Gender-Gap-in-IT-Labor-Market-Remains-Wide-Survey-374098/.
Career Opportunities
Research Technologies, University Information Technology Services
Indiana University - Job #7135
Ascertains needs, creates, coordinates, and leverages education materials and coordinate outreach efforts for the Research Technologies Division of OVPIT, the Indiana University Pervasive Technology Institute, and the scientific research community within and outside IU. Creates new education, outreach, and engagement materials related to the most advanced computing technologies in existence; and updates, changes, and creates new materials as technology changes. For a complete job description, including job requirements, please visit https://jobs.iu.edu/.
Computer Science Postdoctoral Researcher - Scientific Data Management
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory - Req #75117
The Scientific Data Management Research Group has an immediate opening for a post-doctoral researcher to perform research and development on a new project in the area of scientific data management. The project, called the Data Services (SDS), aims to provide a scientific data storage system that can dynamically optimize the underlying physical storage structures while maintaining a consistent logical data organization. This separation between logical and physical views of data is a key concept of database research. The SDS system seeks to apply this concept to high-level data format libraries such as HDF5 and netCDF commonly used by scientific application. The SDS system will monitor the user access patterns and alter the physical storage structures to dynamically optimize the speed of data accesses. To fully realize the advantage of high-level data models, the SDS project seeks to directly integrate with the disk storage systems. For more information and to apply, please visit
https://lbl.taleo.net/careersection/2/jobdetail.ftl?lang=en&job=75117.
High Performance Computing Technician
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory - Req #75134
The High Performance Computing Technician is skilled in all HPC operational areas including computational systems, networking, cybersecurity, storage and environmental systems in a UNIX environment. Under minimal supervision, monitors daily operations on one or two areas of the control center. Analyzes system failures and initiates appropriate recovery procedures on all large systems, servers, storage systems and network components within the NERSC and Esnet environments. Contact appropriate vendors and initiate service calls in a timely manner. Maintains appropriate documentation using a trouble ticketing system and the ESnet Maintenance Calendar system. Maintains tools and procedures used to monitor and support HPC operations. Provide technical support for monitoring tools utilized by the group, including the ability to make basic modifications to existing utilities as required. Inform and update NERSC staff and the user community quickly and accurately when system failures or maintenances occur. Perform basic user support functions such as generation of passwords and disabling of user accounts when requested. Be able to provide procedural input to the CONS manager or Lead Technician. Modify and maintain CONS documentation including system and network documentation as appropriate, and Standard Operating Procedures (SOP’s) as directed. For more information and to apply, please visit
https://lbl.taleo.net/careersection/2/jobdetail.ftl?lang=en&job=75134.
Computational Biologist/Biophysicist Postdoctoral Fellow
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory - Req #75126
The position requires development of novel methods for the analysis of and integration of OMIC data with phenotypic data for identifying biomarkers. Applicant will develop computational methods (i) for improved understanding of diseased models from high content screening of multicellular systems as a result of perturbation of the microenvironment, and (ii) to identify molecular basis of tumor subtypes from high content screening of tumor histologies. This is an exciting opportunity to expand in multiple directions, to gain new insights for developing new therapeutic targets, and obtain independent grants. For more information and to apply, please visit
https://lbl.taleo.net/careersection/2/jobdetail.ftl?lang=en&job=75126.
Last But Not Least – Computational News of Interest
Getting Serious About Global Gaming
University of Alberta researchers have developed a network designed to bring together academia and the gaming industry. The researchers are addressing a broad range of questions about how electronic games can be used for education, defining the line between literature and gaming, and finding ways to preserve electronic games. "We as faculty need to make sure that we’re looking at this global phenomenon," says Alberta researcher Geoffrey Rockwell. He says the gap between the games industry and the games studies community has resulted partly because of cultural differences and how computer games are studied. In addition, Rockwell says both academia and the gaming industry need to find a way to preserve electronic games. "We have to provide an answer to the question of the preservation of interactive media," he says. “Much of the important art of the last 50 years--and by that I don’t mean fine art but human art--has been interactive media." To read further, please visit http://www.news.ualberta.ca/article.aspx?id=A5E84E48330B46E08847909732C894FF.
MIT Researchers at the Intersection of Big Data and Healthcare: What 7.2 Million Medical Records Can Tell Us
Big data analytics have enabled researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's SENSEable City Lab and colleagues at GE Healthymagination to create a powerful visual of the relationships between medical conditions based on the frequency of co-occurrences. The researchers combed through 7.2 million electronic medical records to create an extensive disease network, which they called the Health InfoScape. Their first analysis shows the numerous and sometimes unexpected associations that exist for any given condition. The researchers say their results provided new insights into the close connections of conditions, forcing researchers to reexamine conventional categories about disease classification. "Our initial results are a mix of the expected and the unexpected--simultaneously challenging and reaffirming our preconceptions of health pattern, within individuals, and across the U.S.," the researchers say. To read further, please visit http://www.cccblog.org/2012/08/23/at-the-intersection-of-big-data-and-healthcare-what-7-2-million-medical-records-can-tell-us/.
Robots Compete in Their Own 'Olympics' Games
Twenty-six teams from around the world currently competed in the FIRA RoboWorld Cup, an event that has been running since 1996 and is taking place at Bristol University this year. The robots are participating in a range of competitions, including soccer, basketball, weightlifting, and foot races. Robots can compete in the sprint, which is a three-meter race, or the marathon, which is a 42-meter race. The marathon is made more difficult by the fact the teams have not been told in advance where the race will take place or what surface it will be on. "The robots must be autonomous," says FIRA RoboWorld Cup organizer Guido Herrmann. "Once they start the humans must be hands-off." sports. To read further, please visit http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-19359372
