HPC Happenings
Podcast: Radio Free HPC Does the SC13 Wrapup Show
In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team discusses what was hot and trending at the SC13 conference in Denver. Big Data was everywhere on the exhibit floor, but the coming requirements of Exascale spurred a number of low-power supercomputing demonstrations that look to be the wave of the future. To listen to the podcast, please visit http://insidehpc.com/2013/11/25/podcast-radio-free-hpc-sc13-wrapup-show/?goback=.gde_1775643_member_5811243179223035904#!.
Application Development for Exascale
February 27-March 1, 2014 – Baton Rouge, Louisiana
The LSU Center for Computation & Technology (CCT) invites you to participate in the 19th Annual Mardi Gras Conference on Application Development for Exascale Computing. This year's conference is designed to introduce possible solutions to this scalability problem. A series of talks and workshops are planned where the creators of modern runtime systems are put into direct contact with application developers providing an avenue for application developers to hear about innovative, new approaches to computation. For registration and more information, please visit https://www.cct.lsu.edu/mardigras14.
Berners-Lee Demands Countries Deliver on Open Data Promises
Telegraph.co.uk
Speaking at the Open Data Institute, Sir Tim Berners-Lee called on world leaders to back talk on transparency and accountability with action, claiming that fighting poverty, accelerating industry and innovation, and reducing corruption can all be assisted through the release of publicly held data to the public and software developers. "Governments and companies must not shy away from publishing contentious datasets if they contain information that could be used to dramatically improve people's lives," Berners-Lee says. The United Kingdom is the most advanced country when it comes to releasing data, with the United States, Sweden, New Zealand, and Denmark also in the top five, according to Berners-Lee's new report. The report says that 55 percent of countries surveyed have formal open data policies in place. However, the report also notes that when government datasets are released, they are often issued in inaccessible formats. The study aims to encourage efforts that coax entrepreneurs, the public, and organizations to use data, rather than for governments to simply publish it. "The open data movement has made a promising start, but many Open Government Data initiatives are presently resting on shallow foundations, at risk of falling backwards if political will or pressure from campaigners subsides," Berners-Lee warns. To read further, please visit http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/internet/10416029/Berners-Lee-demands-countries-deliver-on-open-data-promises.html.
Blue Waters Student Internship Program
Application Period Begins - November 1, 2013
Application Period Ends - March 1, 2014
Support is provided by the NSF-funded Blue Waters Project for sustained petascale computing to support yearlong undergraduate internship experiences involving the application of high-performance computing to problems in the sciences, engineering, or mathematics. The program provides a student stipend totaling $5000, a two-week intensive high-performance computing workshop, and travel to the Blue Waters Symposium 2015. This program provides support for undergraduate internship activities at any accredited degree granting institution in the United States. The internships awarded through this program may be to students working with a faculty mentor on their home campus, or at another campus. Interested faculty need to create a position description, and can specify a particular student that the position is intended for, or may select a qualified applicant with Blue Waters support through our program. For more information and to apply, please visit http://shodor.org/petascale/participation/internships/.
Call for Participation - Opportunity to Collaborate to Offer Parallel Computing Course on Your Campus
The XSEDE project 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. Participating institutions will need to provide a local instructor that will be responsible for advising the local students and officially assigning grades. Students will complete the online course quizzes and exercises as part of their grade and can then undertake a final group project supervised by the local instructor. The course will begin on January 21, 2014 and end on May 2, 2014. Course materials can be reviewed at https://www.cac.cornell.edu/VW/apc/default.aspx. The XSEDE and Berkeley staff will meet with local instructors online every two weeks and also help with answers to student questions using an online forum. Local instructors may design their own group project or choose from a number of projects that have been undertaken by students in the past. For examples of class projects done in previous semesters at UC Berkeley, see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2vjL834tX4&list=SPYTiwx6hV33vMPVw_n-svAjkcRlMRSH9f&index=29 for students presenting their projects in the Spring 2013 offering, or the posters from Spring 2009 at http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~demmel/cs267_Spr09/posters.html.Instructors interested in the collaborative class should contact Steve Gordon, lead for the XSEDE education program at sgordon@osc.edu or by phone at 614-292-4132.
HPC Conference Call for Participation
American Physical Society March Meeting 2014
March 3-7, 2014 – Denver, Colorado
Poster Session Deadline – January 10, 2014
Division of Computational Physics has organized a number of sessions at the APS March Meeting 2014. There will be both invited sessions and focus sessions. The focus sessions each have 12 contributed talks. Abstract submission for oral presentations closed November 15, 2013. You may submit a post-deadline abstract to be considered for a poster session on a space-available basis. For submission information, please visit http://www.aps.org/meetings/march/scientific/index.cfm. For complete registration and conference information, please visit http://www.aps.org/meetings/march/scientific/index.cfm.. v
International Conference on Algorithms for Computational Biology (AlCoB 2014) – 2nd Call for Papers
July 1-3, 2014 - Tarragona, Spain
Paper Submission Deadline – February 4, 2014
AlCoB aims at promoting and displaying excellent research using string and graph algorithms and combinatorial optimization to deal with problems in biological sequence analysis, genome rearrangement, evolutionary trees, and structure prediction. The conference will address several of the current challenges in computational biology by investigating algorithms aimed at: 1) assembling sequence reads into a complete genome, 2) identifying gene structures in the genome, 3) recognizing regulatory motifs, 4) aligning nucleotides and comparing genomes, 5) reconstructing regulatory networks of genes, and 6) inferring the evolutionary phylogeny of species. Particular focus will be put on methodology and significant room will be reserved to young scholars at the beginning of their career. For submission information and guidelines, please visit http://www.springer.com/computer/lncs?SGWID=0-164-6-793341-0. For complete conference information, please visit http://grammars.grlmc.com/alcob2014/.
Upcoming Conferences, Workshops and Webinars
2nd International Conference on the Theory and Practice of Natural Computing (TPNC 2013)
December 3-5, 2013 - Cáceres, Spain
TPNC is a conference series intending to cover the wide spectrum of computational principles, models and techniques inspired by information processing in nature. TPNC 2013 will reserve significant room for young scholars at the beginning of their career. It aims at attracting contributions to nature-inspired models of computation, synthesizing nature by means of computation, nature-inspired materials, and information processing in nature. For more information, please visit http://www.globaleventslist.elsevier.com/events/2013/12/2nd-international-conference-on-the-theory-and-practice-of-natural-computing-tpnc-2013/
XSEDE HPC Monthly Workshop – MPI
December 4-5 2013 – various locations
XSEDE along with the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center and the Texas Advanced Computing Center are pleased to announce a two-day MPI workshop. This workshop is intended to give C and Fortran programmers a hands-on introduction to MPI programming. Both days are compact, to accommodate multiple time zones, but packed with useful information and lab exercises. Attendees will leave with a working knowledge of how to write scalable codes using MPI the standard programming tool of scalable parallel computing. You may register for this event at any of the following sites:
* Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center
* Ohio Supercomputer Center
* Georgia State University
* The University of Utah
* South Carolina University
* Harvey Mudd College
* The University of Iowa
* The University of Houston, Clear-Lake
Please choose the appropriate link on the XSEDE Portal Registration pages: https://portal.xsede.org/course-calendar. Please address any questions to Tom Maiden at tmaiden@psc.edu.
Rice University 2014 Oil & Gas HPC Workshop
March 6, 2014 – Houston, Texas
The Oil and Gas HPC Workshop, hosted annually at Rice University, is a premier meeting place for engaging in discussion focused on high performance computing and computational science and engineering for the oil and gas industry. The program committee is pleased to invite you to participate in the 7th annual workshop and encourages you to submit abstract(s) for consideration for the technical program. For more information, please visit http://rice2014.og-hpc.org/?utm_source=Oil+%26+Gas+HPC+Workshop+Community&utm_campaign=6928632946-Rice_2013_OG_HPC_Call4Abstracts&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_59170dce43-6928632946-31504533
Research Features From Across the Country and Around the World
UC Berkeley and UC Davis Develop a Gestural Interface for Smart Watches
Technology Review
Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley and UC Davis are developing Chirp, a computer chip that uses ultrasound waves to detect a wide range of gestures in three dimensions, and could be implanted in wearable devices. The researchers say Chirp eventually could be used in devices ranging from helmet cameras to smart watches. Chirp relies on sonar via an array of ultrasound transducers that send ultrasonic pulses outward in a hemisphere, echoing off objects in their path. The echoes can be used to detect a range of hand gestures in three dimensions within a distance of about a meter. Berkeley's Richard Przybyla says Chirp's basic set of gesture commands could be programmed into Chirp-enabled devices. To read further, please visit http://www.technologyreview.com/news/520841/a-gestural-interface-for-smart-watches/.
EarthCube: NSF Funds $14.5 Million in Grants to Improve Geosciences Cyberinfrastructure
National Science Foundation
The U.S. National Science Foundation's (NSF) EarthCube initiative intends to enable researchers to plot geoscientific data from any source and visualize it any manner, and model results and investigate concepts from a desktop, a lab, or the field. EarthCube's purpose is to devise new ways of comprehending and predicting the Earth system, and NSF has allotted 13 grants totaling $14.5 million to cultivate a dialogue among geo-, bio-, and cyberscientists to create an EarthCube architecture. NSF's Directorate for Geosciences and its Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering are sponsoring the EarthCube effort. "As the Internet revolutionized the way we lead our daily lives, scientists are searching for technologies that will advance the ability to discover, collaborate, and conduct research at all levels," says the Geosciences Directorate's Roger Wakimoto. "Through EarthCube, NSF has made investments in these technologies and the infrastructure that will be the foundation of addressing challenges in studying the Earth system." To read further, please visit http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=129413.
LLNL Deploys New Supercomputer That Uses SSDs Instead of DRAM and Hard Drives
IDG News Service
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) has deploying Catalyst, a new supercomputer that uses solid-state drive (SSD) storage as an alternative to dynamic random access memory and hard drives, and delivers a peak performance of 150 teraflops. Catalyst has 281 terabytes of total SSD storage and is configured as a cluster broken into 324 computing units, each of which has two 12-core Xeon E5-2695v2 processors, totaling 7,776 central processing unit cores. Catalyst is built around the Lustre file system, which helps break bottlenecks and improves internal throughput in distributed computing systems. "As processors get faster with every generation, the bottleneck gets more acute," says Intel's Mark Seager. He notes that Catalyst offers a throughput of 512GB per second, which is the same as LLNL's Sequoia, the world's third-fastest supercomputer. To read further, please visit http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9243789/New_supercomputer_uses_SSDs_instead_of_DRAM_and_hard_drives.
Google Refining Flu Spread Methodology as Flu Season Approaches
eWeek
Inaccurate, higher estimates for Google Flu Trends last year prompted Google to update its flu data analysis methods for the 2013-2014 flu season. Google's models examine the number of Web searches for information about the flu, which the company believes is a good indicator of flu levels. However, the estimated number of flu cases by Google Flu Trends data in January 2013 was much higher than the number of actual healthcare visits for influenza-like illnesses reported by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC). Google studied the discrepancies and believes the reason for the difference was that "heightened media coverage on the severity of the flu season resulted in an extended period in which users were searching for terms we've identified as correlated with flu levels," says Google's Christian Stefansen. "In early 2013, we saw more flu-related searches in the U.S. than ever before." To read further, please visit http://www.eweek.com/cloud/google-refining-flu-spread-methodology-as-flu-season-approaches.html/.
UCSD, UT Austin Countering Click Spam
UCSD News
Researchers at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), Microsoft Research India, and the University of Texas at Austin have developed ViceROI, an algorithm designed to catch click-spam in search ad networks. "We designed ViceROI based on the intuition that click-spam is a profit-making business that needs to deliver higher return on investment--ROI--for click-spammers than other ethical business models in order to offset the downside risk of getting caught," says UCSD's Vacha Dave. Until now, ad networks normally responded to click-spam reactively. However, the lack of transparency often led to click-spam not being uncovered for years at a time. During testing, ViceROI flagged several hundred publishers that were resorting to click-spam of various sorts. "The ViceROI approach flags click-spam through all these mechanisms and ... is resilient against click-spammers using larger botnets over time," the researchers say in their paper. They also point out that the approach is now "ranked among the best existing filters deployed by the ad-network today while being far more general." To read further, please visit http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/pressrelease/countering_click_spam
MD Anderson Researchers Use TACC Systems to Plan Laser Brain Surgeries
Planning laser surgery for the brain takes into account a large number of variables, such as blood flow, optical properties, material properties, and thermal conductivity inside the body. Because these variables differ from person to person, there is always a level of uncertainty. "What makes these complex variables more predictable for a surgical operation is solid data," Fuentes said. "The more data and images that can be acquired, the more confidence researchers and surgeons can have in planning surgical simulations." In late 2012, Fuentes' team used TACC's Ranger supercomputer to solve incredibly sophisticated and complex calculations. These calculations focused on particular treatment areas throughout the brain to achieve probabilistic simulations in bioheat transfer, which shows how heat moves throughout the brain due to the treatment laser. The researchers conducted many uncertainty quantification calculations, which allowed them to become very familiar, and confident, with their bioheat transfer model. Results of these breakthrough simulations were reported in the International Journal of Hypothermia in June 2013. To read further, please visit http://www.tacc.utexas.edu/news/feature-stories/2013/surgical-simulations-you-can-bet-on.
Educator Opportunities and Information
2014-2015 Albert Einstein Distinguished Educator Fellowship Program
Application Deadline - December 4, 2013, 5:00 p.m. EST,
The Einstein Fellowship seeks experienced and distinguished K-12 educators in fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) to serve an 11-month fellowship appointment in a Federal agency or U.S. Congressional office. The Einstein Fellowship is managed by the Department of Energy / Office of Science, in partnership with other sponsoring agencies including the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and in collaboration with the Triangle Coalition for STEM Education and the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education. Information about the Albert Einstein Distinguished Educator Fellowship Program, including eligibility requirements, program benefits, application requirements, and access to the online application system can be found at http://science.energy.gov/wdts/einstein/. For more information, please contact: Anthonette Pena, Program Director apena@trianglecoalition.org
Study Tracks Attrition Rates for STEM Majors
Inside Higher Ed
About 50 percent of bachelor's degree candidates in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) exit the field without completing a college degree, according to a report from the U.S. Education Department's National Center for Education Statistics. Using data tracking students enrolling in a bachelor's or associate degree program in the 2003-2004 academic year through 2009, the study found that approximately 28 percent of bachelor's degree candidates and 20 percent of associate degree candidates had declared a STEM major. Of those who had entered a STEM program, 48 percent of bachelor's degree candidates had departed the STEM field by spring 2009. Meanwhile, 69 percent of associate degree candidates had left the STEM field during the course of the study. An identical attrition rate for STEM entrants who had entered post-secondary education in the 2003-2004 academic year was uncovered by an October 2012 report. The highest attrition rate was for bachelor's degree candidates declaring a major in computer/information sciences, and for associate degree candidates who declared a math major. To read further, please visit http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/11/27/study-tracks-attrition-rates-stem-majors.
Student Engagement and Information
Summit at Stanford Addressed How to Attract Underrepresented-Minority Students to Careers in Science and Technology
Stanford Report (CA)
The United Negro College Fund's HBCU Innovation Summit held in late October was aimed at finding ways to get more young people, especially underrepresented minorities, to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields. The first-of-its-kind gathering brought together leaders from institutions including Spelman College, Clark Atlanta University, and Howard University that have traditionally focused on educating African Americans. The program was organized by Stanford University's Center for Engineering Pathways to Innovation (Peicenter) and the Center for Professional Development, with support from the U.S. National Science Foundation. "We think that kind of skill can be built in any person who has the drive, who has the excitement, who wants to change the world," says Stanford president John Hennessy. To read further, please visit http://news.stanford.edu/news/2013/november/hbcu-stem-summit-110413.html.
iAAMCS Scholarship to Tapia Conference
Application Deadline – December 5, 2013
Notification of Award – December 6, 2013
The Institute for African American Mentoring in Computing Sciences (iAAMCS) is offering scholarships to the Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing, which is scheduled for February 5-8, 2014 in Seattle, Washington. The scholarship will cover your costs for attending including registration fees, lodging, and travel expenses. Eligibility: (1) U.S. Citizens and permanent residents of the United States or its territories, (2) currently attending U.S. institutions, and (3) underrepresented minorities and women in the computational science (computer science, applied mathematics, high performance computing applications) and engineering. Scholarships to all others are considered as funding is available and on a case-by-case basis. The Institute for African-American Mentoring in Computing Sciences (iAAMCS, pronounced ‘i am cs’) serves as a national resource for all African-American computer science students and faculty. For more information regarding iAAMCS, please visit http://www.iaamcs.org/. For more information and to apply, please visit https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?usp=drive_web&formkey=dFM1OTQ2ZFktZERLWFpJVzJoMXpPZXc6MA#gid=0.
Applications Now Being Accepted for Blue Waters Graduate Fellowships
The Blue Waters Graduate Fellowship Program is a new and unique program funded by the National Science Foundation. This prestigious program will select graduate students from across the country to immerse themselves in a year of focused high-performance computing (HPC) research. The fellowships will empower these talented graduate students to advance their HPC knowledge while also providing them with time and support to accelerate their research. The fellowship is designed to support PhD students who are engaged in a program of study and research that is directly relevant to the use of the Blue Waters supercomputer. Preference will be given to candidates engaged in a multidisciplinary research project that combines disciplines such as computer science, applied mathematics and computational science applications. For complete information on the fellowships, visit https://bluewaters.ncsa.illinois.edu/fellowships. Questions? Contact bwgf@ncsa.illinois.edu.
Fall 2014 Simons Postdoctoral Fellowship
University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, California
Application Deadline - December 15, 2013
The Simons Institute at the University of California, Berkeley and the Computing Sciences Area at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) invites applications for the Simons Postdoctoral Fellowship in the "Theory of Computing for Science." The fellowship allows recent graduates with a Ph.D. (or equivalent) to acquire further scientific training in an exciting new collaboration between the Simons Institute and Berkeley. The postdoctoral fellows will be part of a research project in partnership with Berkeley Lab's Computational Research Division, National Energy Research Scientific Computing (NERSC) Division, or Scientific Networking Division (home of ESnet), which include state-of-the-are computing and networking facilities in addition to basic research in Computer Science, Applied Mathematics, and Computational Science. Fellows will also serve one semester as Fellows in the Simons Institute in the "Algorithmic Spectral Graph Theory" or "Algorithms and Complexity in Algebraic Geometry" programs during the fall of 2014. For more information and to apply, please visit https://lbl.taleo.net/careersection/2/jobdetail.ftl?lang=en&job=76466.
On the Lighter Side – Computational Science News on the Edge
Solving the Tongue-Twisting Problems of Speech Animation
Technology Review
BioVision Hierarchy (BVH) is the de facto standard for encoding body-motion data for use in motion-capture systems. "BVH has survived the company that created it and is now widely supported, presumably because it is simple and clearly defined, straightforward to implement, and human-readable," says Saarland University researcher Ingmar Steiner. However, although BVH is used to encode data from almost every form of motion capture, until now it has been unable to capture tongue articulation during speech. Steiner and his colleagues have developed a method for converting high-resolution tongue data into BVH format, combining data from several sources at the same time. The researchers demonstrated their approach on a standard database of existing tongue articulation recordings, including real-time magnetic resonance imaging, dental scans, and electromagnetic recordings. "This technique is by no means intended to provide an accurate model of tongue shapes or movements, as previous work using biomechanical models does,” the researchers say. "Rather, the advantage here is the lightweight implementation...where realistic animation is more important than matching the true shape of the tongue." To read further, please visit http://www.technologyreview.com/view/521001/solving-the-tongue-twisting-problems-of-speech-animation/.
Gimball: A Crash-Happy Flying Robot
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne
Researchers at the Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) have developed Gimball, a spherical flying robot that is protected by an elastic cage that enables it to absorb and rebound from impacts. The robot keeps its balance using a gyroscopic stabilization system. "The idea was for the robot's body to stay balanced after a collision, so that it can keep to its trajectory," says EPFL's Adrien Briod. The researchers developed the gyroscopic stabilization system consisting of a double carbon-fiber ring that keeps the robot oriented vertically, while the cage absorbs shocks as it rotates. Most robots navigate using a complex network of sensors, which enable them to avoid obstacles by reconstructing the environment around them. Gimball is designed to handle the most difficult terrain. "Our objective was exactly that--to be able to operate where other robots can't go, such as a building that has collapsed in an earthquake," Briod says. "The on-board camera can provide valuable information to emergency personnel." To read further, please visit http://actu.epfl.ch/news/gimball-a-crash-happy-flying-robot/.
UTSA Researchers Develop Prototype Football Kicking Simulator
UTSA Today
University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) researchers have developed the prototype components for a football kicking simulator designed to be a real-time training tool. The Football Kicking Simulation and Human Performance Assessment is a virtual training system that uses real-time wireless feedback and computer sensing to measure football kicking mechanics data. The researchers say the system gives kickers the ability to practice either on or off the field and receive the same kind of attention to detail experienced at a training camp. In addition, they note the quantitative data collected from the football dynamics and kicker's body motion can be used to predict the accuracy of a kick as well as provide visual feedback to maximize the kicking power while minimizing the risk of injury. "What sets our product apart from other kicking simulations is that we are using computer sensing and mathematical models to predict the football trajectory along with various training tools," says UTSA's Alyssa Schaefbauer. To read further, please visit http://utsa.edu/today/2013/10/footballsimulator.html
