HPC Happenings
Harvard SEAS ComputeFest 2013
January 15-25, 2013 – Boston, Massachusetts
Workshops – January 15-18, 2013 (requires registration)
Events – January 15-25, 2013 (registration not required)
Sessions are being led by experts from within Harvard (SEAS, IQSS, FAS-RC), and outside (Mathworks, Amazon, XSEDE, PSC, UCSD, TACC). There is also a student computational challenge and three symposia, the headline event being "Computing@Exascle" on Friday Jan 25 that will feature world experts on high performance computing and computational science. Workshops will cover Amazon AWS, Matlab, R, Python, Unix, MPI, Visualization, and HPC. For more information and to register, please visit http://computefest.seas.harvard.edu.
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
The Data Management Implementations Workshop – Call for Papers
March 13-14, 2013 – Arlington, Virginal
Submission Deadline – February 20, 2013
The 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. They encourage papers about implementations that are in their infancy as well as well-tested implementations. The workshop organizers will ask your permission to share these papers with meeting attendees. For more information, please visit http://rdmi.sites.uchicago.edu/.
Upcoming Conferences and Workshops.
2013 Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing Conference
February 7-9, 2013 – Washington, DC
The 2013 Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing Conference has issued a call for participation, inviting submissions for panel discussions, student research posters, birds-of-a-feather sessions and workshops. Additionally, applications are now being accepted for the Doctoral Consortium and student scholarships to attend the conference. Confirmed speakers include Vint Cerf (Google VP and ACM President), Armando Fox (UC Berkeley), Anita Jones (University of Virginia), Jeanine Cook (New Mexico State University), Annie Anton (Georgia Tech), and Hakim Weatherspoon, (Cornell University), among others. For more information, please visit the http://tapiaconference.org/2013/.
South Carolina Cyberinfrastructure Symposium
Feb 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/.
7th International Technology, Education and Development Conference
March 4-6, 2013 – Valencia, Spain
The 7th International Technology, Education and Development Conference is an international forum to present and share your experiences in the fields of Education, Technology and Development. The attendance of more than 600 delegates from more than 70 countries is expected, being an annual meeting point for lecturers, researchers, academics, educational scientists and technologists from all disciplines and cultures. For more information, please visit http://www.iated.org/concrete2/login.php?event_id=15.
Research Features From Across the Country and Around the World
NYU Researchers Use Simulations on TACC, XSEDE Supercomputers to Better Understand Carcinogens
A DNA repair system usually finds and repairs lesions within the cell. But some lesions are able to evade repair by stabilizing the DNA where they are bound. Simulations examined six different lesions caused by three carcinogens and found why the damage caused by some is more resistant to repair. To read further, please visit http://www.tacc.utexas.edu/news/feature-stories/2012/cancer-bound.
PSC Joins the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon to Launch New Effort to Improve Multi-scale Modeling of Biological Systems
The University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) have been awarded a five-year, $9.3 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to establish the Biomedical Technology Research Center (BTRC) that will develop computational tools for modeling and simulating biological systems from the tissue level down to the molecular level. By filling in the missing pieces between modeling efforts at disparate scales of structural biology, cell modeling and large-scale image analysis, this new collaborative initiative seeks to identify the molecular and cellular mechanisms that control neurotransmission and signaling events, which in turn could lead to the development of novel treatments for nervous system disorders. To read further, please visit http://www.psc.edu/index.php/newscenter/71-2012press/778-psc-joins-pitt-and-carnegie-mellon-with-improved-multi-scale-modeling-of-biological-systems-effort-.
World's Most Powerful Big Data Machines Charted on Graph 500
IDG News Service
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's Sequoia supercomputer ranked first in the most recent Graph 500 list, which tracks how well supercomputers handle big data-related workloads. The Graph 500 list is important because many high-performance computing (HPC) machines are being put to work on data analysis, instead of traditional tasks such as modeling and simulation. "Everyone has recognized that data is a new workload for HPC," says Georgia Tech professor David Bader. When compared to the Top500 supercomputer list, which tracks how effectively HPC systems execute floating-point operations, the Graph 500 places greater emphasis on how well a computer can search through a large data set. "Big data has a lot of irregular and unstructured data sets, irregular accesses to memory, and much more reliance on memory bandwidth and memory transactions than on floating-point performance," Bader says. To read further, please visit http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9233750/World_s_most_powerful_big_data_machines_charted_on_Graph_500.
The TV Is the New Tablet: How Gesture-Based Computing Is Evolving
Network World
The proliferation of smart TVs and gesture-based computing could enable viewers to mount and control everything they need on the living room wall. For example, the gesture-based technology MoveEye enables users to navigate a smart TV with hand gestures. However, for more intuitive navigation to become popular, the technology will have to work well enough to convince users to move away from traditional input devices. "It's interesting to see this generation of super-smart televisions and they all come with a remote that was built in the 1990s, which just seems kind of crazy," says Gartner's Stephen Prentice. He notes touchless, gesture-based computing also holds significant advantages over touchscreen technology in certain use cases. For example, although tablets can be very useful in the healthcare industry, they also can spread germs if several different doctors and nurses all use the same device. Touchless, gesture-based computing can solve this problem, Prentice says. To read further, please visit http://www.networkworld.com/news/2012/111412-tv-tablet-264262.html.
Bug Repellent for Supercomputers Proves Effective
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) researchers have developed the Stack Trace Analysis Tool (STAT), a highly scalable, lightweight tool that has been used to debug a program running more than one million MPI processors on the IBM Blue Gene/Q-based Sequoia supercomputer. The debugging tool is part of a multi-year collaboration between LLNL, the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and the University of New Mexico. The researchers say STAT has helped early access users and system integrators quickly isolate a wide range of errors, including complicated issues that only appeared at extremely large scales. "STAT has been indispensable in this capacity, helping the multi-disciplined integration team keep pace with the aggressive system scale-up schedule," says LLNL's Greg Lee. To read further, please visit https://www.llnl.gov/news/newsreleases/2012/Nov/NR12-11-02.html.
Georgia Tech’s Keeneland Project Deploys New GPU Supercomputing System for the National Science Foundation
Georgia Tech News
The Keeneland Project, a collaborative effort between Georgia Tech, the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, the National Institute for Computational Sciences, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, recently completed the installation and acceptance of the Keeneland Full Scale System (KFS). KFS is a supercomputing system designed to meet the compute-intensive needs of a wide range of applications through the use of NVIDIA graphics processing unit (GPU) technology. The researchers note that KFS is the most powerful GPU-based supercomputer available for research through the U.S. National Science Foundation's Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) program. KFS has 264 nodes, and each node contains two Intel Sandy Bridge processors, three NVIDIA M2090 GPU accelerators, 32 GB of host memory, and a Mellanox InfiniBand FDR interconnection network. To read further, please visit http://www.cc.gatech.edu/news/keeneland-project-deploys-new-gpu-supercomputing-system-national-science-foundation.
China Moves to Beat U.S. in Exascale Computing
Computerworld
China recently has fully embraced high-performance computing and now has 72 systems on the most recent Top500 supercomputer list, making it the second largest HPC user in the world behind the United States. Part of China's strategy includes building an indigenous tech industry. "What I think is interesting is the dedication [in China] to creating a homegrown economy for computing," says Argonne National Laboratory's Pete Beckman. He says the biggest challenge in HPC is the development of an exascale system that is 1,000 times more powerful than the petaflop systems being deployed today. Intersect360 Research CEO Addison Snell thinks the Chinese could construct an exaflop computer by 2020. "The U.S. may intend to wait for a more sophisticated design, but it will have to deal in the meantime with the public perception that China will have passed us by," he says. To read further, please visit http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9233856/China_moves_to_beat_U.S._in_exascale_computing.
Human Brain, Internet, and Cosmology: UCSD Researchers Seek to Discover if Similar Laws at Worka
UCSD News
All complex networks, including the universe, the human brain, and the Internet and social networks, may have more in common than previously thought, according to University of California, San Diego (UCSD) researchers. "The discovered equivalence between the growth of the universe and complex networks strongly suggests that unexpectedly similar laws govern the dynamics of these very different complex systems," says Dmitri Krioukov, a research scientist at UCSD's Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis. Krioukov says structural and dynamical similarities among different real networks suggest the presence of universal laws that govern these systems. The researchers used the Trestles supercomputer to perform simulations of the universe's growing causal network. The San Diego Supercomputer Center's Robert Sinkovits parallelized and optimized the application, which enabled Trestles to complete the simulation in just over one day, instead of three or four years. To read further, please visit http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/pressreleases/human_brain_internet_and_cosmology_similar_laws_at_work.
Educator Curriculum and Information
High Schools Go High-Tech, Offering Associate Degrees to Make Sure Students are Job- and College-Ready
Students at City Polytechnic High School of Engineering, Architecture and Technology in Brooklyn have the opportunity to earn not just a high school diploma but also an associate degree in five years of study. It is one of many technical education high schools created in the last 10 years. To read further, please visit http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/education/high-schools-offering-associate-degrees-ensure-students-job-college-ready-article-1.1213538#ixzz2GxHTqDUE.
Vint Cerf Urges Computer Science to Be Included in EBacc
Computer Weekly
Google vice president and ACM president Vint Cerf is backing the British Computer Society's (BCS) recent call for computer science to be included in the English Baccalaureate (EBacc). The EBacc will replace the current GCSE examination system in English, math, a science, a foreign language, and one from either history or geography in 2015. However, the BCS recently released a report, titled "The Case for Computer Science as an Option in the English Baccalaureate," which Cerf strongly supports. The BCS report shows how some of the new GCSEs in computer science require greater intellectual depth to achieve a C grade, when compared with some physics GCSEs Computer science needs to be included in the EBacc, or all of the work that has been done to ensure the subject is included in the curriculum could be at risk, according to BCS and Computing at School. "This will help head teachers realize that computer science is as important for the future success of their students as other scientific subjects such as math or physics," Cerf says. To read further, please visit http://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240173959/Vint-Cerf-urges-computer-science-to-be-included-in-EBacc.
In MLB.com Challenge, College Students Pitch Tech Ideas
InformationWeek
The MLB.com College Challenge, a competition cosponsored by the Syracuse University's School of Information Studies and Major League Baseball Advanced Media, offers participants a chance to solve some of MLB.com's real-world tech challenges, and an opportunity to pitch solutions to MLB representatives. The challenge encourages students from varied backgrounds to participate, serving as a model for helping students find jobs, as well as encouraging technological innovation to flourish in more places. In a previous competition, the winning project presented a way to merge all of the social media documents that a single game might produce, including smartphone photos, tweets, and Facebook status updates, into a single interface. This year's competition, which recently completed its third edition, focused on how MLB.com could harness the trend of "gamification" to engage fans. The winning project was a novel approach to fantasy baseball with gamification elements and competitive social challenges to share the experience with friends. Syracuse professor Jeffery Rubin, one of the competition's organizers, notes the hackathon is an interdisciplinary challenge. "It's not the most technical project that wins--but the best idea," Rubin says. To read further, please visit http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/training/in-mlbcom-challenge-college-students-pit/240143942
Student Engagement and Information
Postdoctoral Position in Numerical Methods for Kinetic Transport Equations
Oak Ridge National Lab!
The position requires collaboration within a multi-disciplinary research environment consisting of mathematicians, computational scientists, computer scientists, engineers, and physicists conducting basic and applied research in support of the Laboratory’s missions. Specific responsibilities include the development and design of multi-scale, multi-physics algorithms for simulating partial differential equations on large-scale, heterogeneous architectures. Application areas of particular interest include radiation transport, electron transport, and plasma physics. For more information and to apply, please visit http://bull.hn/l/XIQL/6.
Postdoctoral Position in Numerical Methods for Stochastic Partial Differential Equations and Uncertainty Quantification
Oak Ridge National Laboratory
The position requires collaboration within a multi-disciplinary research environment consisting of mathematicians, computational scientists, computer scientists, experimentalists, and engineers/physicists conducting basic and applied research in support of the Laboratory’s missions. Specific responsibilities include participating in the development and design of multi-scale, multi-physics algorithms, design and implementation of scalable numerical methods for UQ, collaboration with experts from various scientific disciplines on UQ and applications, and following team planning, goals and quality processes. For more information, please visit http://www.linkedin.com/groupAnswers?viewQuestionAndAnswers=&discussionID=198003061&gid=4178444&trk=eml-anet_dig-b_jb-ttl-cn&ut=1_gzqc9uyE95A1.
Computational Science Postdoctoral Fellow
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory - Req #75368
The successful candidates will participate in research activities related to computational mathematics for chemistry and materials science that are relevant to DOE and LBNL missions. Of particular interest are the development of numerical algorithms for constructing adaptive local basis functions suitable for discretizing the Kohn-Sham problem, the development of efficient dimension reduction algorithms for coupled-cluster calculations, and other numerical linear algebra problems that arise in the solution of the quantum many-body problem. The research activities will include the analysis of the performance profile and algorithmic complexity of existing computational approaches; the improvement of the efficiency and reliability of existing algorithms; and the development of novel computational algorithms on high performance computers for quantum chemistry and materials science. For more information, please visit
https://lbl.taleo.net/careersection/2/jobdetail.ftl?lang=en&job=75368.
Announcement: 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.
Career Opportunities
Outreach Coordinator
Purdue University
The Purdue Computer Science Department has an opening for an Outreach Coordinator. The candidate must possess computer science knowledge, K-12 experience, and the desire to offer workshops and professional development opportunities to K-12 students and teachers. If you are interested in applying, please visit http://purdue.taleo.net/careersection/wl/jobdetail.ftl?job=172560&lang=en&sns_id=gmail#.UMeOu1YGFxE.gmail.
Web Administrator
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory – Req 75473
The incumbent shall be responsible for regular maintenance, updates and content management of the Physical Biosciences Division (PBD) website, databases and other internal systems. The position requires experience with website development, content management and familiarity with visual layout design. Experience is also necessary in computer support and document development. For more information please visit http://www.linkedin.com/jobs?viewJob=&jobId=4445033&trk=eml-anet_dig-b_premjb-ttl-cn&ut=21VKqq15iy95A1.
Last But Not Least – Computational News of Interest
The Robotic Equivalent of a Swiss Army Knife
MIT News
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers have developed milli-motein, a tiny robot that could lead to future devices that can fold themselves into almost any shape. "It’s effectively a one-dimensional robot that can be made in a continuous strip, without conventionally moving parts, and then folded into arbitrary shapes," says MIT's Neil Gershenfeld. The researchers developed an electropermanent motor, which is able to hold its position even with the power switched off. To create the robot, a series of permanent magnets paired with electromagnets are arranged in a circle. The key innovation is that they do not take power in either the on or the off state, but only use power in the changing state, using minimal energy overall, says MIT's Ara Knaian. "This result brings us closer to the idea of programmable matter--where computer programs and materials merge to form a new kind of matter whose shape and function can be programmed--not unlike biology," says Cornell University professor Hod Lipson. To read further, please visit http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2012/reconfigurable-robots-turn-into-anything-1130.html.
AI Boffins Take on Angry Birds
Register
The Australian National University's (ANU's) Artificial Intelligence Group is hosting a competition that pits humans against artificial intelligence agents using the popular game Angry Birds. ANU professor Jochen Renz says the game presents some of the problems researchers are facing. "You need to solve computer vision, learning, and diagnosis problems to play the game," Renz says. "Those are some of the different sub-groups of artificial intelligence, so we [from the group] were all able to work together on the problem." Renz thought a competition could help advance research, so his team created an Angry Birds-playing app, called NAIVE, which offers a model of the game and plays it by simulating the mouse drags and clicks that launch the birds. The app is a Chrome extension, the competition takes place within the Chrome Web Store version of the game, and competitors can build on NAIVE or create their own code. The scores of the contestants who successfully complete the 10 custom levels created for the event will be put to test against human combatants. After the best-performing agents are matched against people, Renz will release the source code. To read further, please visit http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/12/05/angry_birds_ai_competition/.
A Computer for Your Car's Windshield
Wall Street Journal
General Motors (GM) and Daimler AG are developing new windshield technology that could provide drivers with information about their surroundings, improving safety and efficiency. The windshields use augmented reality to display driving directions, text messages, or oncoming hazards, all without requiring the driver to look away from the road. "The goal is to reduce head-down time and maybe make driving a more interactive experience," says GM chief technologist for human machine interface Tom Seder. Augmented-reality windshields are likely to have simple graphics enabling drivers to see digital renditions of their surroundings, including difficult-to-see road edges or animals The technology combines sensors outside the vehicle with inside sensors that track the driver's eyes. The windshield also could display facts about a city's landmarks, weather and traffic updates, and social media posts. To read further, please visit http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323717004578157420618921346.html.
