HPC Happenings
XSEDE Deploys Globus Online for Data Transfer
Globus Online is the first service to pass the XSEDE Operations Acceptance Test. The approval for production deployment makes it an official software service on XSEDE. Globus Online is a file transfer and synchronization service that is specifically geared to the big data needs of the research community, with Web, command line and REST interfaces. This software-as-a-service makes it much simpler for researchers to transfer and synchronize large volumes of data between systems. Using their XSEDE User Portal credentials, researchers can access Globus Online’s simple web interface to move data between any two XSEDE resources. This milestone builds on the long-standing relationship between XSEDE and Globus Online. XSEDE researchers have used their robust file transfer services since the project’s inception in July 2011—and it is now a recommended and supported service for all XSEDE users. For more information, please visit https://www.xsede.org/globus-online-passes-xsede-acceptance-test.
SDSC Visualization Training: Preparing/Translating Data for Use With VisIt Application
- Webinar
February 11, 2013 - 9:00am- 10:30am (PST)
This tutorial is being offered In-person and as a Webcast
One of the biggest hurdles in visualization is translating the data into a format that is supported by visualization application. This tutorial focuses on getting users acquainted with the data formats supported by VisIt and how to write a simple custom data reader and a very brief introduction to the in-situ capabilities of VisIt.
Local attendees are encouraged to attend in person while webcast may be more suitable for others. This tutorial is offered at no charge. More information is available at the tutorial webpage. Please visit http://www.sdsc.edu/Events/data2visit2013/ .
LittleFe Buildout at SIGCSE 2013
March 6-9, 2013 – Denver, Colorado
Thinking of attending SIGCSE13 in Denver this year? The LittleFe group (http://LittleFe.net) will be hosting a buildout as a set of two workshops (sessions 24 and 25) at the conference. If you're accepted for the SIGCSE LittleFe buildout, then during the workshop, you will assemble your LittleFe, install the Bootable Cluster CD (http://BCCD.net) and learn how to setup and use it for teaching parallel programming and distributed computing. At the end you and your partner will be able to take the LittleFe back to your institution for use in your classes. Both you and your partner must register for and attend both workshop 24 and workshop 25 to be eligible to receive the free LittleFe unit. For more information on the conference, please visit http://www.sigcse.org/sigcse2013/. For more information on LittleFe, please visit http://LittleFe.net.
Federated Identity and Delegation Workshop at OGF37
March 11, 2013 – Charlottesville, Virginia
Delegating attributes and identities as a means of establishing who, or on whose behalf, an operation is to be executed, is a concept as old as the access matrix. The basic problem is of asserting in a cryptographically secure way that A->B (A says that B is authorized to act as A) and subsequently have B->C and C->D such that A->B->C->D, i.e. D is authorized to act as A. The challenge in multi-organizational distributed systems such as clouds and grids is particularly difficult due to the different mechanisms and policies of the various players. Existing mechanisms include, but are not limited to, X.509 delegated credentials, VOMs certificates, and signed SAML assertions. The goal of the workshop is to bring together stakeholders in the scientific computing infrastructure community in the Americas, Europe, and Asia to present requirements for a good solution to the delegation problem, alternative visions of how this problem can be solved, and begin the process of defining a limited number of interoperable common mechanisms. Following the workshop the OGF Identity Delegation working group (IDEL) will meet to continue the work of identifying and defining proposed standards and best practices for grid identity delegation. For more information, please visit http://www.ogf.org/OGF37/.
HPC Call for Participation
University of Tennessee Announces Beacon Project - Call for Participation
Submission Deadline – February 7, 2013
The National Institute for Computational Sciences (NICS) at the University of Tennessee is pleased to announce an open call for participation in the Beacon Project, an ongoing research project partially funded by the National Science Foundation that explores the impact of emerging computer architectures on computational science and engineering.
Project teams associated with the Beacon Project are currently exploring the impact of the Intel® Xeon Phi™ coprocessor on scientific codes and libraries such as H3D, PSC, OMEN, ENZO, MADNESS, NWChem, Amber, MILC, and MAGMA through porting and optimization work on a small, experimental cluster equipped with pre-production coprocessors. To expand this effort and to facilitate research into energy-efficient supercomputing, NICS is replacing the experimental cluster with Beacon, a Cray Xtreme-X Supercomputer that ranks #1 on the November 2012 Green500 list. For more information on topics and submission guidelines, please visit http://www.jics.tennessee.edu/aace/beacon/open-call, . .
OGF37 - Call for Demonstrations
March 11-13, 2013 - Charlottesville Virginia
Submission Deadline – February 15, 2013
The organizers of OGF 37 invite software teams to demonstrate cloud and grid infrastructures, software systems, and applications at the Open Grid Forum 37. These 75-minute demonstrations will be held concurrently on Tuesday, March 12. During the demonstration period, each team will give its presentation three times, with a 5-minute break between sessions. Participants will attend a demonstration of their choice for twenty minutes, have five minutes to move to another demonstration, see a second demonstration, and then move again to observe a third demonstration. This format will allow attendees to see three different demonstrations and will give demonstrators a reasonable period of time to present their project. Each demonstration team will be provided with a conference room (small rooms hold 10, larger ones 15), projection system, Ethernet, and Polycom phone system if needed. To apply for a demonstration slot, please send a half-page abstract by to glc2z@virginia.edu. The abstract should clearly state the problem the software addresses, the OGF standards, if any, that are supported, and what attendees can expect to learn.
Research Data Management Implementations Workshop
March 13-14, 2013 - Westin Arlington Gateway, Arlington, VA
Submission Deadline – February 20, 2013
The Research Data Management Implementations Workshop organizers are inviting the submission of position and experience papers that describe implementations of discipline-based data management infrastructure and services, and the ways in which those solutions leverage resources within and outside institutions. Papers about implementations that are in their infancy as well as well-tested implementations will be considered and are encouraged. Papers should be between 2 – 5 pages in length. For more information, please visit http://rdmi.sites.uchicago.edu/.
Hawaii University International Conferences 2013 Education, Math & Engineering Technology – Call for Participation
June 10 - 12, 2013 – Honolulu, Hawaii
Extended Submission Deadline - March 15, 2013
Hawaii University International Conferences (HUIC) are specifically designed to address the latest developments and advancements in academic studies. The Arts and Humanities conference is dedicated to academicians and individuals from all disciplines to discover, to nurture, to create and to inspire, providing opportunities to discuss and explore recent findings in related fields of studies and research. For more information and submission guidelines, please visit http://www.huichawaii.org/.
Upcoming Conferences and Workshops.
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
Research Features From Across the Country and Around the World
TACC, PSC Collaborate on Patient-Specific Computational Modeling
Researchers at The University of Texas San Antonio (UTSA) are using XSEDE consulting and computing resources to better asses risk of abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA) rupture. Ender Finol, director of the Vascular Biomechanics and Biofluids Laboratory at UTSA, and colleagues used a series of medical images of individual cases to develop protocols for computational modeling of patient-specific AAA features. XSEDE consultants at Pittsburg Supercomputing Center (PSC) provided advice on options and coding in developing a method to initialize the computational models — to set boundary conditions — based on individual profiles. This method takes into account aortic wall thickness, slice by slice, aiding in predicting wall-stress distribution for each patient. Results from computations on XSEDE-allocated Pople (now decommissioned) and Blacklight at PSC show wall stresses are more sensitive to changes in AAA shape; therefore, suggesting that rupture risk may be characterized in relation to AAA morphology. The goal of this kind of individualized modeling is to asses individual risk in order to help guide decisions about surgical intervention in the future. To read further, please visit http://psc.edu/science/2012/inprog/#aortic.
Stampede at TACC Now Online
Performing at nearly 10 petaflops, Stampede at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) is now operational and available to the national open science community as an XSEDE-allocated resource. The scale of Stampede delivers opportunities in computational science and technology research, from highly parallel algorithms to high-throughput computing, from scalable visualization to next generation programming languages. Any researcher at a U.S. institution can submit a proposal to request an allocation of cycles on the system, with 90% of the system dedicated to XSEDE. Lonestar 4, which went online in Feb. 2011, will remain an XSEDE-allocated resource with Ranger retiring on Feb. 4 after five years of stellar performance and contributions to scientific and engineering research. For more information, please visit http://www.tacc.utexas.edu/resources/hpc.
Educator News and Opportunities
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/.
Alice Symposium 2013 - Call for Papers
July 19, 2013 – Durham, North Carolina
Paper Submission Deadline Extended – February 15, 2013
Poster Submission Deadline – March 15, 2013
“Supercomputing” Theme 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.
Code.org Needs Your Assistance
Code.org is a public 501c3 dedicated to the vision that every student in every school should have the opportunity to learn to code (see recent features on TechCrunch and in the NY Times) Code.org is weeks from launching a broad awareness campaign starring Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and other tech and media celebrities to help motivate students (and their parents) to learn to code. In the next 4 weeks they are building a public database of every computer programming classroom, for students (and parents) to find schools or classrooms or afterschool/summer courses near them. If you teach computer programming, whether in K-12, university, or an afterschool program, please visit http://code.org to submit your classroom so it can be found by students who want to learn to code.
Student Engagement and Information
RDAV internships for undergraduates: Summer 2013
Submission Deadline – February 11, 2013
Many research problems in science and engineering rely on both interdisciplinary knowledge and sophisticated computing. The Remote Data Analysis and Visualization (RDAV) Center seeks motivated undergraduate students who are eager to take on these challenges by using high performance computing to attack research problems in the biological, physical, social, computing, or engineering sciences. We have opportunities for the summer of 2013 at all stages of the data analysis process: From preparing raw data, to using and developing data analysis and visualization processes and tools, to deploying web-based interfaces for interacting with the results. Their center works with researchers who are tackling a wide range of problems including extracting meaning through text mining, understanding biodiversity, making sense of the universe, and developing visualization tools. We seek students with a passion for real-world problems, an understanding of science or engineering, and the computer science skills to make it happen. Ideal students will be majoring in a science or engineering discipline with a strong background in computer science; students in all majors and from all backgrounds will be considered. ROAV highly encourage applications from students from under-represented groups. For more information and to apply, please visit https://rdav.nics.tennessee.edu/2013/01/rdav-internships-for-undergraduates-summer-2013/.
University of Texas, Dallas Research Experience for Undergraduates
May 28 - August 2, 2013
Submission Deadline - March 15, 2013
The Computer Science Department at the University of Texas at Dallas will conduct a ten-week summer research program funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) for ten undergraduates. The focus is on "software safety," however, the technology and skills learned by the students have general applicability to research and practice in their future studies. A highlight which provides an overview of our program including research projects, lectures, and field trips is available at YouTube. Please visit http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kRIUNotUdQ. In addition, videos (along with PowerPoint slide shows) for students' project presentations as well as lectures on software safety and technical writing can be found at http://paris.utdallas.edu/reu/Video.html. For more information and to apply, please visit http://paris.utdallas.edu/reu/.
University of Texas Pan American Center of Excellence in STEM Education Internship Opportunities for Undergraduates
The Center of Excellence in STEM Education builds a community of faculty who are leaders in Challenge-Based Instruction and student programs in the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) fields. Together with its collaborators, the goals of the Center are focused on strengthening STEM academic programs and increasing the number of STEM graduates, particularly those from underrepresented groups. Students can find many resources under the “Student Resources” tab at http://portal.utpa.edu/utpa_main/daa_home/coecs_home/stemgrant_home.
University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston-Gene-Environment Interaction Summer Undergraduate Research Program
Application Deadline – February 18, 2013
The Houston Laboratory and Population Sciences Training Program in Gene-Environment Interaction (GxE), generously sponsored by the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, offers a summer program for outstanding college students with a strong background in science who are considering graduate school and a future career in biomedical research. This grant-funded program is a joint effort offering opportunities for study at three world-renowned institutions: The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth), M.D. Anderson Cancer Center (MDACC), and Baylor College of Medicine (BCM). Scientists in each of these organizations plan and supervise a 9-week project that explores an aspect of environmental interaction with genes that impact human health. Students who are considering pursuing either a PhD in scientific research, or an MD/PhD, with a particular interest in genetics, will benefit from this opportunity. For more information, please visit https://go.uth.edu/gxeSummer
Graduate Student Update at MIT: MIT Lincoln Laboratory Summer Research Opportunities
The MIT Lincoln Laboratory’s fundamental mission is to apply science and advanced technology to critical problems of national security, primarily working on sensors, information extraction (signal processing and embedded computing), and communications. A Department of Defense federally-funded research and development center, the Laboratory has a focused commitment to research and development, with an emphasis on building prototypes and demonstrating operation systems under live test conditions that meet real-world requirements. The Laboratory also undertakes government-sponsored, nondefense projects such as the development of systems for the Federal Aviation Administration to improve air traffic control and air safety, and systems that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration uses in weather surveillance. For more information please visit http://www.ll.mit.edu. MIT Lincoln Laboratory actively recruits individuals pursuing BS, MS and PhD degrees in Electrical Engineering, Physics, Computer Science, Mathematics, and to a limited degree, Aerospace Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Biology, Chemistry, Meteorology and Materials Science. Candidates should have an interest and ability to work on a broad range of technical problems in a team environment and possess strong problem- solving, analytical, innovative, communications, and teaming skills. Eligibility requirements, program details, and the application process can be viewed at http://www.ll.mit.edu/college/summerprogram.html.
Training Available for Students in U.S., Europe, and Japan at International Summer School on HPC Challenges in Computational Sciences
Application Deadline – March 18, 2013
Graduate students and postdoctoral scholars in the UnitedStates, Europe, and Japan are invited to apply for the fourth InternationalSummer School on HPC Challenges in Computational Sciences, to be heldJune 23-28, 2013, at New York University inNew York City. The summer school is sponsored by the U.S. National Science Foundation’s Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment(XSEDE) project, the European Union Seventh Framework Program’s Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE), and RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science (RIKEN AICS). The expense-paid summer school will benefit advanced scholars from European, U.S., and Japanese institutions who use HPC to conduct research. Further information and to apply for the 2013 summer school, visithttps://www.xsede.org/web/summerschool13.
Career Opportunities
Computational Science Postdoctoral Fellow in Computer and Data Sciences
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory - Req # 75198
The Future Technologies Group (FTG) has an immediate opening for two postdoctoral researchers to work on research in projects to develop, optimize, and deploy optimized, communication-avoiding sparse linear solvers. This project will couple traditional performance analysis and optimization arenas with newly developed variants of the Conjugate Gradient (CG) and BiConjugate Gradient Stabilized (BiCGSTAB) sparse linear solver algorithms that minimize data movement and will target supercomputers built from multi- and manycore processors solving the systems of linear equations found in AMR Multigrid bottom solvers. As such, the performance benefits of matrix-free implementations will be evaluated. Concurrently, this project will parallelize and optimize a newly developed variant of sparse LU based on a hierarchically semiseparable representation of the matrix. Deliverables will include both prototype software distributions as well as publications targeted at top-tier research conferences. For more information, please visit
https://lbl.taleo.net/careersection/2/jobdetail.ftl?lang=en&job=75198.
Computer Science Postdoctoral Fellow Computer and Data Sciences
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory - Req # 75199
The Future Technologies Group (FTG) has an immediate opening for a postdoctoral researcher to work on research in parallel programming system for large-scale distributed-memory multi-core supercomputers (see: http://ftg.lbl.gov/). This position will be part of an experienced research team to research and develop system software for programming large-scale distributed-memory multi-core supercomputers. For more information and to apply, please visit https://lbl.taleo.net/careersection/2/jobdetail.ftl?lang=en&job=75199.
On the Lighter Side – Computational News of Interest
Now, 'Smart Closet' to Help You Dress Up
The Times of India
Researchers at the National University of Singapore and the Chinese Academy of Science are developing Magic Closet, a smart closet system that uses artificial intelligence to suggest occasion-based and color-appropriate outfits. “The Magic Closet can be used as a mobile personalized clothes management app,” according to National University of Singapore researchers Si Liu and Shuicheng Yan. “It can also be used as a plug-in system in online shops to help customers choose suitable clothes.” The Magic Closet software makes outfit suggestions for 10 different occasions, including weddings, funerals, work, and dates. The software also matches clothing to an item the user already owns, taking suggestions from the user’s wardrobe and from online shops. The researchers trained the program with more than 24,000 photos of outfits from online shopping sites and photo-sharing communities. They searched for photos that were highly rated to catch fashionable combinations. The researchers also asked people on Amazon's Mechanical Turk Web site to match their photos with occasions and keywords and then developed a program to analyze the tagged photos, looking for rules they could incorporate into the recommendation system. To read further, please visit http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2012-12-28/science/36035663_1_photos-outfits-suggestions.
Computers May Someday Beat Chefs at Creating Flavors We Crave
NPR Online
IBM researchers are developing a computer that can understand how people come up with new ideas, including new food recipes. “The goal in computational creativity is to come up with new things that have never been seen before,” says IBM's Lav Varshney. The researchers are developing a program that can invent new recipes that taste good and are part of a healthy diet. The researchers first give the computer access to a database of recipes that have already proven to be successful. “Then we remix them, substitute things, do all kinds of other modifications, and generate millions of new ideas for recipes,” Varshney says. The researchers then attempt to predict which recipes people will like, based on basic principles of chemistry and psychology. They say the program could be used to make school lunches more appealing to students or to help combat obesity by finding dishes that satisfy people’s food cravings without as many calories. To read further, please visit http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2012/12/25/167725602/computers-may-someday-beat-chefs-at-creating-flavors-we-crave.
