HPC in the News
Mark Your Calendar - XSEDE15
July 26-30, 2015 - St. Louis, Missouri
The 4th annual conference will showcase the discoveries, innovations, challenges and achievements of those who utilize and support XSEDE resources and services, as well as other digital resources and services throughout the world. This year's theme is Scientific Advancements Enabled by Enhanced Cyberinfrastructure. Mark your calendar and check the website for upcoming information at https://conferences.xsede.org/technical-program.
PRACE Announces 11th Call for Proposals
Submission Deadline – March 18, 2015 at 12:00 (noon) CET.
PRACE has opened its 11th Call for Proposals. This Call includes Multi-year Access as well as a Data Storage Service Pilot. 2015. The PRACE 11th Call for Proposals is open to Project Access. Proposals can be based on a 12-months schedule, or, for multi-year projects, on a 24- or 36-months schedule. The allocation of awarded resources is made for 1 year at a time with provisional allocations awarded for the 2nd and 3rd year. Additionally, the 11th Call:
- Offers the opportunity to launch a pilot call for joint data storage services and resources
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Reserves 0.5% of the total resources available for the 11th Call for Centres of Excellence (CoE) as selected by the EC under the E-INFRA-5-2015 call for proposals.
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For complete information, please visit http://www.alphagalileo.org/ViewItem.aspx?ItemId=149584&CultureCode=en.
NCAR Travel Support for MSI and EPSCoR Students to Attend the Fourth Annual Software Engineer Assembly (SEA) Conference and Tutorials
April 13–17, 2015 - Boulder, Colorado
Application Deadline – March 23, 2015
The SEA Conference and Tutorials provide great opportunities for students and faculty to attend talks, engage discussions and receive in-depth technical training on important aspects of scientific computing and software engineering. This year SEA Conference theme will be “Python for Scientific Computing. As in past years, we are offering travel support to undergraduate and graduate students in the computational sciences at Minority Serving Institutions and EPSCOR universities to attend this valuable training opportunity provided by the NCAR SEA Conference. There will be no registration fee for students. Travel support provided includes: round trip airfare or mileage (if applicable), ground transportation to/from airports (excluding rental cars), lodging and a daily per diem at the standard GSA rate for Boulder, Colorado. Applications for travel support will be processed on a first come, first served basis, participant registration opens February 2015. To register please visit: https://sea.ucar.edu/conference/2015.
National Science Foundation Research Traineeship (NRT) Program
Full Proposal Deadline – May 3, 2015
The NSF Research Traineeship (NRT) program is designed to encourage the development and implementation of bold, new, potentially transformative, and scalable models for STEM graduate education training. The NRT program seeks proposals that ensure that graduate students in research-based master’s and doctoral degree programs develop the skills, knowledge, and competencies needed to pursue a range of STEM careers. The NRT program includes two tracks: the Traineeship Track and the Innovations in Graduate Education (IGE) Track. The Traineeship Track is dedicated to effective training of STEM graduate students in high priority interdisciplinary research areas, through the use of a comprehensive traineeship model that is innovative, evidence-based, aligned with changing workforce and research needs, and scalable. For complete information, please visit http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2015/nsf15542/nsf15542.htm?WT.mc_id=USNSF_25&WT.mc_ev=click
The Register Announces The Platform - HPC, Large Enterprise IT Analysis
InsideHPC
The publishers of The Register and the founding editors of a new effort to address those shortfalls are pleased to announce a new outlet for readers seeking to understand this momentum at the top of the infrastructure market. The publication, called The Platform, will track key foundational hardware and software technologies that can be used as components in modern systems as well as those systems that vendors create or end users build themselves. If a technology can be used to make a system have more throughput, lower latency, or easier to manage or program, readers now have a fresh source focused on in-depth content. The Platform will bring together coverage of high performance computing (HPC) or supercomputing with advances among the hyperscale datacenter operators and cloud builders, all of whom are pushing the upper limits of scalability. These latter two organizations provide large enterprises either with technology to manage their most complex and demanding workloads or the inspiration to build such systems themselves. To read further, please visit https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/register-announces-platform-hpc-large-enterprise-analysis-hemsoth.
XSEDE15 Sponsor Prospectus Now Available
The XSEDE15 planning committee has released the sponsor prospectus for the upcoming conference taking place in St. Louis, July 26-30. The 2015 XSEDE Conference will showcase the discoveries, innovations, and achievements of those who use, build, and support XSEDE resources and services, as well as those involved in related digital resource endeavors around the world. The full prospectus, including options and pricing for non-profits, is available at https://www.xsede.org/web/conference/sponsors.
Applications Being Accepted for SC15 Student Programs
Application Deadline - June 1, 2015
The SC15 conference is broadening its mission to build a strong and diverse HPC student community at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, through professional development programs, opportunities to learn from mentors, and engagement with SC’s technical sessions. By encouraging a strong student community centered on HPC, the SC15 Student Program helps ease the transition into the broader professional community. For complete information, including activities at SC15, please visit http://www.hpcwire.com/off-the-wire/applications-accepted-sc15-student-programs/.
XSEDE News from Partners and Friends’
XSEDE Call for Interest to Deliver Online Courses on Advanced Computing, Modeling and Data Analysis Topics
We are looking for faculty/staff interested in teaching on-line semester courses on high-end HPC issues that can be offered to graduate students at multiple institutions across the country. The objective is to offer high-end HPC courses not normally available at most campuses. Participating students earn graduate credit at their own institution. We welcome a broad range of topics including extreme scale computing, big data, scientific visualization, and domain science issues in HPC. We pay the faculty member a stipend, and provide funding for a TA. We cover costs for video-taping of presentations. We recruit faculty from institutions across the country to engage their students in taking these courses. For more information, please visit https://conferences.xsede.org/xsede15.
Call for Papers and Participation
Call for Participation: 9th INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON LANGUAGE AND AUTOMATA THEORY AND APPLICATIONS (LATA 2015)
March 2-6, 2015 - Nice, France
LATA is a conference series on theoretical computer science and its applications. Following the tradition of the diverse PhD training events in the field developed at Rovira i Virgili University in Tarragona since 2002, LATA 2015 will reserve significant room for young scholars at the beginning of their career. It will aim at attracting contributions from classical theory fields as well as application areas. For complete information, please visit http://grammars.grlmc.com/lata2015/.
CALL FOR LIGHTNING TALKS: Advancing Research Computing on Campuses
March 17-19, 2015 - Clemson University, South Carolina
Submission Deadline – February 27, 2015
Professionals involved in operating and supporting campus shared research computing infrastructure are invited to share their experiences in 10-minute lightning talks during a workshop on Advancing Research Computing on Campuses. For more information and specific Lightning Talk topics, please visit http://citi.clemson.edu/arcc/.
Call for Papers: 7th Workshop on Interfaces and Architectures for Scientific Data Storage (IASDS)
September 1-4, 2015 – Beijing, China
Submission Deadline – March 31, 2015
held in conjunction with ICPP 2015
High-performance computing simulations and large scientific experiments generate tens of terabytes of data, and these data sizes grow each year. Existing systems for storing, managing, and analyzing data are being pushed to their limits by these applications, and new techniques are necessary to enable efficient data processing for future simulations and experiments. This workshop will provide a forum for engineers and scientists to present and discuss their most recent work related to the storage, management, and analysis of data for scientific workloads. Emphasis will be placed on forward-looking approaches to tackle the challenges of storage at extreme scale or to provide better abstractions for use in scientific workloads. For more information, please visit http://press3.mcs.anl.gov/iasds15/.
Call for Papers - Mobile Web Portals workshop | to be held in CENTERIS 2015 –
October 7-8, 2015 - Vilamoura, Algarve, Portugal
Submission Deadline – April 3, 2015
According to the European Commission report "A Roadmap for Advanced Cloud Technologies H2020 under", the environment of IST (market research, industry, education, training, etc.) undergoes constant changes. Thus, it is necessary to identify the major changes that can be expected in the next 5-10 years and may, or will, affect the environment of IST. Additionally, mobile malware has been around for a while, but it is only in the last few years that it is been used as a tool in the hands of cybercriminals. The growth of mobile malware is only going to continue as people increasingly conduct business and sensitive transactions via mobile devices and it is a result of a number of different factors. For complete information, please visit http://centeris.scika.org.
Upcoming Conferences, Workshops and Webinars
STEM Equity Pipeline Webinar: Helping Native American Females Thrive in Your STEM and CTE Programs
February 26, 2015 - 2-3:30 pm ET, 1-2:30 pm CT, 12-1:30 pm MT, 11 am-12:30 pm PT
Participants are invited to take a journey across cultures into the perceptual intersections of Native and Western cultures to broaden their ability to embrace diversity and sets themselves on a path to effectively teach and mentor underserved and underrepresented females. This webinar uses storytelling to introduce participants to a Native perception of women that provides a point of departure to many of the images portrayed in popular culture (e.g., movies, songs, and stories). Participants will learn about a set of cultural proficiency tools that can help them to eliminate their own stereotypes or those they encounter in their programs. To register for this complimentary webinar, please visit http://www.napequity.org/stem/stem-equity-project/sep-20-webinars/february-26-2015/.
Upcoming Beginning Visualization Tutorial Webinar
March 6, 2015 - La Jolla, California and virtually
Registration Deadline – March 2, 2015
Amit Chourasia from SDSC is offering a beginning data visualization tutorial entitled, “Scientific Visualization: Concept, Execution and Ubiquitous Access.” It’s being offered both at SDSC and as a webcast. I think it might be a worthwhile experience particularly if there were a site that wanted to act as a satellite site and host a group to learn together. The advantage of a satellite site is threefold. First, the attendees can view the webinar on a large screen and keep their laptops free for doing the hands-on exercises. Secondly, an on-site facilitator can field questions and (maybe) answer some of them (or present them to Amit through the ReadyTalk interface). Third, the attendees meet other folks who are just starting to learn how to visualize and share data. More information can be found at http://www.sdsc.edu/Events/gordonviz2015/index.html.
NSF CAREER Proposals Workshop
March 16, 2015 – Arlington, Virginia
Registration Deadline – February 20, 2015
The goal of this workshop is to introduce junior CAREER-eligible faculty to the NSF CAREER program and help them to prepare their CAREER proposals to target CISE programs. Attendees will have the opportunity to improve their skills in proposal writing, as well as to interact with NSF program directors from different CISE divisions (ACI, CCF, CNS, and IIS) and recent NSF CAREER awardees. The workshop includes presentations and discussions on proposal preparation, experience sharing, a mock panel, and meetings with Program Directors from various research programs within CISE. For more information, please visit: http://csl.seas.gwu.edu/nsf-cise-career/.
PRACEdays15 Conference
May 26 = 20, 2015 – Dublin Ireland
The PRACEdays15 conference programme is packed with high-level international keynote speakers, including a talk by RIST, Japan, and many parallel sessions dealing with different HPC topics in science and industry. One of the main highlights of the conference will be a keynote speech by Masahiro Seki, president of the Research Organization for Information Science and Technology (RIST), Japan. Further information, the conference schedule, and a registration link can be found here: http://www.prace-ri.eu/pracedays15/.
Research News From Around the World
PSC, Johns Hopkins Computer Model Saving Lives through Details of Vaccine Supply
Rotavirus is a killer of children in much of the world. About half a million kids die of rotavirus-caused diarrhea every year, particularly in Africa and South Asia. It’s a big reason diarrhea is the third leading cause of child deaths worldwide and why introducing rotavirus vaccine to many countries is so important. Introducing lifesaving vaccines such as the one for rotavirus immunization could save millions of children’s lives. It’s an obvious international public health goal. But these vaccines have to get to children to help them. In countries that don’t have an extra penny to spare, a new vaccine could easily overburden the system, crashing distribution of other vaccines and increasing sickness, suffering and death. To save lives with a new vaccine, you have to work out all the details. To read further, please visit http://www.psc.edu/index.php/life-though-the-details.
Computer Scientists at UT Austin Crack Code for Redrawing Bird Family Tree
A new computational technique developed at The University of Texas at Austin has enabled an international consortium to produce an avian tree of life that points to the origins of various bird species. A graduate student at the university is a leading author on papers describing the new technique and sharing the consortium's findings about bird evolution in the journal Science. The results of the four-year effort — which relied in part on supercomputers at the university's Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) — shed light on the timing of a "big bang" in bird evolution, rearrange evolutionary relationships between some bird species and provide new insights on the origins of song pattern recognition in birds, as well as a host of other avian traits. To read further, please visit https://www.tacc.utexas.edu/-/computer-scientists-at-ut-austin-crack-code-for-redrawing-bird-family-tree.
SDSC to Participate in New Cancer Cell Mapping Initiative
Researchers from the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine and University of California, San Francisco – with support from a diverse team of collaborators including the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) – have launched an ambitious new project to determine how all of the components of a cancer cell interact.” We’re going to draw the complete wiring diagram of a cancer cell,” said Nevan Krogan, director of the UC San Francisco division of QB3, a quantitative biosciences research institute, in announcing the Cancer Cell Map Initiative, or CCMI. To read further, please visit http://www.sdsc.edu/News%20Items/PR013015_cancer_mapping.html.
Researchers from the Mayo Clinic use NSF-supported Blue Waters Supercomputer to Understand Gene Expression in the Brain
The release of the film, "Still Alice," in September 2014 shone a much-needed light on Alzheimer's disease, a debilitating neurological disease that affects a growing number of Americans each year. More than 5.2 million people in the U.S. are currently living with Alzheimer's. One out of nine Americans over 65 has Alzheimer's, and one out of three over 85 has the disease. For those over 65, it is the fifth leading cause of death. There are several drugs on the market that can provide relief from Alzheimer's symptoms, but none stop the development of disease, in part because the root causes of Alzheimer's are still unclear. To read further, please visit http://www.nsf.gov/discoveries/disc_summ.jsp?cntn_id=134049.
Sustained Investment in Research Is Needed to Combat Cyberthreats, CISE AD Tells Congress
Computing Research Policy Blog
In testimony before the U.S. House Science, Space, and Technology Committee's Research and Technology Subcommittee on Tuesday, Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) assistant director Jim Kurose said sustained basic research investment is necessary for countering growing cyberthreats. He also stressed the need for behavioral researchers' participation in this effort, since effective solutions must be social-technical in nature. In addition, Kurose said there must be closer communication between federal agencies, especially the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology, and industry in order to get the most up-to-date information on ever-changing threats and best practices. Kurose's views were echoed by all of the witnesses at the hearing, which included both private- and public-sector experts. relies on professionals. To read further, please visit http://cra.org/govaffairs/blog/2015/01/cybersecurity-hearing-2015/.
Educator News and Opportunities
Teacher Fellow Openings for San Diego County High School STEM Teachers
Extended Deadline – February 16, 2015
Another opportunity for you and your students to pursue STEM activities is through COSMOS (The California State Summer School for Mathematics and Science). Students live on a college campus (UCSD, UCI, UCSC or UCD) for four weeks and learn via hands-on activities from university faculty. One important component in COSMOS is the Teacher Fellow. Teacher Fellows are high school teachers who work with the students on a daily basis. (You do not live on-campus and get to go home at the end of the day.) I have had the privilege of being a UCSD Teacher Fellow for 8 years now and it is the single best professional development that I've had as well as a refreshing way to look at material. COSMOS is still seeking applications for two clusters whose main focus requires a physics background. Information on the COSMOS UCSD program is available on our website: http://www.jacobsschool.ucsd.edu/cosmos/. Please email cosmos@ucsd.edu to let them that you are going to apply.
Study: 100 Percent of Women of Color in STEM Have Experienced Bias
Fortune
Women of color in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields face a double jeopardy, according to University of California Hastings professor Joan Williams. Her new study reveals 100 percent of women of color said they have experienced gender bias, compared with 93 percent of white women. However, women of color also report encountering ethnic and racial stereotyping. Williams, who has studied gender for more than two decades, interviewed 60 women of color and surveyed 557 women, both white and of color. Women of color reported instances of being mistaken as janitors, as well as conflicts over asserting and expressing themselves. To read further, please visit http://fortune.com/2015/01/26/study-100-of-women-of-color-in-stem-experience-bias/.
Student Engagement and Opportunities
REU Summer 2015 in High Performance Computing
July 15- August 7, 2015 - Baltimore, Maryland
Application Deadline – March 1, 2015
UMBC is excited to host this unique Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) Site in scientific, parallel, and statistical computing, all extremely hot areas of current research. Participants will work in teams on projects brought in by high caliber researchers from academia and industry, closely supported by experienced graduate students and faculty members in collaboration with the Center for Interdisciplinary Research and Consulting. The participants will acquire the skills necessary to perform hands-on high performance computing on a state-of-the-art distributed-memory cluster in the UMBC High Performance Computing Facility. For all information and to apply by March 01, 2015, please visit http://www.umbc.edu/hpcreu.
Student Summer Internships at JPL—Computer Science Emphasis—for ALL Majors
Application Deadline – March 1, 2015 (early submissions have priority)
--Are you a Science or Engineering major interested in an exciting Computer Science-related internship at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory?
--Do you have great Computer Science skills?
--Do you have a GPA of 3.0 or above?
--Are you a U.S. Citizen or Permanent Resident?
If you answered "YES" to the above, JPL would like you to apply for a paid internship. Send your application to education@jpl.nasa.gov. Please also use this email address for questions.
Faculty Opportunities
Summer Faculty Fellowship Program at NASA Glenn (Apply by 2/23/15):
Application Deadline – February 23, 2015
NASA John Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio, is accepting applications from full-time, qualified STEM faculty in accredited US colleges and universities inclusive of Minority Serving Institutions, for the summer 2015 NASA Glenn Faculty Fellowship Program (NGFFP). The ten-week Fellowship will begin on Monday, June 1, and end on Friday, Aug. 7. The Fellowship is open to US citizens/. Under-represented and under-served faculty members are encouraged to apply. For additional NGFFP information, including application process, please follow Steps 1 through 4 below-
Step 1: Go to https://intern.nasa.gov
Step 2: In the “OSSI Student Opportunities and Recruitment Tools” container, select the “Fellowships” link to get to the NGFFP Application
Step 3: To access the NGFFP Application and instructions on the Glenn Office of Education Website, control/click on or copy and paste the following website address in your browser -
http://www.nasa.gov/centers/glenn/education/index.html
Step 4: At the Glenn Office of Education, select the “Faculty Fellowship Program Application” link beneath “University Affairs Website” under “Higher Education - Students, Faculty and Postdoc Fellows” on the right side of the page to access the application and specific instructions.
Computational Science News of Interest
.Coder Creates Smallest Chess Game for Computers
BBC News
The Sinclair ZX81 computer game 1K ZX Chess is no longer the smallest-sized chess computer program, as French coder Olivier Poudade has created BootChess, which is only 487 bytes in size, and the code can run on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux computers. David Horne's 1K ZX Chess contained 672 bytes of code and had held the record for 33 years. Poudade, who says creating something smaller seemed impossible at first, achieved his goal by making BootChess even more basic than its 1982 predecessor. The board and pieces are represented by text alone, with P representing pawns, Q used for the queens, and full stops put in the place of empty squares. To read further, please visit http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-31028787.
CSI Computer Science: Your Coding Style Can Give You Away
ITWorld.com (01/28/15) Phil Johnson
Researchers at Drexel University, the University of Maryland, the University of Goettingen, and Princeton University have developed a code stylometry using natural language processing and machine learning to determine the authors of source code based on coding style. The researchers say the technology could be applicable to a wide range of situations in which ascertaining the originating coder is important, such as to help identify the author of malicious source code. The researchers say they developed abstract syntax trees derived from language-specific syntax and keywords, which capture a syntactic feature set that "was created to capture properties of coding style that are completely independent from writing style." To read further, please visit http://www.itworld.com/article/2876179/csi-computer-science-your-coding-style-can-give-you-away.html.
Social Media and HPC
Turning Pac-Man Into a Street-Based Chase Game Using Smartphones
Technology Review
Researchers led by Thomas Chatzidimitris at Greece's University of the Aegean have invented a real-world application of the iconic video game Pac-Man using Android smartphone technology. PacMap enables players to negotiate a labyrinth of actual city streets by determining their location on OpenStreetMap using the smartphone's global positioning system (GPS) sensors. The local street network is then overlaid with a Pac-Man grid dotted with coins, which players collect while being chased by virtual ghosts. The ghosts are programmed either to travel along random paths calculated with standard algorithms, or to follow players using more sophisticated processes. To read further, please visit http://www.technologyreview.com/view/534306/turning-pac-man-into-a-street-based-chase-game-using-smartphones/.
