HPC in the News
Top HPC Centers Meet in Barcelona at JLESC
Top researchers from six of the largest supercomputing centers got together in Barcelona at the beginning of this month for the Joint Laboratory for Extreme‐Scale Computing (JLESC) to discuss the challenges for future supercomputers. Marc Snir highlighted US Government programs to promote new supercomputing systems; Thomas Lippert discussed the EU Flagship ‘Human Brain Project'; and Akira Ukawa explained the point of view from Riken, Japan’s largest research institution. Overcoming the monumental challenges that face the HPC on the road to exascale will take a concerted effort from the entire industry as demonstrated by events such as JLESC and PRACE Days, which was held in Dublin at the end of May. Both focused on understanding the challenges around designing both software and hardware for these extreme scale systems and provide a forum for industry experts to discuss potential solutions and ideas for the future of the HPC industry. To read further, please visit http://insidehpc.com/2015/07/top-hpc-centers-meet-in-barcelona-at-jlesc/.
Dell Aims PowerEdge C-Series Platform for HPC and Beyond
Dell has positioned its latest PowerEdge C-series platform to meet the needs of both traditional HPC and the hyperscale market. The recently hatched PowerEdge C6320 is outfitted with the latest generation Intel Xeon E5-2600 v3 processors, providing up to 18 cores per socket (144 cores per 2U chassis), up to 512GB of DDR4 memory and up to 72TB of flexible local storage. HPCwire spoke with Brian Payne, executive director of Dell Server Solutions, to explore how the new PowerEdge C6320 fits in with Dell’s broader portfolio and approach to the widening HPC space. With two Intel Xeon E5- 2699 processors, the new server offers a 2x performance improvement on the Linpack benchmark, delivering 999 gigaflops compared with 498 gigaflops from the previous generation PowerEdge C6220 (outfitted with Xeon E5-2697 CPUs). The C6320 also achieved a 45 percent improvement on the SPECint_rate benchmark and up to 28 percent better power efficiency on the Spec_Power benchmark. To read more, please visit http://www.hpcwire.com/2015/06/30/dell-aims-poweredge-c-series-platform-for-hpc-and-beyond/.
Computing the Cost of Catastrophe: Researchers Use XSEDE/TACC Resources to Calculate Future Damage from Hurricanes
Hurricane Katrina, the most deadly and destructive storm to hit the United States, caused 1800 deaths and an estimated $81 billion in damages. Most of the loss was not due to the storm's high winds, but the accompanying storm surge and flooding. Imminent climate change and sea level rise could possibly make these mega storms more frequent and intense, and especially disastrous to those living on the coast. While it's challenging, beginning to quantify future loss from storms may help communities start planning to prevent unnecessary death and destruction. Francisco Olivera, associate professor of Civil Engineering at Texas A&M University, is evaluating the impact of hurricanes and coastal flooding on the Gulf Coast. His group's assessment of the damage caused by current and future hurricane storm surges has been published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans, the Journal of the American Water Resources Association, Climatic Change, and Ocean and Coastal Management. These studies represented the first of their kind to explore how the coastlines would change from rising seas. To read more, please visit https://www.tacc.utexas.edu/-/computing-the-cost-of-catastrophe.
XSEDE News From Partnerss and Friends
Thomas Bogdan Departing As UCAR President
The Board of Trustees of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) announced today that it is exercising its option to terminate Thomas Bogdan’s five-year contract as UCAR president, effective July 10. The board is looking at several possibilities for an interim leader. The board expressed appreciation to Bogdan for his service to UCAR and its member universities. As president for the last three and a half years, Bogdan provided new vision for the organization, working to diversify funding sources and build relationships with the commercial sector. The board reached its decision after careful deliberation in order to move the organization forward with a new president. The University Corporation for Atmospheric Research is a nonprofit consortium of 105 colleges and universities offering degrees in the atmospheric and related sciences. UCAR manages the National Center for Atmospheric Research through a cooperative agreement with the National Science Foundation. To read further, please visit https://www2.ucar.edu/atmosnews/news/16132/thomas-bogdan-departing-ucar-president.
Access To Big Data Is Crucial For Credibility Of Computational Research Findings, Says University of Illinois Library and Information Science Professor
Think of a scientist at work, and you might picture someone at a lab bench, doing a physical experiment involving beakers or petri dishes and recording his or her findings, which will eventually form the basis for a scientific paper. That’s the old model of science, says University of Illinois professor of library and information science Victoria Stodden. Science is being transformed so that massive computation is central to scientific experiments, with scientists using computer code to analyze huge amounts of data. Computational science might be used to study climate change, to simulate the formation of galaxies, for biomolecular modeling or for mining a vast set of data looking for patterns. But, Stodden says, this relatively new form of scientific inquiry has not yet developed standards for communicating the details of how the work was done or for validating results. The lack of such standards is causing a credibility crisis, Stodden says. Her research looks at the “reproducibility” of computational science – how findings can be verified and an experiment replicated or used as a basis for further research. To read more, please visit http://news.illinois.edu/news/15/0710computational_science_victoriastodden.html.
Teaching the Machine to See Blacklight "Trains" Video Search System for Competition Victory
A good example that we live in the era of Big Data is that, as we’ve moved from super-8-film home movies to ever-present smartphones, we’ve all begun to generate so much visual imagery that we seldom look at a given video more than once. Worse, when we do want to find a video clip, it’s lost among thousands of others. Machine intelligence researchers Shoou-I Yu and Lu Jiang, working with colleagues on Carnegie Mellon University’s Alexander Hauptmann’s Informedia project and at PSC have developed E-Lamp, a system of “event detectors” designed to search for events in videos without human intervention. Such a detector could help us all keep better tabs of our videoelectronic lives. The task of finding a video of a birthday party, for example, is fairly easy for a person. But it’s extremely hard for a computer: All the cues a machine might use to spot a video, including color, shape, sounds and even captions can be misleading. To read more and watch the video, please visit http://www.psc.edu/index.php/teaching-the-machine.
Call for Papers
Asia Pacific Bioinformatics Conference (APBC)
January 11-13, 2016 – San Francisco, California
Submission Deadline – July 30, 2015
Notification – August 30, 2015
The Asia Pacific Bioinformatics Conference (APBC) series is an annual international forum for exploring research, development and novel applications in the field of Bioinformatics. The aim of APBC is to bring together academia and industry to share knowledge and experiences, and to showcase innovations and achievements. It has been held since 2003 around Asia Pacific Regions. The conference venue South San Francisco Conference Center is conveniently located in the heart of the biotech region, minutes from San Francisco Airport and 15 minutes from downtown San Francisco. APBC 2016 features five world-recognized leaders in bioinformatics field as keynote speakers. Oral presentation will be selected from submitted papers. Accepted papers will be invited to be published in certain peer reviewed journals. APBC 2016 invites industry to explore the sponsorship opportunities as a sponsor, exhibitor, or advertiser during this annual gathering. For more information, please visit http://www.sfasa.org/apbc2016/apbc2016.html.
12th IEEE Symposium on Visualization for Cyber Security
October 26, 2015 – Chicago, Illinois
Submission Deadline – August 1, 2015
Notification – September 5, 2015
The 12th IEEE Symposium on Visualization for Cyber Security (VizSec) is a forum that brings together researchers and practitioners from academia, government, and industry to address the needs of the cybersecurity community through new and insightful visualization and analysis techniques. VizSec provides an excellent venue for fostering greater exchange and new collaborations on a broad range of security- and privacy-related topics. VizSec will be held in Chicago, Illinois, USA in conjunction with IEEE VIS. The purpose of VizSec is to explore effective and scalable visual interfaces for security domains such as network security, computer forensics, reverse engineering, insider threat detection, cryptography, privacy, user assisted attacks prevention, compliance management, wireless security, secure coding, and penetration testing. For more information, please visit http://vizsec.org/.
Upcoming Conferences, Webinars, and Seminars
BroCon ‘15
August 4-6, 2015 - Cambridge, Massachusetts
BroCon ‘15 offers the Bro community a chance to share experiments, successes, and failures to better understand and secure our networks. The convention is composed of talks and training exercises from the Bro development team as well as fellow users and enthusiasts. For more information, please visit https://www.bro.org/community/brocon2015.html#agenda.
Data Parallelism for Raster-Based Land Cover Analysis
July 30, 2015 - Urbana, Illinois
This course is designed for researchers and practitioners interested in large scale landscape studies. With increased availability of fine-resolution regional and national land cover raster datasets, there comes the opportunity to study local land change dynamics across large regions. In this training, we introduce big-data-appropriate methods for conducting typical land cover analyses and simulations in a high performance computing environment. This course uses Python, but concepts can be applied using other programming languages. For more information, please visit http://illinois.edu/calendar/detail/772/32875732.
XSEDE HPC Monthly Workshop: Big Data
August 4, 2015 - Columbus, Ohio
XSEDE along with the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center are pleased to announce a one day Big Data workshop, to be held August 4, 2015. This workshop will focus on topics such as Hadoop and Spark. As is the case with all of the XSEDE HPC Workshop series, this event will feature a large portion of hands-on exercises. Due to demand, this workshop will be telecast to several satellite sites. This workshop is NOT available via a webcast. For more information, please visit
https://www.osc.edu/calendar/events/august_4_xsede_hpc_monthly_workshop_big_data.
Sixth Workshop on Big Data Benchmarking
June 16-17, 2015 – Toronto, Canada
Formed in 2012, the Workshop Series on Big Data Benchmarking has conducted five successful workshops, bringing together industry experts and the academic community towards the development of benchmarks for providing objective measures of the effectiveness of hardware and software systems dealing with big data applications. These workshops have become a leading international forum for discussing and disseminating the latest trends, challenges, and ideas around big data benchmarking and related applications scenarios, in industry and research. Discussions initiated in these workshops have led to the creation of a formal TPC benchmark called, TPCx-HS (for Hadoop Systems). A new TPC working group, called TPC-BigBench, has also been established to develop the next TPC big data benchmark. Ideas for BigBench originated in the WBDB workshops. For more information, please visit http://clds.sdsc.edu/wbdb2015.ca.
24th USEIX Security Symposium
August 12-14, 2015 – Washington, D.C.
USENIX Security ’15 brings together researchers, practitioners, systems programmers and engineers, and others interested in the latest advances in the security of computer systems and networks. The 3-day program includes a Keynote Address by Dr. Richard J. Danzig; Invited Talks by Mike Walker, Katherine Fisher, and Christopher Kern; panel discussions; over 60 refereed paper presentations; and evening events including Birds-of-a-Feather sessions, a poster session, and more. Register by July 20, 2015 and save! For more information, please visit https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity15.
Research News From Around the World
Computational Fact-Checking
Network scientists at Indiana University have developed a new computational method that can leverage any body of knowledge to aid in the complex human task of fact-checking. In the first use of this method, IU scientists created a simple computational fact-checker that assigns “truth scores” to statements concerning history, geography and entertainment, as well as random statements drawn from the text of Wikipedia, the well-known online encyclopedia. In multiple experiments, the automated system consistently matched the assessment of human fact-checkers in terms of their certitude about the accuracy of these statements. The results of the study, “Computational Fact Checking From Knowledge Networks,” are reported in PLOS ONE. The team selected Wikipedia as the information source for their experiment due to its breadth and open nature. To read more, please visit http://research.indiana.edu/2015/06/fact-checking-computers-vs-humans/.
We're Not Alone – But the Universe May Be Less Crowded than We Think: Michigan State University Stude
There may be far fewer galaxies further out in the universe then might be expected, according to a new study led by Michigan State University. Over the years, the Hubble Space Telescope has allowed astronomers to look deep into the universe. The long view stirred theories of untold thousands of distant, faint galaxies. The new research, appearing in the current issue of the Astrophysical Journal Letters, however, offers a theory that reduces the estimated number of the most distant galaxies by 10 to 100 times. “Our work suggests that there are far fewer faint galaxies than we once previously thought,” said Brian O’Shea, MSU associate professor of physics and astronomy. “Earlier estimates placed the number of faint galaxies in the early universe to be hundreds or thousands of times larger than the few bright galaxies that we can actually see with the Hubble Space Telescope. We now think that number could be closer to ten times larger. To read further, please visit http://msutoday.msu.edu/news/2015/were-not-alone-but-the-universe-may-be-less-crowded-than-we-think/?utm_campaign=standard-promo&utm_source=msuedu-news-links&utm_medium=msuhome.
Extreme Weather in a Changing Climate: Asking the Right Questions
When a deadly heat wave lingers for an especially long time; when a hurricane makes landfall with particular ferocity; or when droughts, winter storms or cold snaps break records, the public is increasingly interested in knowing if human-induced climate change played a role. Attributing individual extreme weather events to a warming climate is difficult work. Even so, scientists have been making an effort in recent years to determine when a connection can be detected. In a new "Perspective" piece published in Nature Climate Change, scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and the University of Reading argue that many researchers looking for links between the two have been asking the wrong question. The result, according to the authors, is that human-induced climate change hasn't always gotten the blame it deserves. To read more, please visit https://www2.ucar.edu/atmosnews/perspective/16000/extreme-weather-changing-climate-asking-right-questions.
Genomics among the Biggest of Big Data, Illinois Experts Say
Each cell in the body contains a whole genome, yet the data packed into a few DNA molecules could fill a hard drive. As more people have their DNA sequenced, that data will require massive computational and storage capabilities beyond anything previously anticipated, says a new assessment from computational biologists and computer scientists at the University of Illinois and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. The team of experts compared data needs of genomics with three of the biggest players in big data: astronomy, Twitter and YouTube. They projected growth in each area through the year 2025 and found that genomics is poised to be a leader in data acquisition, storage, distribution and analysis. The team’s assessment is published in the journal PLOS Biology. To read further, please visit http://news.illinois.edu/news/15/0707genomics_data_generobinson_saurabhsinha.html.
Neutrons Find “Missing” Magnetism of Plutonium
Groundbreaking work at two Department of Energy national laboratories has confirmed plutonium’s magnetism, which scientists have long theorized but have never been able to experimentally observe. The advances that enabled the discovery hold great promise for materials, energy and computing applications. Plutonium was first produced in 1940 and its unstable nucleus allows it to undergo fission, making it useful for nuclear fuels as well as for nuclear weapons. Much less known, however, is that the electronic cloud surrounding the plutonium nucleus is equally unstable and makes plutonium the most electronically complex element in the periodic table, with intriguingly intricate properties for a simple elemental metal. While conventional theories have successfully explained plutonium’s complex structural properties, they also predict that plutonium should order magnetically. To read more, please visit http://www.ornl.gov/ornl/news/news-releases/2015/f249af5f-8fd8-47af-bb97-7c7df9d7376d.
Educator News, Conferences, and Opportunities
Mozilla Fellowship for Science
Submission Deadline – August 14, 2015
The Mozilla Fellowships for Science present a unique opportunity for researchers who want to influence the future of open science and data sharing within their communities. We're looking for researchers with a passion for open source and data sharing, already working to shift research practice to be more collaborative, iterative and open. Fellows will spend 10 months starting September 2015 as community catalysts at their institutions, mentoring the next generation of open data practitioners and researchers and building lasting change in the global open science community. Throughout their fellowship year, chosen fellows will receive training and support from Mozilla to hone their skills around open source and data sharing. They will also craft code, curriculum and other learning resources that help their local communities learn open data practices, and teach forward to their peers. For more information, please visit https://www.mozillascience.org/fellows.
2015 CSTA Annual Conference
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
Introduction to iPhone Development
July 27-31, 2015 – Durham, North Carolina
Participants in this workshop will learn the basics of mobile app development in the context of Apple's iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch devices. We'll use Xcode, Apple's development environment, to create apps which we can run in the simulator as well as on actual devices. We have several iPads and iPods available, but feel free to bring your own as well, if you wish, so that you can bring home the apps that you write! The three prongs of this workshop are:
· What makes a good mobile app
· How to write an app for Apple's devices
· A little bit about computer programming
Students should be rising 9th - 12th graders interested in mobile app development. Although no programming experience is expected, some familiarity with using computers for other-than-gaming activities will be helpful. For more information, please visit http://www.shodor.org/succeed/curriculum/workshops/iPhone/.
The 24th International Conference on Parallel Architectures and Compilation Techniques
October 18-21, 2015 – San Francisco, California
Submission Deadline – August 10, 2015
Notification – August 24, 2015
PACT aims to bring together researchers from architecture, compilers, applications and languages to present and discuss innovative research of common interest. PACT invites participation in the ACM Student Research Competition (SRC). Sponsored by ACM and Microsoft Research, the SRC is a forum for undergraduates and graduate students to share their research results, exchange ideas, and improve their communication skills while competing for prizes. Students accepted to participate in the SRC are entitled to a travel grant to help cover travel expenses. The top 3 undergraduate and graduate winners will receive several prizes. For more information, please visit https://sites.google.com/a/lbl.gov/pact2015/.
Computational Science News of Interest
Microsoft Windows Phone: A 20-Year Retrospective of a Meandering Mobile Strategy
ExtremeTech
Microsoft’s $7.6 billion-dollar write-off of its investment in Nokia and planned layoff of 7800 employees — mostly from the phone manufacturing division — has been big news these past two days. What’s less remembered is Microsoft’s 20 year mobile technology journey that led to this point. Before, we wander down that path, however, let me make it clear that I understand that announcements are about the Windows Phone hardware group and not the Windows Phone operating system group. The Windows Phone platform continues to move forward. Though, with Microsoft’s phone hardware division written off and few hardware partners making phones based on Windows Phone, you have to wonder what this really means. To read further, please visit http://www.extremetech.com/computing/209542-microsoft-windows-phone-a-20-year-retrospective-of-a-meandering-mobile-strategy.
Hackers Stole U.S. Data on More Than 20 Million People
BloomBerg
Hackers stole Social Security numbers and other personal data for about 22.1 million people in breaches of the U.S. government’s personnel office, the Obama administration said. The total includes new data related to the breach of security clearance applications as well as information previously released on the theft of personnel records, the Office of Personnel Management said Thursday. On Capitol Hill, lawmakers said OPM’s director should be replaced. House Republican leaders -- Speaker John Boehner of Ohio, Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California and Majority Whip Steve Scalise of Louisiana -- issued statements calling for President Barack Obama to fire OPM Director Katherine Archuleta. In the Senate, Democrat Mark Warner of Virginia and Republican John McCain of Arizona, also called for a new director. The Chinese government is a leading suspect behind the attack, according to Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, some lawmakers and cybersecurity companies that conduct forensics investigations. To read further, please visit http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-07-09/hackers-stole-government-data-on-25-7-million-people-u-s-says.
'Pac-Man' Satellite to Munch on Space Junk
TechNewsWorld
There are more than 300,000 pieces of debris larger than 1 cm circulating less than 2,000km above Earth, and the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne's Space Engineering Center, aka "eSpace," is working on a solution to the problem. EPFL this week announced that its CleanSpace One satellite project has passed a milestone toward its goal of launching a cleanup satellite to capture and destroy its SwissCube, which has been orbiting Earth for more than five years. Swiss Space Systems, or S3, which focuses on in-orbit delivery of small satellites, will invest about $16 million dollars in the cleanup system, which eSpace likened to a Pac-Man gobbling up space debris. The current design envisions a satellite that will deploy a net around a piece of debris and close down once it has captured the target. The CleanSpace One launch is scheduled for 2018. S3 will handle the Space Pac-Man launch. SOAR, a small suborbital reusable shuttle, will piggyback on an Airbus A300 jetliner. To read further, please visit http://www.technewsworld.com/story/82248.html.
Social Media
We Forced Our Company to Communicate Only Through Snapchat
TechCrunch
Snapchat was the first social network I was too old to understand. I joined Facebook as it first rolled out on campuses when I was in my junior year of college. I joined Twitter and Instagram in the very early days and even snagged my first name @gregory as my username on both. I scoffed at people who didn’t “get” these services. Then Snapchat came around. I downloaded it, but none of my friends were on it so I found it impossible to understand the appeal. Most people could afford to adopt new social networks less quickly as they get older, but the company I cofounded, Sawhorse Media, runs The Shorty Awards which honor the best of social media and Muck Rack, a SaaS solution for PR and journalism with social media at its heart. It’s our job to understanding the latest trends in social media, yet many of us simply didn’t get Snapchat. To read more, please visit http://techcrunch.com/2015/07/11/a-new-users-guide-to-understanding-snapchat/.
Whatsapp, Snapchat, Imessage May Face UK Ban within Weeks
TechSpot
Popular instant messaging apps could soon be banned in the UK, owing to the strict laws on social media and online messaging services. The move comes as British Prime Minister David Cameron pushes ahead with new legislation that plans to stop people from sending any form of encrypted messages. If passed, the new law could result in the UK ban of all popular messaging services that scramble communications between their users. This would include Snapchat, iMessage and WhatsApp. Earlier this year, Cameron stated that if re-elected he would look at ways to ban encrypted communication services. “In our country, do we want to allow a means of communication between people which we cannot read? My answer to that question is: ‘No, we must not’,” the Prime Minister said. With the new Investigatory Powers Bill, Internet Service Providers, internet companies like Google, Facebook and Apple, will have to record the history of every UK user. To read further, please visit http://www.techspot.com/news/61313-whatsapp-snapchat-imessage-may-face-uk-ban.html.
