HPC in the News
Registration Open for 2015 Oil & Gas HPC Workshop
March 4-5, 2015 – Houston, Texas
The Rice University Oil and Gas High Performance Computing (OG HPC) Workshop, hosted annually at Rice University, is the premier meeting place for networking and discussion focused on computing and information technology challenges and needs in the oil and gas industry, high-end computing and information technology continues to stand out across the industry as a critical business enabler and differentiator with a relatively well understood return on investment. However, challenges such as constantly changing technology landscape, increasing focus on software and software innovation, and escalating concerns around workforce development still remain. This workshop has become the key venue for planners and practitioners alike. This is a forum for taking the pulse of industry needs and discussing challenges, opportunities and new development at the interface of the oil and gas industry, the IT industry and the academic and research community. To register, please visit http://rice2015.og-hpc.org/registration/.
ACM Names Fellows for Innovations in Computing
ACM has recognized 47 of its members for their contributions to computing that are driving innovations across multiple domains and disciplines. The 2014 ACM Fellows, who hail from some of the world’s leading universities, corporations, and research labs, have achieved advances in computing research and development that are driving innovation and sustaining economic development around the world. ACM President Alexander L. Wolf acknowledged the advances made by this year’s ACM Fellows. “Our world has been immeasurably improved by the impact of their innovations. We recognize their contributions to the dynamic computing technologies that are making a difference to the study of computer science, the community of computing professionals, and the countless consumers and citizens who are benefiting from their creativity and commitment.” Additional information about the ACM 2014 Fellows, the awards event, as well as previous ACM Fellows and award winners is available at http://awards.acm.org/.
Applications Due February 6 for Blue Waters Graduate Fellowships
Applications are due Feb. 4 for the Blue Waters Graduate Fellowship program, which provides graduate students from across the country the opportunity to immerse themselves in a year of focused high-performance computing (HPC) research. Fellows will receive a stipend of $38,000, up to a $12,000 tuition allowance, and up to 50,000 node-hours on the petascale Blue Waters supercomputer to support 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 Blue Waters. 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 to the 2015-2016 academic year. For complete information on the fellowships, visit https://bluewaters.ncsa.illinois.edu/fellowships. Questions? Contact bwgf@ncsa.illinois.edu.
PRACE to Publish Magazines Dedicated to Women in HPC
In 2015, PRACE, in collaboration with Women in HPC, will publish 2 magazines entirely dedicated to Women in HPC: the first one in the run-up to PRACEdays15 in May 2015 where a special satellite event with Women in HPC will be organized, and the second one as a special edition of the PRACE Digest to be launched at SC15 in Austin in November 2015. The cover of at least one of these magazines will include a mosaic or collage of pictures of women working in HPC in Europe, and we need to collect as many photographs as possible. PRACE invites all women working in HPC in Europe to send a photo of themselves to Tiina Leiponen (Tiina.Leiponen@csc.fi) and / or Marjolein Oorsprong (M.Oorsprong@staff.prace-ri.eu). For complete information and guidelines, please visit http://www.prace-ri.eu/wihpc-selfies/.
CODE2040 Helps Tech Plan for a Non-White-Majority USA
USA Today
By the year 2040, the United States will have a non-white majority, a demographic trend that is spurring technology companies to increase the diversity of their workforces. "If you're a smart company, you'll want an ethnically diverse team empathetic about the needs of your diverse consumers," says CODE2040 co-founder Tristan Walker. CODE2040 wants to help Silicon Valley companies make the tech industry as a whole more diverse. The nonprofit organization, founded in 2012, provides college-age African-American and Latino students who have shown an interest in computer science with both an encouraging network of peers and a summer internship program aimed at placing them at tech companies whose narrowly focused recruiting programs often overlook them. "If you can inspire the best consuming demographic in the world to be the best producing demographic in the world, imagine the amount of market change you can have in the world," Walker says. To read further, please visit http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2014/12/15/code2040-helps-aspiring-techies-of-color-find-a-place-in-silicon-valley/20270979/.
XSEDE News from Partners and Friends’
The National Science Foundation (NSF) today announced "Jetstream," a new self-service cloud to increase participation in advanced computing for researchers who need flexible, reproducible, powerful and easy-to-use computing. "Jetstream will serve as a cloud computing facility for scientists and engineers across the whole portfolio of disciplines supported by the National Science Foundation," said Craig Stewart, Indiana University Pervasive Technology Institute executive director and associate dean for research technologies at Indiana University. "It will allow researchers to create a customized virtual machine environment or select from an existing one, while also ensuring the reproducibility of the results supercomputers produce." Jetstream will be part of the eXtreme Digital (XD) program, currently the most advanced, comprehensive, and robust collection of integrated digital resources and services enabling open science research in the world. To read further, please visit https://www.tacc.utexas.edu/-/nsf-awards-6-6-million-to-iu-tacc-and-other-partners-for-self-service-cloud-for-science.
Starting a Discussion
Women in Tech: Change the Conversation
EE Times
The G20 Summit in mid-November included a Women in Leadership conference in which leaders pledged to reduce the gender gap in workforce participation 25 percent by 2025. 1-Page CEO Joanna Weidenmiller wants to inspire more women to participate in the tech industry by highlighting their inherent skills and the field's ample opportunities. "This will be biggest job creation opportunity ever, and if you don't know tech in the next 10, 20 years you will be obsolete," Weidenmiller warns. She also says the government and school systems should incentivize businesses to teach computer and science skills, citing Step It Up America, a nationwide program led by UST Global that seeks to educate 5,000 minority women in science, technology, engineering, and math fields by 2020. Weidenmiller also believes women need more encouraging role models and parental support. "I think we should be talking more about how do you have a work life balance," she notes. To read further, please visit http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1324941&.
Call for Participation
Call for Papers: The Science of Cyberinfrastructure: Research, Experience, Applications and Models (SCREAM-15)
June 15-16, 2015 - Portland, Oregon
Submission Deadline – February 13, 2015
in conjunction with HPDC'15
There is a need for comprehensive, balanced and flexible distributed cyberinfrastructure (DCI) in support of science and engineering applications. The SCREAM workshop generally aims to address this gap, and specifically aims to understand, through a combination of experience, application requirements, and conceptual models, how to best to create a conceptual framework for the objective design and assessment of distributed cyberinfrastructure. Although primarily targeted towards computing scientists, we believe this workshop will have an impact beyond the computing specialist in light of the fact that production cyberinfrastructure impacts the effectiveness of other science & engineering endeavors. This workshop will welcome technical contributions delivered via research-based results, experience papers, and vision papers. Understanding the principles and science of cyberinfrastructure has impact beyond just the computing aspects. Topics of interest are in the context of distributed cyberinfrastructure. For more information, including subtopics and submission criteria, please visit https://sites.google.com/site/scream15workshop/home.
DBKDA 2015: DBKDA 2015, The Seventh International Conference on Advances in Databases, Knowledge, and Data Applications
May 24 - 29, 2015 - Rome, Italy
Submission Deadline – January 23, 2015
Authors of selected papers will be invited to submit extended article versions to one of the IARIA Journals: http://www.iariajournals.org. For submission information, please visit http://www.iaria.org/conferences2015/SubmitDBKDA15.html. For conference information, please visit http://www.iaria.org/conferences2015/DBKDA15.html.
Call for Papers: Fifth International Workshop on Advances in High-Performance Computational Earth Sciences: Applications and Frameworks (IHPCES 2015)
June 1-3, 2015 - Reykjavik, Iceland
Paper Submission Due - February 1, 2015
This workshop will provide a forum for presentation and discussion of state-of-the-art research in high-performance computational earth sciences. Emphasis will be on novel advanced high-performance computational algorithms, formulations and simulations, as well as the related issues for computational environments and infrastructure for development of high-performance computational earth sciences. The workshop facilitates communication between earth scientists, applied mathematicians, computational and computer scientists and presents a unique opportunity for them to exchange advanced knowledge, insights and science discoveries. With the imminent arrival of the exascale era, strong multidisciplinary collaborations between these diverse scientific groups are critical for the successful development of high-performance computational earth sciences applications. Presentations and audience representation from the broad earth sciences community is strongly encouraged. For complete information and guidelines, please visit http://heim.ifi.uio.no/xingca/IHPCES2015/.
Conferences, Workshops and Webinars
Cross-Connects Workshop on Managing Cosmology Data
February 10-11, 2015 - Berkeley, California
Registration is now open for a workshop on “Improving Data Mobility and Management for International Cosmology” to be held at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. The workshop, one in a series of Cross-Connects workshops, is sponsored the by the Dept. of Energy’s ESnet and Internet2. Early registration is encouraged as attendance is limited and the past two workshops were filled and had waiting lists. Registration is $200 including breakfast, lunch and refreshments for both days. Visit the Cross-Connects Workshop website for more information. Cosmology data sets are already reaching into the petabyte scale and this trend will only cosmic continue, if not accelerate. This data is produced from sources ranging from supercomputing centers—where large-scale cosmological modeling and simulations are performed—to telescopes that are producing data daily. The workshop is aimed at helping cosmologists and data managers who struggle with data workflow, especially as the need for real-time analysis of events increases. To register, please visit https://service5.internet2.edu/reg/events/cc15-02/registrations.
PACE Data Mining Bootcamp 1
February 10-11, 2015 – La Jolla, California
While modern databases can contain massive volumes of data, researchers are confronted with a virtual obstacle course in order to extract meaningful predictive information from within these records. During the two-day PACE Data Mining Boot Camp participants will receive the basic training to learn effective predictive analytic strategies associated with the growing discipline of data mining, a process that uses a variety of data analysis tools to discover patterns and relationships in data that may contribute to valid predictions. Predicting future trends and behaviors allows for proactive, knowledge-driven decisions. The PACE Boot Camp 1 is designed to provide individuals in business enterprises and scientific communities with improved tactics critical to design, build, verify, and test predictive data models. Data mining, the art and science of learning from data, covers a number of different procedures. For complete information, please visit http://pace.sdsc.edu//sites/pace.sdsc.edu/bootcamp/201502/index.html.
Research News From Around the World
New Wind-Farm Computer Simulations Unlock Increased Power Generation: SDSC’s Trestles Supercomputer Used in
Detailed Flow Analyses
Researchers at Johns Hopkins University (JHU) have developed high-resolution computer simulations, done on the Trestles supercomputer at the San Diego Supercomputer Center at the University of California, San Diego, that take into account how the air flows within and around a wind-farm in unprecedented detail. The study, published recently in the Journal of Renewable and Sustainable Energy, challenges conventional wisdom that suggests the highest power output comes when the turbines are arranged in a checkerboard pattern. As it turns out, the highest power results when the lateral offset of turbines is such that they are just outside each other’s wakes. When this coincides with prevailing wind directions at a given site, this may in fact yield higher power levels, according to the researchers. To read further, please visit http://www.sdsc.edu/News%20Items/PR010515_windfarm.html.
Stanford to Host 100-Year Study on Artificial Intelligence
Stanford University will spearhead a century-long initiative to study and predict the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) in all aspects of people's lives. The One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence (AI100) has started with the formation of a committee tasked with choosing an expert panel to begin a series of periodic studies of AI's implications for automation, national security, psychology, ethics, law, privacy, democracy, and other issues. "Given Stanford's pioneering role in AI and our interdisciplinary mindset, we feel obliged and qualified to host a conversation about how artificial intelligence will affect our children and our children's children," says Stanford president John Hennessy. Stanford professor Russ Altman and Microsoft Research's Eric Horvitz founded the committee, and Horvitz expects subsequent committees to identify the most important AI issues of the day and convene panels to research and report on them every few years. To read further, please visit http://news.stanford.edu/news/2014/december/ai-century-study-121614.html.
As Robots Grow Smarter, American Workers Struggle to Keep Up Findings by MIT, University of Chicago Researchers
The New York Times
Economists and technologists have long said the march of technological progress and increased automation will create new jobs and opportunities that offset the jobs they make obsolete, but experts are increasingly less sure this axiom still holds true. The last several decades of technological progress has brought unprecedented gains in productivity, largely due to innovations in computer and communications technology, but that period has also seen decreased labor force participation and stagnating wages and many worry these trends are poised to accelerate with artificial intelligence and other technologies moving into everything from sales and vehicle piloting to personal training and psychiatry. Self-driving cars, for example, could completely eliminate truck and taxi drivers as a class of workers. Former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers recently said he no longer believes automation will always create new jobs. To read further, please visit http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/16/upshot/as-robots-grow-smarter-american-workers-struggle-to-keep-up.html?_r=0&abt=0002&abg=0.
Educator News and Opportunities
Colleges, Labs Develop STEM Core Curriculum
The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) is developing a core curriculum to prepare junior college students for technical jobs at California’s national labs. The initiative is being undertaken by a consortium of community colleges, national labs, and nonprofit educational institutes, and will emphasize science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) courses to prepare women, minorities, veterans, and other underserved populations for tech jobs. The consortium recently met at the Livermore Valley Open Campus to structure a common STEM educational standard for use by colleges as well as to form internships and other employment pipelines for LLNL and other local labs, including Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA) Ames Research Center, and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. To read further, please visit https://www.llnl.gov/news/colleges-labs-develop-stem-core-curriculum.
The Ralph L. Boyer Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching Engineering Innovation
Application Deadline – February 3, 2015
The award will be presented to a faculty team or to an individual faculty member in the College of Engineering that has made outstanding contributions to the improvement of undergraduate engineering education. The award is meant to recognize the demonstrated impact of innovation in the education process, including the design, development and application of new pedagogy, teaching tools (e.g., multi-media), and assessment methodologies on the overall quality of the undergraduate engineering education process/experience at Ohio State. Selection will favor faculty whose contributions have made important, pervasive improvements in the engineering education process with a significant potential for long term impact. For more information, please visit https://engineering.osu.edu/awards/content/ralph-l.-boyer-award-excellence-undergraduate-teaching-engineering-innovation.
Howard Gadberry Award for Primary and Secondary School Educators
Nominations Deadline – January 23, 2015
The Howard Gadberry Award in the amount of $500 sponsored by the Howard Gadberry family is designed to recognize teachers in grades 4-12 who show outstanding effort toward the motivation of students in scientific exploration. The award of $500 and a plaque is given annually by Science Pioneers at the annual Greater Kansas City Science and Engineering Fair Awards Ceremony. This award is for 4th to 12th grade teachers in the Kansas City area. For more information, please visit http://www.sciencepioneers.org/teachers/teacher-awards.
2015 CSTA Annual Conference for Computer Science Teachers
July 13-14, 2015 – Grapevine, Texas
The CSTA Annual Conference provides professional development opportunities for K–12 computer science and information technology teachers who need practical, relevant information to help them prepare their students for the future. The CSTA annual conference is the only CS conference specifically dedicated to meeting the needs of K-12 computer science educators. Come network with your peers, present your great ideas, and learn best practices. This year, the conference is seeking 3-hour workshops and 1- hour sessions, and 20-minute mini sessions that focus on pedagogy and best teaching practices. For more information, please visit http://csta.acm.org/ProfessionalDevelopment/sub/CSTAConference.html.
Student Engagement and OpportunitieS
Graduate Education Fellowship at Arizona State University
Application Deadline – March 15, 2015
Graduate Education Fellowships provide up to $10,000* of support to regularly admitted first year graduate degree students who are Arizona residents or underrepresented in their discipline, and who demonstrate academic excellence. This can include underrepresented minorities, i.e. Hispanics, African Americans and Native Americans in all disciplines and underrepresented students in particular disciplines, e.g., Asian Americans in the Humanities and Social Sciences, women in Mathematics, Science, Engineering and some CALS programs, men in Nursing, Public Health or Women's Studies. For more information, please visit https://graduate.asu.edu/fellowships/graduate-education
Students' Raspberry Pi Computers to Run on International Space Station
The Raspberry Pi Foundation has partnered with the U.K. European Space Agency and U.K. space companies to offer an Astro Pi competition for students. The competition will challenge students in U.K. primary and secondary schools to use Raspberry Pi computers to devise and code apps for experiments in space. Astronaut Tim Peake will bring two winning apps along with him for his next six-month mission to the International Space Station (ISS). The Raspberry Pi computers will be connected to Astro Pi computers deployed onboard the ISS, collect data, and download it to Earth for the winning teams. The foundation and the U.K. European Space Education Resource Office will develop teaching resources for the competition. The foundation will provide Raspberry Pi computers and an Astro Pi board for coding, and will assist teams with the best ideas to ready their work for the space mission. "I'm really excited about this project, born out of the cooperation among U.K. industries and institutions," Peake says. "This competition offers a unique chance for young people to learn core computing skills that will be extremely useful in their future." To read further, please visit http://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240236580/Students-Raspberry-Pis-to-run-on-International-Space-Station.
CompuGirls: Young Women Have Role to Play in Technology Field
CompuGirls is a U.S. National Science Foundation-funded organization based at Arizona State University that provides girls aged eight to 12 from under-resourced schools in the Greater Phoenix area and Colorado with activities to develop technical skills and encourage computational thinking in a way that is culturally relevant. CompuGirls provides a one-week program during the fall or spring break, as well as an eighth-period class over a couple of semesters and a three-week summer class. The classes include digital storytelling, learning Scratch software, and exposure to coding through researching a topic and putting it together in a virtual world. "CompuGirls instills a sense of discipline, and we do see gains in their technical knowledge and comfort," says CompuGirls founder Kimberly Scott. CompuGirls also is working with the National Robotics Initiative to teach girls how to program robots and study the social aspects of human-to-robot interaction. To read further, please visit https://www.nsf.gov/discoveries/disc_summ.jsp?cntn_id=133634&org=HER.
SDSC UC Graduate Summer Fellowship Program
Application Deadline - February 15, 2015
The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California, San Diego, has announced its inaugural UC Graduate Student Summer Fellowship program, providing opportunities for graduate students throughout the University of California system to learn about SDSC’s expertise and utilize the Center’s wide range of resources to advance their own research. The eight-week residential program, to run from June 22 until August 14, 2015, is funded by SDSC to specifically foster stronger ties with other UC campuses. The program is focused on attracting graduate students from other UC campuses. UC San Diego graduate students are invited to collaborate with SDSC researchers at any time, but they would not be eligible for the UC Summer Fellowship housing support. For more information, please visit http://www.sdsc.edu/News%20Items/PR011415_summerfellowship.html.
Computational Science News of Interest
Disney Research Builds Computer Models to Analyze Play in Pro Basketball and Soccer
Disney researchers used player-tracking data from more than 600 basketball games from the 2012-13 National Basketball Association (NBA) season to develop models that can make accurate in-game predictions of what each player is likely to do next in a game situation. In a separate study, Disney researchers collected more than 400 million data points from a professional soccer league to examine team behavior rather than individual players. The researchers showed they could accurately detect and visualize team formations well enough to identify teams based just on their style of play 70 percent of the time. Disney Research associate research scientist Patrick Lucey says these automated, data-driven methods can serve as tools for educating players in the limited time available for practice, or as tools for scouting opposition teams and planning for specific game situations. To read further, please visit http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2014-12/dr-drb121514.php.
Want to Influence the World? Map Reveals the Best Languages to Speak
ScienceMag
A new technique for mapping the flow of information across the world identifies the best languages for achieving the optimum proliferation of ideas. The method is rooted in a Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) student's master's thesis concerning the generation of global maps of transmission of information and ideas by multilingual people. A multi-university team met the challenge by characterizing three global language networks based on bilingual tweeters, book translations, and multilingual Wikipedia edits. For example, the book translation network plots out how many books are translated into other languages. Although the researchers learned English boasts the most transmissions to and from other languages in all three networks and forms the most central hub, the maps also illustrate "a halo of intermediate hubs" such as French, German, and Russian. To read further, please visit http://news.sciencemag.org/social-sciences/2014/12/want-influence-world-map-reveals-best-languages-speak.
Social Media and HPC
Google Wants You to Help Design the Internet of Things
Submission Deadline – January 21, 2015
Google plans to fund research that will help support the development of the Internet of Things (IoT), with the projects to be carried out over the course of a year. One set of awards will be for larger team projects that would be led by an academic or a graduate student "willing to dedicate a substantial portion of their research time to this expedition," according to the company's request for proposals. Google will provide grants of $500,000 to $800,000 for the projects. A smaller set of awards, ranging from $50,000 to $150,000, will be available for "new and unorthodox solutions" in user interface and application development, privacy and security, and systems and protocols research. To read further, please visit http://www.computerworld.com/article/2858328/google-wants-you-to-help-design-the-internet-of-things.html.
