HPC Happenings

How HPC is Used to Aid Graduate Research – Webinar
January 16, 2013 -  
12:00pm- 1:00pm CT

The XSEDE Scholars Program presents an exciting new webinar featuring the research of graduate students Lindley Graham, UT Austin  And Grace Silva, UNC Chapel Hill.  This webinar will showcase their research areas and highlight how HPC is used to aid their research efforts.  In addition, the session will provide a forum for fellow students to discuss similar research efforts and ask questions about the graduate school experience. To join the session, sign up here by Tuesday, January 15.

2013 Rice Oil & Gas HPC Worksho - Registration Now Open
February 28, 2013 – Rice University

2013 Conference and Plenary Speakers

• Dirk Smit, Chief Scientist Geophysics, Shell
• John Kuzan, Manager, Computational Sciences Function, ExxonMobil Upstream Research Company
• Mary Wheeler, Director, Center for Subsurface Modeling, Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences, The University of Texas at Austin
• William Kramer, Deputy Project Director, Blue Waters Project Office, NCSA

To register, please visit http://rice2013.og-hpc.org/register/.

Supercomputing in Plain English (SiPE) Spring 2013 Workshop Series – Register Today!
Tuesdays, January 22 – April 9, 2013, 2:00pm CT
Available  in person and via videoconferencing

SiPE is targeted at an audience of not just computer scientists but especially scientists and engineers, including a mixture of  undergraduates, graduate students, faculty and staff. These workshops focus on fundamental issues of HPC as they relate to computational and data-enabled science and engineering, The key philosophy of the SiPE workshops is that an HPC-based code  should be maintainable, extensible and, most especially, portable  across platforms, and should be sufficiently flexible that it can adapt  to, and adopt, emerging HPC paradigms. To register, please send e-mail to hneeman@ou.edu. For more information, including the series schedule, please visit http://www.oscer.ou.edu/education.php.

HPC Call for Participation

Third NSF/TCPP Workshop on Parallel and Distributed Computing Education Call for Papers
March 20, 2013 – Boston, Massachusetts
Submission Deadline Extended – January 21, 2013

The third workshop on Parallel and Distributed Computing Education invites unpublished manuscripts from individuals or teams from academia, industry, and other educational and research institutes on topics pertaining to the teaching of PDC topics in the Computer Science and Engineering (and related) curriculum. The emphasis of the third workshop continues to be on the undergraduate education.  The workshop especially seeks papers that report on experience with implementing aspects of the NSF/TCPP curriculum or other novel approaches to incorporating PDC topics into undergraduate core courses that are taken by the majority of students in a program. Methods, pedagogical approaches, tools, and techniques that have the potential for adoption across the broader community are of particular interest. This effort is in coordination with NSF/TCPP curriculum initiative for CS/CE undergraduates (http://www.cs.gsu.edu/~tcpp/curriculum/index.php) and its upcoming NSF-supported Center for Parallel and Distributed Computing Curriculum Development and Educational Resources (CDER). For more information, please visit http://cs.gsu.edu/~tcpp/curriculum/?q=edupar.

ROSS 2013  - International Workshop on Runtime and Operating Systems for Supercomputers
June 10, 2013 – Eugene, Oregon
Submission Deadline – March 15, 2013

The complexity of node architectures in supercomputers increases as we cross petaflop milestones on the way towards Exascale.  Increasing levels of parallelism in multi- and many-core chips and emerging heterogeneity of computational resources coupled with energy and memory constraints force a reevaluation of our approaches towards operating systems and runtime environments. The ROSS workshop, to be held as a full-day meeting at the ICS 2013 conference in Eugene, Oregon, USA, focuses on principles and techniques to design, implement, optimize, or operate runtime and operating systems for supercomputers and massively parallel machines. For more information and projects of interest, in addition to submission guidelines, please visit http://www.mcs.anl.gov/events/workshops/ross/2013/. .

Alice Symposium 2013 - Call for Papers
July 19, 2013 – Durham, North Carolina
Paper Submission Deadline – February 1, 2013
Poster Submission Deadline – March 15, 2013
Contest Submission Deadline – March 15, 2013

The Third Alice Symposium will be held at Duke University and will be part of a week of Alice activities with two-day workshops before and after the Alice Symposium. There is also an Alice contest! You are invited to submit a paper or poster related to the educational use of the Alice programming language at any level (elementary school,  middle school, high school, community college, university).  Teachers are invited to submit student Alice worlds for an Alice contest. There will be two-day workshops before and after the Alice Symposium. Topics include Alice 2.3, Alice 3.1 and Alice with Media Computation. For more information on this robust series of events, please visit http://www.cs.duke.edu/csed/aliceSymposium2013. Questions can be addressed to Kathy Menchaca at menchaca@cs.stanford.edu.

Upcoming Conferences and Workshops.

South Carolina Cyberinfrastructure Symposium
February 11-12, 2-13 - Clemson University

Integrating Computational Science into your Undergraduate Curriculum is the symposium theme. The symposium will begin on February 11, with an evening reception and poster session and the following day is filled with speakers and breakout sessions.  Confirmed speakers include:

* Steven I. Gordon (Ohio State)
* Angela Shiflet (Wofford College)
* Sushil Prasad (Georgia State)
* Steve Stuart (Clemson)

Registration details available soon. Travel awards will be available!! For more information, please contact Jill Gemmill at gemmill@clemson.edu.

2013 AAAS Annual Meeting
February 14-18, 2013 - Boston, Massachusetts

The Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is the most important general science venue for a growing segment of scientists and engineers who are interested in the latest advances as well as multidisciplinary topics and the influence of science and technology on how we live today. Thousands of leading scientists, engineers, educators, and policy-makers interact with one another and with hundreds of members from national and international media. In fact, the growing number of international attendees attests to the growing international nature of this gathering. More than 150 sessions spread across about a dozen tracks are usually presented at the Annual Meeting. For mire information, please visit http://aaas.confex.com/aaas/2013/cfp.cgi.

Emerging Researchers National Conference in STEM
February 28- March 2, 2013 – Washington, DC

The Emerging Researchers National (ERN) Conference in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) is hosted by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), Education and Human Resources Programs (EHR) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) Division of Human Resource Development (HRD), within the Directorate for Education and Human Resources (EHR). The conference is aimed at college and university undergraduate and graduate students who participate in programs funded by the NSF HRD Unit, including underrepresented minorities and persons with disabilities. The objectives of the conference are to help undergraduate and graduate students to enhance their science communication skills and to better understand how to prepare for science careers in a global workforce For more information, please visit http://www.emerging-researchers.org/.

Research Features From Across the Country and Around the World

UC Berkeley, MIT Cellphone, GPS Data Suggest New Strategy for Alleviating Traffic Tie-Ups UC Berkeley NewsCenter

Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that asking specific groups of drivers to stay off the road can significantly reduce rush-hour traffic. The researchers monitored traffic through drivers' cell phone and global positioning system (GPS) data and found that canceling or delaying the trips of 1 percent of all drivers across a road network would reduce delays caused by traffic by only about 3 percent. However, canceling the trips of 1 percent of drivers from carefully selected neighborhoods would reduce the extra travel time for all other drivers in a metropolitan area by as much as 18 percent. "Reaching out to everybody to change their time or mode of commute is thus not necessarily as efficient as reaching out to those in a particular geographic area who contribute most to bottlenecks," says Berkeley professor Alexandre Bayen. To read further, please visit http://newscenter.berkeley.edu/2012/12/20/cellphone-gps-data-suggest-new-strategy-for-alleviating-traffic-tie-ups/.

Supercomputing on the XPRESS Track
Sandia National Laboratories

Sandia National Laboratory researchers are working on the eXascale Programming Environment and System Software (XPRESS) project, an operating system that can handle the million trillion operations per second of future exascale computers and then create prototypes of several programming components. Exascale computing speeds will more accurately simulate the most complex reactions in such fields as nuclear weapons, atmospheric science, chemistry and biology. "The XPRESS project aims to provide a system software foundation designed to maximize the performance and scalability of future large-scale parallel computers, as well as enable a new approach to the science and engineering applications that run on them," says Sandia's Ron Brightwell. The XPRESS effort will address factors known to degrade fast supercomputer performance, such as the insufficiency of concurrent partial problem solving at particular processing locations, which hinders efficiency and scalability because it can require more parallelism. To read further, please visit https://share.sandia.gov/news/resources/news_releases/supercomputing_xpress/.

Research Outlays to Decline Next Year
Wall Street Journal

Research and development spending by governments and corporations in the U.S. and Europe could decline in 2013 as a result of weak economies and large national debts, according to a Battelle Memorial Institute forecast. U.S. inflation-adjusted R&D spending is expected to fall by 0.7 percent in 2013 on the assumption that lawmakers will resolve the fiscal cliff issue, but spending could decline further in the absence of a resolution. U.S. inflation-adjusted R&D spending growth averaged about 4 percent annually from 2004 to 2007, but since 2009 growth has failed to outpace inflation. Globally, the U.S. remains the leader in R&D, spending $418.6 billion in 2012 in current-dollar terms while China spent $197.3 billion, but Battelle predicts that China could achieve R&D spending parity with the U.S. in 2022 and possibly 2019 if the fiscal cliff remains unresolved. Worldwide R&D spending in 2013 is projected to increase by 3.7 percent, or $53.7 billion, to nearly $1.5 trillion, of which the largest increase of $22.9 billion is expected to come from China. The U.S. is predicted to spend $423.7 billion on R&D in 2013, with academic research comprising more than 60 percent of the basic research conducted nationwide. To read further, please visit http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324677204578185552846123468.html.

Follow the Eyes: Head-Mounted Cameras Could Help Robots Understand Social Interactions
Carnegie Mellon News

Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) robotics researchers have developed an algorithm that uses crowdsourcing to detect where people's gazes intersect. The researchers tested their method by monitoring the gaze patterns of volunteers equipped with head-mounted displays. The data enabled researchers to determine if the volunteers were listening to a single speaker, interacting as a group, or watching a bouncing ball in a ping-pong game. The researchers say their algorithm could be used by robots to evaluate social cues, such as the expressions on people's faces or body movements, or data from other types of visual or audio sensors. "This really is just a first step toward analyzing the social signals of people," says CMU's Hyun Soo Park. To read further, please visit http://www.cmu.edu/news/stories/archives/2012/december/dec13_socialsaliency.html.

State-of-the-Art Virtual Reality System Is Key to Medical Discovery
National Science Foundation

University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) researchers are using CAVE2, a next-generation, large-scale, virtual environment, to study brain aneurysms. “We had been looking at computer models of a particular patient’s brain for several months, but within five minutes of putting the model into the CAVE2, the chief endovascologist said we had connected certain arteries in a way that was inconsistent with anatomy,” says UIC professor Andreas Linninger. He notes that without CAVE2’s ability to electronically immerse the researchers in the data, they could have continued to miss this significant data point and struggle with developing an accurate model. “CAVE2 gives us a unique ability to take that data and represent it in a large-scale virtual environment,” says Jason Leigh, director of UIC’s Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL). To read further, please visit http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=126209.

The Stampede Era Begins at TACC

The deployment of a new system is an exciting time at TACC. Stampede will offer 20 times more performance than its predecessor, Ranger, and this means scientists can explore problems that were previously beyond their grasp. Learn more from Chris Hempel, director of TACC's User Services group. To read further, please visit http://www.tacc.utexas.edu/newsletter/1301/stampede.

Educator Curriculum and Information

No Women in CS? Well, Not for Long
TechCrunch

Less than 21 percent of undergraduate computer science (CS) majors at Stanford University are female, and many students say stereotypes, misconceptions, and lack of confidence cause women to drop the introductory CS lasses in large numbers. Research indicates that the two biggest factors for the dearth of female CS students is a lack of confidence and not having a firm grasp of what CS is really about and what its applications are. Stanford students Ayna Agarwal and Ellora Israni recently founded she++, a Stanford community for women in tech. "We would like to see a self-sustaining community of female technologists in the Bay Area working to collaborate with and inspire each other to make technology a field as welcoming to women as it is to men, and to have this community be a model for similar microcosms throughout the nation and the world," Israni says. To read further, please visit http://techcrunch.com/2012/12/27/stanford-bridging-gender-gap/.

In Fairfax County, the Classroom Is a (Cyber) Battlefield
Washington Post

Thousands of students across the U.S. recently participated in the opening round of the CyberPatriot challenge, the premier high school cyberwarfare competition. The event focuses mainly on defending networks, putting teams through reconnaissance missions of probing a network firewall for weaknesses and other hidden vulnerabilities in a system, deleting files, and adding password protections. A second round will be held before the semifinals in January, and the finals will be in mid-March. The winning teams will receive thousands of dollars in scholarship money. Since its launch in 2009, CyberPatriot has grown in popularity among teenagers who are interested in pursuing careers in computer science. "There's an enormous appetite for what we're offering here," says Bernard Skoch, a retired Air Force brigadier general and commissioner of the CyberPatriot event. To read further, please visit http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/fairfax-county-students-compete-in-cyberwarfare-competition/2012/11/17/aeefad2e-302b-11e2-ac4a-33b8b41fb531_story.html.

One Laptop Per Child Project Developing New Laptop Tablet Device

The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project is developing a version of its XO device that will combine its existing laptop functionality with a full-fledged tablet mode. Part laptop and part tablet, the new XO-4 Touch device will feature an energy-efficient, optical multitouch-capable screen. The screen will offer fast-scanning capabilities, a low-latency pen and brush sensors, and the ability to detect pressure. "There is constant debate over laptops versus tablets in educational programs," says OLPC CEO Rodrigo Arboleda. "While maintaining our XO's award-winning design from Yves Behar's FuseProject, we have combined features of both devices to deliver dual benefits." The XO laptop features flash storage rather than a hard disk drive and comes with thick plastic walls and a sunlight-usable display shielded by internal bumpers. The devices have two wireless 802.11 b/g antennas that can link to both ad-hoc networks and wireless access points, and a dust- and waterproof rubber keyboard. The new XO-4 Touch could be released in the first quarter of 2013. OLPC also is developing more strategic partnerships with educational material developers to provide content for the devices. To read further, please visit http://thejournal.com/articles/2012/08/15/one-laptop-per-child-project-developing-new-laptop-tablet-device.aspx.

Student Engagement and Information

Students: Seeking a Mentor for AAAS Meeting?
February 14-18, 2013 – Boston, MA
Application Deadline – February 1, 2013

Are you a student looking for guidance on how to establish a career in science writing? Are you curious about how senior science writers do their jobs? Here's your chance to find out through the NASW Mentoring Program, which matches science writing students with established science journalists and public information officers for a day during the AAAS Annual Meeting. The program is limited by the number of mentors who volunteer. For more information and to apply for mentorship, please visit to www.nasw.org. To contact the planning committee with questions, please visit mentor@nasw.org.

LSU REU Programs in Computational Sciences and Material Science
June 3 - August 2, 2013
Application Deadline - March 1, 2013

The Center for Computation & Technology (CCT) hosts a nine week Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) program where students work collaboratively on a wide variety of computational science projects. Interested in a major that is within the computational sciences umbrella (leaves out few majors as it includes all sciences, mathematics, engineering, finance, statistics, etc.) with at least a 2.75 GPA, considering a career in research and/or graduate school in your major, being a US citizen or permanent resident, and graduating at least one semester after completion of the REU. 
 For more information and to apply, please visit http://reu.cct.lsu.edu/.

NASA-Sponsored Computing School for EnviSci Students
Application Deadline – March 13, 2013

This summer and for the two following summers, the University of Virginia will be hosting a NASA-sponsored Summer School in programming,  basic software engineering, and HPC for students in environmental sciences. Twenty students will be accepted of whom 10 will get to spend the rest of the summer as interns at NASA centers.  The Summer School portion will provide room and partial board (with a stipend for other expenses) and the internships will pay the standard NASA stipend. The program is focusing on graduate students who are early in their careers but will also accept senior-level undergraduates who plan to go on to graduate school. This is especially appropriate for students who are interested in large-scale modeling or other computing-intensive areas.  Fields might include atmospheric, oceanic, climatological, and geophysical sciences, remote sensing, and possibly even ecology. For more information and to apply, please visit http://www.uvacse.virginia.edu/isscens/ and send an email of interest.

Post-master's or Postdoctoral Research Positions available in Computer Science 
Oak Ridge National Lab

The Oak Ridge National Laboratory invites applications for Post-Graduate appointments of one year on the Scientific Software Team in the Computer Science Research Group of the Computer Science and Mathematics Division. The successful applicant will contribute to the development of an integrated environment for modeling and simulation that covers many areas of computational science. For more information and to apply, please see
http://bull.hn/l/UQQH/6.

Post-Graduate Positions in Computer Science Research at ORNL
Oak Ridge National Lab

The Oak Ridge National Laboratory invites applications for Post-Graduate appointments of one year on the Scientific Software Team in the Computer Science Research Group of the Computer Science and Mathematics Division. The successful applicant will contribute to the development of an integrated environment for modeling and simulation that covers many areas of computational science. These areas include:

• Batteries
• Nuclear Reactors and Fuels
• Plasma-facing components in fusion reactors
• Quantum Computer Simulations and Quantum Information

The successful applicant would simultaneously contribute to software development activities and original research. For more information, please visit https://niceproject.sourceforge.net.

Career Opportunities

Software Developer (Systems Biology Knowledgebase
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory - Req # 74891

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory is building a next-generation computational resource for biological investigation, the Systems Biology Knowledgebase (KBase). This integrated software system aims to become the "go-to" online community for biological research. We are seeking a talented software developer with bioinformatics / computational biology experience. The successful applicant will have opportunities to work on a wide range of software development tasks, including user interface design, data integration, database and software interface design, and high-performance computing and bioinformatic algorithm development. For more information and to apply, please visit
https://lbl.taleo.net/careersection/2/jobdetail.ftl?lang=en&job=74891.

Computational Mathematician
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory - Req # 75506

The Applied Mathematics & Scientific Computing Department is looking for an experienced Research Scientist/Staff Scientist to join the Computational Research Division (CRD) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) to participate in the development of scalable parallel linear and nonlinear solvers. Of particular interest are Krylov and Newton-Krylov methods, as well as multigrid and multilevel algorithms, for parallel architectures such as those available at the DOE National Energy Research Scientific Computing (NERSC). For more information and to apply, please visit https://lbl.taleo.net/careersection/2/jobdetail.ftl?lang=en&job=75506.

High Performance Computing Technician
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory- Req # 75501

The High Performance Computing Technician 1 is an entry-level professional who has sufficient educational and/or technical experience to start in a support function in a HPC operational area including computational systems, networking, cybersecurity, storage and environmental systems in a UNIX environment. For more information and to apply, please visit https://lbl.taleo.net/careersection/2/jobdetail.ftl?lang=en&job=75501.

Video Collaboration Engineer
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory - Req # 75495

The Video Collaboration Engineer (Computer Systems Engineer 3) is responsible for the service design, infrastructure selection, implementation and third tier operation of ESnet’s ECS video collaboration service. In addition to developing and supporting ECS service, the Video Collaboration Engineer will be responsible for creating a technology and service roadmap that can comprise new technology infrastructure, strategic partnerships with other video collaboration providers, or a mix of several technology and service options. The Video Collaboration Engineer’s primary responsibility will be to provide technology and service design, consulting, implementation and support services. Experience in developing technology and service strategies, conducting pilots, and developing strategic partnerships with service providers and suppliers are key to the success of this role. For more information, please visit
https://lbl.taleo.net/careersection/2/jobdetail.ftl?lang=en&job=75495.

Software Developer
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory - Req # 75446

This software developer position is part of the Physical Biosciences Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Labs, within the Joint BioEnergy Institute’s (JBEI) Plant Systems Biology Division. Under general supervision of the principal investigator, Joshua Heazlewood, the position will work as part of a team to develop software tools to exploit large-scale proteomics data from the model plant Arabidopsis. The developer will work with scientists and software developers to create a user friendly interface for existing bioinformatics software, as well as develop new tools for the analysis of proteins. In particular, this software developer will be responsible for further developing and expanding a web-based graphical user interface (GUI) the MASCP Gator (http://gator.masc-proteomics.org/), into a functional proteomics portal to analyze protein modifications from experimental data. For more information and to apply, please visit https://lbl.taleo.net/careersection/2/jobdetail.ftl?lang=en&job=75446.

Last But Not Least – Computational News of Interest

UMass, Georgia Tech to Share $6.2 Million Grant for Computer Education
The Republican (MA)

The University of Massachusetts (UMass) and Georgia Tech, backed by a $6.24 million U.S. National Science Foundation grant, will continue their partnership to share strategies for attracting students to computer science. More than 21,000 students and 1,200 educators have attended some 350 events sponsored by the alliance since its founding in 2007, according to UMass. The alliance has had significant success in helping community college computer science students transfer to four-year colleges. By combining and building on their work, UMass and Georgia Tech hope to share their knowledge with other states. "Right now there are just not enough people to fill the jobs," says Commonwealth Alliance for Information Technology Education project manager Renee Fall. She says women and other underrepresented sectors of the population can bring new perspective and fresh skills to computing and make the workforce more diverse overall. "Using computers is exciting and fun, but knowing how to program and design computers is a whole other level," Fall says. To read further, please visit http://www.masslive.com/news/index.ssf/2012/11/umass_georgia_tech_to_share_62.html.

A Leap Forward in Brain-Controlled Computer Cursors
Stanford University

Stanford University researchers have developed ReFIT, an algorithm that improves the speed and accuracy of neural prosthetics that control computer cursors. In a side-by-side comparison, the cursors controlled by the ReFIT algorithm doubled the performance of existing systems and approached the performance of a real arm. "These findings could lead to greatly improved prosthetic system performance and robustness in paralyzed people, which we are actively pursuing as part of the FDA Phase-I BrainGate2 clinical trial here at Stanford," says Stanford professor Krishna Shenoy. The system uses a silicon chip that is implanted in the brain. The chip records "action potentials" in neural activity from several electrode sensors and sends the data to a computer. The researchers want to understand how the system works under closed-loop control conditions in which the computer analyzes and implements visual feedback taken in real time as the user neurally controls the cursor toward an onscreen target. To read further, please visit http://engineering.stanford.edu/research-profile/leap-forward-brain-controlled-computer-cursors.

Computers Identify What Makes Abstract Art Move Us
New Scientist

University of Trento researchers have developed a machine-vision system that can measure how color and shapes are distributed in abstract art. The system also used data on how 100 volunteers responded to the paintings to determine the emotional impact of the artistic elements. To test the system, the researchers gave the program other works of art and asked it to predict the typical viewer's emotional response, ranging from extremely negative to extremely positive. About 80 percent of the time, the system was able to produce a score that matched the average response from a new group of 100 volunteers. The research could lead to using emotional data in the creation of more advanced machine art, says Penn State University professor James Wang. Similar machine-vision systems also could help improve the Painting Fool, an artificial intelligence-based program developed by Imperial College London researcher Simon Colton. To read further, please visit http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21628916.000-computers-identify-what-makes-abstract-art-move-us.html.

Robot Learns to Recognize Itself in the Mirror
New Scientist

Yale University researchers have developed Nico, a humanoid robot that can recognize its reflection in a mirror and identify its arms' location and orientation down to an accuracy of 2 centimeters in any dimension. Nico is part of an experiment to see whether a robot can pass the test of self-awareness known as the mirror test. Only dolphins, orcas, elephants, magpies, humans, and a few other primates have passed the test to date. The researchers plan to teach Nico how to recognize where its torso and head are, what shape they are, and their color and texture so it can see and react to the mark on its body. "What excites me is that the robot has learned a model of itself, and is using it to interpret information from the mirror," says Yale researcher Justin Hart. Robotic self-awareness is essential to robots working safely alongside human beings, according to Mary-Anne Williams at Sydney's University of Technology. "Many robots today not only do not recognize themselves in a mirror, but do not recognize their own body parts directly," she notes. To read further, please visit http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21528785.900-robot-learns-to-recognise-itself-in-the-mirror.html.