HPC In the News
The Exascale Revolution
HPCwire
The post-petascale era is marked by systems with far greater parallelism and architectural complexity. Failing some game-changing innovation, crossing the next 1000x performance barrier will be more challenging than previous efforts. At the 2014 Argonne National Laboratory Training Program on Extreme Scale Computing (ATPESC), held in August, Professor Pete Beckman delivered a talk on “Exascale Architecture Trends” and their impact on the programming and executing of computational science and engineering applications. To read further, please visit http://www.hpcwire.com/2014/10/23/exascale-revolution/.
XSEDE Seeking Partner Institutions to Offer Course in Applications of Parallel Computing
XSEDE and the University of California, Berkeley are offering an online course on parallel computing for graduate students and advanced undergraduates and are seeking other university partners that are interested in offering the course for credit to their students. The course includes online video lectures, quizzes, and homework assignments with access to free accounts on the NSF supported XSEDE supercomputers. Last year the course included participants from 17 different institutions with students from a variety of backgrounds that successfully completed the course. To read further, please visit https://portal.xsede.org/user-news/-/news/item/6927.
SDSC Granted $1.3 Million Award for ‘SeedMe.org’ Data Sharing Infrastructure
Researchers at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California, San Diego have received a three-year, $1.3 million award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to develop a web-based resource that lets scientists seamlessly share and access preliminary results and transient data from research on a variety of platforms, including mobile devices. Called SeedMe – short for ‘Swiftly Encode, Explore and Disseminate My Experiments’ – the new award is from the NSF’s Data Infrastructure Building Blocks (DIBBs) program, part of the foundation’s Cyberinfrastructure Framework for 21st Century Science and Engineering (CIF21). The DIBBs program encourages development of robust and shared data-centric cyberinfrastructure capabilities to promote interdisciplinary and collaborative research. A summary and list of the 2014 DIBBs awards can be found on the NSF website. To read further, please visit http://www.sdsc.edu/News%20Items/PR100114_seedme.html.
Tim Berners-Lee, Web Creator, Defends Net Neutrality
The New York Times
Sir Tim Berners-Lee, speaking at a technology conference in London on Wednesday, says harnessing the full potential of the Internet and Web technology in the future will require the codification of network neutrality into law. The battle over network neutrality is approaching a major inflection point with the U.S. Federal Communications Commission poised to issue a final decision on new net neutrality rules later this year, possibly allowing for Internet service providers to charge for improved access to bandwidth at the same time the European lawmakers pass laws guaranteeing open and equal access to online content for everyone. To read further, please visit http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/10/08/tim-berners-lee-web-creator-defends-net-neutrality/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0.
NSF CISE Research Infrastructure (CRI) Program
The following is a National Science Foundation (NSF) Dear Colleague Letter (DCL) by the Directorate for Computer & Information Science & Engineering (CISE) Acting Assistant Director, Dr. Suzanne Iacono. Through its CISE Research Infrastructure (CRI) program (NSF 14-593 http://www.nsf.gov/publications/pub_summ.jsp?ods_key=nsf14593), the NSF Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) supports world-class research infrastructure enabling focused research agendas in computer and information science and engineering. The CRI program funds both the creation of new infrastructure as well as the enhancement of existing infrastructure. For more information, please visit http://www.cccblog.org/2014/10/22/nsf-cise-research-infrastructure-cri-program/.
SC14 in HPC News
NCSA at SC14
Visit booth #1621 at SC14 to learn more about big data, big computing, and big research at NCSA. Meet staff, see demos, and get the latest on the Blue Waters supercomputer, our collaborations with industry, the National Data Service, and more. The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) accelerates discovery and innovation through expertise in high-performance computing, data, software, and interdisciplinary research. NCSA staff and Illinois computer science students will compete in the Intel Parallel Universe Coding Challenge. Cheer on the #CodingIllini!. For more information, please visit http://www.ncsa.illinois.edu/SC14/.
Radio Free HPC Previews the StartupHPC Meetup at SC14
In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team previews the StartupHPC Meetup at SC14. “Does your Startup have ties to High Performance Computing? SC14 will be in New Orleans this year, and we are holding our first meetup on Nov 17th in New Orleans. Please come, meet like minded people, listen to industry notables, and kick off StartupHPC as a support community.” To listen to the podcast, please visit http://insidehpc.com/2014/10/radio-free-hpc-previews-startuphpc-meetup-sc14/.
HPC Call for Participation
Call for Proposals: Creating Visions for Computing Research
Submission Deadline – December 1, 2014
The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) issued a new call for proposals for workshops that will catalyze and enable innovative research at the frontiers of computing. The CCC encourages creative ideas from all segments of the computing research community on topics ranging from the formulation of new basic research to the use of existing research ideas and technologies to address important scientific or societal challenges. For more information, including submission guidelines, please visit http://cra.org/ccc/visioning/creating-visions-for-computing-research.
European Geosciences Union General Assembly
April 12 -17, 2015 - Vienna, Austria
Abstract Submission Deadline – January 7, 2015
This session explores practical approaches for understanding and furthering many aspects of data stewardship such as defining elements of data quality; tracking provenance, workflows, added value, and credit through the data lifecycle; scaling of complex processes; and ultimately making scientific data more broadly available, discoverable, and usable for a larger and more diverse user community. This is explored through the lens of cyberGIS, which has emerged from the realm of the desktop and the isolated, on-premise server to that of more pervasive, distributed computing, including high-performance grid computing and the cloud. Crucial to CyberGIS as an engine of data stewardship is its evolving capability to natively interoperate with a range of data formats, to digest their key metadata and spatio-temporal boundaries, and to expose and disseminate GIS services, data feeds, and related information products. Papers on these GIS topics are welcome. Detailed information on how to submit an abstract can be found at http://egu2015.eu//abstract_management/how_to_submit_an_abstract.html.
CALL FOR CHALLENGE PAPERS: ACM Journal of Data and Information Quality
As part of our editorial mission for the ACM Journal of Data and Information Quality (JDIQ) we would like to introduce our readers to open challenges in data quality and spur discussions that will potentially lead to new research and solutions. We ask you to share your expertise and insights with the community. We will collect these contributions as articles to be published in selected issues. For these reasons, we are now inviting two-page submissions (Challenge papers) addressing the following:
- What is an important data and information quality-related challenge facing organizations today?
- Why is this important?
- How might this challenge be solved?
For complete information, please visit http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/jdiq. For coordination purposes, please briefly contact Felix Naumann at naumann@acm.org if you plan a submission.
Upcoming Workshops, Conferences and Webinars
SDSC WorDS Center Workflow Hackathon
November 4, 2014 – San Diego Supercomputer Center, La Jolla, California
Have any data science applications you want to experiment with and scale? Join us for the second and last WorDS Hackathon event of 2014. Build your own applications or just choose one from a list of pre-designed challenges. Based on individual use cases, we will help you hack workflow-driven applications by building a prototype of your workflows from scratch, running them on HPC/cloud/cluster resources, ensuring reproducibility via provenance tracking, and wrapping them asweb applications. For more information and to register, please visit http://words.sdsc.edu/events.
Research News From Around the World
NCSA is Mapping Atoms
When Illinois researchers set out to investigate a method to control how DNA moves through a tiny sequencing device, they did not know they were about to witness a display of molecular gymnastics. Fast, accurate and affordable DNA sequencing is the first step toward personalized medicine. Threading a DNA molecule through a tiny hole, called a nanopore, in a sheet of graphene allows researchers to read the DNA sequence; however, they have limited control over how fast the DNA moves through the pore. In a new study published in the journal Nature Communications, University of Illinois physics professor Aleksei Aksimentiev and graduate student Manish Shankla applied an electric charge to the graphene sheet, hoping that the DNA would react to the charge in a way that would let them control its movement down to each individual link, or nucleotide, in the DNA chain. TO READ FURTHER, PLEASE VISIT http://news.illinois.edu/news/14/1009DNA_AlekseiAksimentiev.html.
Brain Cell Linker Dependence Shown by XSEDE/TACC Supercomputer Simulations
It all begins in the brain as a flood, tens of millions of neurotransmitters handed off from one neuron to another in just a fraction of a second. Memories, dreams and learning share a common thread in this exchange of electrical and chemical signals by the nearly 100 billion spindly neurons of the brain, each cell networked to 10,000 others. Memories, dreams and learning share a common thread in this exchange of electrical and chemical signals by the nearly 100 billion spindly neurons of the brain, each cell networked to 10,000 others.. To read further, please visit https://www.tacc.utexas.edu/news/feature-stories/2014/brain-cell-linker-dependence.
Human Brain Project: Electronic Brain by 2023
EE Times
Researchers on the European Union's decade-long Human Brain Project (HBP) recently disclosed how far they have come toward the goal of creating an artificial brain by 2023 at the annual HBP Summit in Germany. The project's goal is the initial simulation of the human brain on supercomputers, and then the precise replication of its functions via a hardware emulator. The long-term objective is the construction of artificial brains that can outperform traditional von Neuman supercomputers at far less cost. The report at the summit detailed the hiring of all required personnel, lab engagements, and the installation of the information and communications technology (ICT) infrastructure to enable HBP researchers and their partners to collaborate and exchange data. To read further, please visit http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1324121&.
RCSB Protein Data Bank Launches Mobile Application
SDSC Helps Develop Free ‘App’ to Access 100,000+ Molecule Structures
The RCSB Protein Data Bank (PDB), which recently archived its 100,000th molecule structure, has introduced a free mobile application device that enables users from the general public and expert researchers to quickly search and visualize the 3D shapes of proteins, nucleic acids, and molecular machines. To read further, please visit http://www.sdsc.edu/News%20Items/PR100614_pdbmobile.html.
University of Missouri is Monitoring Vital Signs for the Elderly
The National Science Foundation recently featured University of Missouri computer scientist Marjorie Skubic in a Science360 radio episode. Skubic is engineering high-speed networks that can remotely monitor movement and vital signs. The goal is to help provide independent living for the elderly. In this photo at the Smart America Expo, Skubic is showing sensors that are placed under a mattress to monitor vital signs. As part of the Closed Loop Healthcare team at the Expo, Skubic worked to connect the technologies she’s created with those developed by other teams with similar health care goals. To read further, please visit http://www.cccblog.org/2014/10/24/monitoring-vital-signs-for-the-elderly/.
Big Data for the Classroom
CCCBlog
Data sets are growing rapidly. Yahoo, Google, and Amazon, work with data sets that consist of billions of items. The size and scale of data, which can be overwhelming today, will only increase as the Internet of Things matures. Data sets are also increasingly complex. It is becoming more important to increase the pool of qualified scientists and engineers who can find the value from the large amount of big data. The National Academies released a report on training students to extract value from big data based on a Committee on Applied and Theoretical Statistics (CATS) workshop that occurred in April 2014. To reads further and to read the workshop report, please visit http://www.cccblog.org/2014/10/23/big-data-in-the-classroom/.
Universities Come Together to Discuss Ebola Fighting Robots
Could robots really aid in the Ebola fight? On November 7th, robotics researchers from around the country will come together to try to answer that question. They will see if robots can prevent the spread of Ebola by possibly decontaminating infected equipment and or even burying victims. Robin Murphy, a professor of computer science and engineering at Texas A&M University, is helping to set up this Safety Robotics for Ebola Workers workshop. The workshop will bring together health care workers, relief workers and robotics. It is co-hosted by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, Texas A&M, Worcester Polytechnic Institute and the University of California, Berkeley. The goal of the workshop is for the roboticists to hear directly from those who have been working on the outbreak. That way they can learn what is needed to help patients, prevent the spread of the virus, and protect aid workers from infection. To read further, please visit http://www.computerworld.com/article/2835223/researchers-to-meet-with-aid-workers-to-build-ebola-fighting-robots.html.
Educator News and Opportunities
Teacher Spends Two Days as a Student and Is Shocked at What She Learns
Do teachers really know what students go through? To find out, one teacher followed two students for two days and was amazed at what she found. Her report is in following post, which appeared on the blog of Grant Wiggins, the co-author of “Understanding by Design” and the author of “Educative Assessment” and numerous articles on education. A high school teacher for 14 years, he is now the president of Authentic Education, in Hopewell, New Jersey, which provides professional development and other services to schools aimed at improving student learning.
CSTA Offers Notable Women in Computing? Playing Cards for Sale
One of the projects, CSTA is working on is a guide to encourage people to write Wikipedia pages on Notable Women in Computing. To advertise this project I have created a deck of playing cards of notable women in computing. We have about 300 notable women in our database. For each one we have the status of their Wikipedia page (whether they have one or not, or have a page that needs work). We selected 54 of the women and put each one on a different card. Shafi Goldwasser, Turing Award Winner, is the Jack of hearts, Maria Klawe, President of Harvey Mudd, is one of the jokers, etc. If you want to order them now, we have started a kickstarter running now where you can get them for $10/deck and they will be shipped to you in December. We also have a poster of all the cards there. If you want to know more about the project, the cards, or to order cards now at $10/deck to get in December from the kickstarter, please visit http://www.cs.duke.edu/csed/wikipedia/cards.html.
Applications Now Being Accepted for Costa’s Faces of Computing Contest
Submission Deadline – November 20, 2014
The Equity Committee of the CSTA is sponsoring a contest to celebrate the many different kinds of faces that we see in the computing world. For the past two years, students have created posters to celebrate diversity in computing. This year, we're going to shake things up a little, and we are asking for a commercial-length (1-3 minutes) video that features students participating in computing in interesting ways. The exact style and format is up to your students. They might make a short-short film, a public service announcement, or a commercial for your class, your robotics club, or Computer Science in general. Let your students be creative! Winners will receive Sphero, Ollie (http://www.gosphero.com/) or Finch robots (http://www.finchrobot.com/) for their classrooms. Rules, guidelines and release forms can be found at http://csta.acm.org/Advocacy_Outreach/Other/FOC.html . If you have questions about the contest, please email Laura Blankenship at lblanken@gmail.com.
High-Tech Pay Gap: Minorities Earn Less in Skilled Jobs
USA Today
Hispanics, Asians, and blacks are not receiving equal pay for equal work in the high-tech industry, according to a recent American Institute for Economic Research (AIER) report. "What this tells us is that race and ethnicity matter, and they matter a lot," says AIER's Nicole Kreisberg. "Simply increasing diversity is not enough. We also have to talk about money." The study examined several factors, including education, occupation, age, geography, gender, citizenship status, marital status, and children in the home. Recent figures from some of the largest technology companies show blacks, Hispanics, and women are underrepresented in Silicon Valley. Analysts say this trend can be attributed to an unconscious bias. However, Silicon Valley companies are studying the issues. "We are regularly looking at our diversity metrics so that we can understand the current situation, target problem areas to address, and have a baseline to track the results of change," says Twitter's Janet Van Huysse. To read further, please visit http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2014/10/09/high-tech-pay-gap-hispanics-asians-african-americans/16606121/.
Los Angeles Unified School District Announces Sweeping Expansion of Computer Science Course Work
The Los Angeles Times
The Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) and Code.org are collaborating to launch a sweeping expansion of computer science coursework, according to officials. The three-year effort involves training LAUSD teachers to help students at all grade levels learn about how computers work, enabling them to eventually teach advanced computer coding at the high school level. "It's important to know what's behind the applications and how they're developed," says LAUSD's Todd Ullah. Code.org is training a cohort of Los Angeles educators to pass skills onto their colleagues. Some of the training and part of the curriculum is online, while Code.org also is contributing course materials. "Teaching students how to code enhances their relevant skills, no matter what academic or career path they eventually choose," says LAUSD superintendent John Deasy.
Student Engagement and Opportunities
Computer Engineering Degrees Pay Off Big Time
Network World
Students who graduate with engineering degrees in a variety of fields are rewarded with high-paying jobs and have strong earnings potential throughout their career, according to a Brookings Institution report. Computer engineering currently ranks as the fourth-highest earning degree, with majors earning an average of $2.02 million throughout their career, while the top 10 percent of computer engineering majors earn more than $3.55 million. The report provides detailed data related to how much money graduates make just out of college, throughout different points of their career, and over their lifetime. "Engineering has reliably been a high-paying major dating back as far as the 1960s and 70s," notes Brookings researcher Brad Hershbein. The data showing that computer engineering and computer science is a lucrative major comes as colleges and universities around the country are noting increased interest in computing majors. To read further, please visit http://www.networkworld.com/article/2823415/careers/computer-engineering-degrees-pay-off-big-time.html.
Two Teenage Girls Have Invented the Most Powerful Video Game of the Year
The game, Tampon Run, is proving to be so successful, its creators spent last Saturday and Sunday coding a mobile version of the game. That’s right: An app called Tampon Run is coming to your iPhone. The game takes a whole different approach to first-person shooters. The main character runs down the street firing tampons at her enemies, leaping over their heads to collect more when she runs out. The goal isn’t to build an arsenal and go all Rambo, however; it’s to challenge the idea that in society, we’re more comfortable with guns and violence than we are with teaching girls to be comfortable with their bodies. To read further, please visit http://mic.com/articles/100672/two-teenage-girls-have-invented-the-most-powerful-video-game-of-the-year.
HPCAC-ISC 2015 Student Cluster Competition Applications Now Being Accepted
Application Deadline – November 14, 1014
The HPC Advisory Council (HPCAC), and ISC High Performance (ISC 2015), call on undergraduate students from around the world to submit their application for partaking in the 2015 Student Cluster Competition (SCC). The announcement of the accepted teams will be made at SC14 in New Orleans on November 19, 2014. The 11 teams selected will receive the opportunity to build a small cluster of their design and run a series of benchmarks and applications in real time for four days, on the ISC 2015 exhibition floor. To learn more about the nature of the competition, please refer to the HPCAC-ISC 2014 Student Cluster Competition roundtable on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYc5yU17qtU. Submission details are available on the HPC Advisory Council website at http://www.hpcadvisorycouncil.com/events/2015/isc15-student-cluster-competition/.
Send Your Name on NASA’s Journey to Mars, Starting with Orion’s First Flight
Application Deadline – October 31, 2014
If only your name could collect frequent flyer miles. NASA is inviting the public to send their names on a microchip to destinations beyond low-Earth orbit, including Mars.Your name will begin its journey on a dime-sized microchip when the agency’s Orion spacecraft launches December 4, 2014 on its first flight, designated Exploration Flight Test-1. After a 4.5 hour, two-orbit mission around Earth to test Orion’s systems, the spacecraft will travel back through the atmosphere at speeds approaching 20,000 mph and temperatures near 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit, before splashing down in the Pacific Ocean. But the journey for your name doesn’t end there. After returning to Earth, the names will fly on future NASA exploration flights and missions to Mars. With each flight, selected individuals will accrue more miles as members of a global space-faring society. To submit your name to fly on Orion’s flight test, please visit: http://go.usa.gov/vcpz.
Faculty Opportunities
National Robotics Initiative (NSF 15-505)
Full Proposal Deadline - January 14, 2015
The goal of the National Robotics Initiative is to accelerate the development and use of robots in the United States that work beside or cooperatively with people. It will development the next generation of robotics, to advance the capability and usability of such systems and artifacts, and to encourage existing and new communities to focus on innovative application areas. For complete information, please visit http://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=503641&org=CISE&from=home.
NSF Call for Proposals: Scalable Nanomanufacturing (SNM)
Full Proposal Deadline- January 20, 2015
The National Science Foundation (NSF) announces a fifth year of a program on collaborative research and education in the area of Scalable Nanomanufacturing. This program is in response to and is a component of the National Nanotechnology Initiative Signature Initiative: Sustainable Nanomanufacturing - Creating the Industries of the Future (http://www.nano.gov/node/611). Although many nanofabrication techniques have demonstrated the ability to fabricate small quantities of nanomaterials, nanostructures and nanodevices for characterization and evaluation purposes, the emphasis of the Scalable Nanomanufacturing program is on research to overcome the key scientific and technical barriers that prevent the production of useful nanomaterials, nanostructures, devices and systems at an industrially relevant scale, reliably, and at low cost and within environmental, health and safety guidelines. For more information, please visit http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2015/nsf15507/nsf15507.htm?WT.mc_id=USNSF_25&WT.mc_ev=click.
Other Computational News
Microsoft's RoomAlive Turns Your Room Into a Holodeck
CNet
Microsoft recently unveiled RoomAlive, a proof-of-concept prototype the company's researchers say transforms any room into an immersive, augmented entertainment experience. "Users can touch, shoot, stomp, dodge, and steer projected content that seamlessly co-exists with their existing physical environment," the researchers say. RoomAlive is based on Microsoft's IllumiRoom, a program that sought to expand gaming beyond the screen, projection mapping animated environments onto walls using Kinect sensors to create a more immersive experience. RoomAlive builds on the IllumiRoom concept, but it goes beyond serving as an extension to what people see on their screen to a system that transforms the entire room into a projection-mapped, augmented-reality experience. To read further, please visit http://www.cnet.com/news/microsofts-roomalive-turns-your-room-into-a-holodeck/.
Social Media News
Vast Grassroots Mobile Network Grows at Center of Hong Kong Protests
Technology Review
At the heart of the demonstrations in Hong Kong is a huge mobile messaging network whose operation is separate from cellular networks, enabling protestors to communicate even if the cellular network is too crowded or shut down. Many demonstrators are using the FireChat messaging app so phones can communicate directly with each other using Bluetooth or Wi-Fi, rather than linking to a cellular or Wi-Fi network. The app's proliferation was sparked when a Hong Kong teenager urged people to download it in various social media posts, says Open Garden's Christophe Daligault. To read further, please visit http://www.technologyreview.com/news/531226/vast-grassroots-mobile-network-grows-at-center-of-hong-kong-protests/
