HPC in the News
Skilled Foreign Workers a Boon to Pay, Study Finds
The Wall Street Journal
Three academic economists recently conducted a study examining wage data and immigration in 219 U.S. metropolitan areas from 1990 to 2010 and found that cities seeing the biggest gains of foreign-born workers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) saw wages climb fastest for the native-born, college-educated population. The study concludes that immigrants can boost the productivity of the overall economy, and job creation leads to more jobs for non-immigrants as well. The economists focused on how wages for college- and no college-educated native workers shifted along with immigration. The study found a 1 percent increase in the share of workers in STEM fields could raise wages for college-educated natives by 7 to 8 percent and wages of the noncollege-educated natives by 3 to 4 percent. "A lot of people have the idea there is a fixed number of jobs," says University of California, Davis researcher Giovanni Peri. "It's completely turned around." The study found the areas with the largest gains in foreign STEM workers were Austin, TX; Raleigh-Durham, NC; Huntsville, AL; and Seattle. Those cities had adjusted wage gains of 17 to 28 percent for native college-educated workers, while wages for the college-education population declined in 25 of the 33 cities that had a decline in foreign STEM workers. To read further, please visit http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303749904579578461727257136.
Massachusetts Offers a New Model for Academic HPC
A new HPC center will be launched by years end in Massachusetts. The Massachusetts Green High-Performance Computing Center (MGHPCC) will be outfitted with terascale hardware aims to deliver it in an environmentally friendly way. Beyond promises of power efficiency and reduced carbon footprint, the center is deviating from typical facility models. It will act as a shared resource between multiple universities, requiring users to develop new strategies of implementation. Last week, IEEE Spectrum likened the facility to a Thanksgiving table of HPC for colleges. University members include MIT, Harvard University, Boston University, Northeastern University and the University of Massachusetts system. To read further, please visit http://www.hpcwire.com/2012/05/29/massachusetts_offers_a_new_model_for_academic_hpc/.
Remembering Kraken
In supercomputing, it is often the case that top systems are only around for about half a decade. With the breaking of the petascale barrier now fixed in the rearview mirror of 2008, we are starting to see some of those groundbreaking systems reach their retirement age. It happened with Roadrunner, the world’s first petaflopper, not too long ago, and at noon on April 30, 2014, it happened to Kraken, the first academic petaflop computer. To mark this occasion and highlight the important contributions that Kraken enabled, Troy Baer, Senior HPC System Administrator at the National Institute for Computational Sciences, has written a few words about the “end of an era.” To read further, please visit http://www.hpcwire.com/2014/06/05/remembering-kraken/.
TACC Celebrates 13 Years of Discovery
On June 1st, the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) celebrated a big milestone: 13 years of groundbreaking science, propelled by some of the most powerful supercomputing resources in the world. From being an early user of one of the first supercomputers, a Cray CDC 6600, to operating one of the first multi-petaflop systems, Stampede, the University of Texas at Austin has been on the cutting-edge of scientific and computational progress. In 2001, TACC was established at UT’s J.J. Pickle Research Campus as a center of computational excellence with resources that are made available to the national academic research community through the XSEDE project. For more information, please visit https://www.tacc.utexas.edu/news.
LANL Demos Extreme Scale Index
An HPC middleware project currently underway at Los Alamos National Laboratory has reached a significant milestone. The new supercomputing tool, developed as part of the Multi-dimensional Hashed Indexed Middleware (MDHIM) project, made 1,782,105,749 key/value inserts per second into a globally ordered key space on Los Alamos National Laboratory’s Moonlight supercomputer. The demonstration showcases the potential of MDHIM to help enable data exploration at enormous scale. Fundamental to the progress of science in the 21st century is the need for computer simulations to harness ever-larger numbers of computing cores in unison. As we head toward exascale, the additional computing power results in more complex simulations and more data being pumped into the analysis workflow. To start further, please visit.
HPC Call for Participation
Call for Proposals - NERSC Exascale Science Application Program
Application Deadline – June 39, 2014
NERSC is now accepting applications for the NERSC Exascale Science Application Program (NESAP). Through NESAP, NERSC will partner with approximately 20 application teams to help prepare codes for the Cori architecture. A key feature of the Cori system is the Intel Knights Landing processor, which will have over 60 cores per node with multiple hardware threads on each core, and will also include high bandwidth, on-package memory. The program will partner application teams with resources at NERSC, Cray, and Intel, and will last through the acceptance of the Cori system. For more information and submission guidelines, please visit https://www.nersc.gov/users/accounts/allocations/nersc-exascale-science-application-program/.
First Call for Papers – The Second International Workshop on Large-scale Graph Storage and Management - GraphSM 2015\
May 24 - 29, 2015 - Rome, Italy
Submission Deadline – December 24, 2014
There exists a growing interest to gather, store and query data from various aspects of human knowledge including geographical data; data about various aspects of human activities like music, literature, and sport; scientific data from biology, chemistry, astronomy and other scientific fields; as well as data presenting the activities of governments and other important institutions. There is consensus that data should be presented in some form of graph data model where simple and natural abstractions are used to represent data as subjects and their properties described by objects, that is, by means of nodes and edges of a graph. For complete workshop information, including submission topics and guidelines, please visit http://www.iaria.org/conferences2015/GraphSM.html.
Upcoming Conferences, Workshops and Webinars
Virtual School of Computational Science and Engineering (VSCSE) Summer School
Big Data Summer School, June 30 - July 2, 2014 - U Oklahoma, Norman, Oklahoma
Harness the Power of GPUs: Introduction to GPGPU Programming, June 16-20, 2014
The Virtual School of Computational Science and Engineering is looking forward to another successful summer school program providing undergraduates, graduate students, postdocs, faculty and professionals the skills they need to use advanced computational resources to further their research. These are being offered through one of a kind high-definition videoconferencing delivered simultaneously nationwide to specific sites. For complete information, including summer school site locations and to register, please visit https://portal.xsede.org/course-calendar.
SDSC Virtual Data Intensive Summer School
June 30 – July 2, 2014 -- La Jolla, California
The San Diego Supercomputer Center will be one of 21 sites across the country hosting the Virtual Data Intensive Summer School. It is intended for participants who are local to San Diego or one of the other 20 sites that will be linked using videoconferencing technology. The Data Intensive Summer School focuses on the skills needed to manage, process and gain insight from large amounts of data. It is targeted at researchers from the physical, biological, economic and social sciences that are beginning to drown in data. We will cover the nuts and bolts of data intensive computing, common tools and software, predictive analytics algorithms, data management and non-relational database models. Given the short duration of the summer school, the emphasis will be on providing a solid foundation that the attendees can use as a starting point for advanced topics of particular relevance to their work.
Summer School details: http://www.vscse.org/summerschool/2014/index.html
SDSC Summer Institute 2014: HPC Meets Big Data
August 4 – 8, 2014 – La Jolla, California
HPC Meets Big Data is the theme of SDSC’s Summer Institute in 2014. SDSC Summer Institute will deploy a flexible format designed to help attendees get the most out of their week. The first half will consist of plenary sessions covering the skills that are considered essential for anyone who works with big data. Topics include data management, running jobs on SDSC resources, reproducibility, database systems, characteristics of big data, techniques for turning data into knowledge, software version control and making effective use of hardware. Followed by a series of parallel sessions that allow attendees to dive deeper into specialized material that is relevant to their research projects, with the exact choice of topics will be based on feedback collected during registration. The Summer Institute is targeted to individuals interested in data science and computational science—especially current and potential users of SDSC's data-intensive resources. To apply, please visit http://www.sdsc.edu/Events/summerinstitute/.
Third Theory and Practice in Modern Computing Conference
July 15-17, 2014 - Lisbon, Portugal
The International Conference on “Theory and Practice in Modern Computing” provides a forum for research and developments in the field of computing foundations and technology. Modern computing comes not only with efficient concepts and their application, but also it often addresses networking and mobility topics. The conference covers four main areas: Design Foundations; Realization Aspects; Mobility Communication and Services; Networking and Grid Approaches. For more information, please visit http://www.tpmc-conf.org/.
Research Features From Across the Country and Around the World
Indiana University Computer Scientists Develop Tool for Uncovering Bot-Controlled Twitter Accounts
IU Bloomington Newsroom
Indiana University (IU) researchers have developed BotOrNot, software that helps users determine whether a Twitter account is operated by a human or an automated social bot. The researchers say the program is based on technology designed to counter misinformation and deception campaigns. BotOrNot simultaneously analyzes more than 1,000 features from a user's friendship network, their Twitter content, and temporal information. The system then calculates the likelihood the account may or may not be a bot. "We have applied a statistical learning framework to analyze Twitter data, but the 'secret sauce' is in the set of more than 1,000 predictive features able to discriminate between human users and social bots, based on content and timing of their tweets, and the structure of their networks," says IU professor Alessandro Flammini. To read further, please visit http://news.indiana.edu/releases/iu/2014/05/twitter-botornot.shtml.
Europe Wants a Supercomputer Made From Smartphones
IEEE Spectrum
Mont-Blanc, a European public-private consortium, aims to make exaflop supercomputers based on the central-processing units (CPUs) used in smartphones and tablet computers. The Mont-Blanc project, which was launched at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center in 2011, currently has 14 partners and is set to run through September 2016. The researchers recently unveiled a prototype blade server that could lead to a full exascale system in the future. The new system would consume between one-fifteenth and one-thirtieth as much energy per processor as conventional high-performance computing systems. The system relies on ARM cores, which are designed to run on small smartphone and tablet batteries, and could yield more speed while consuming less power. To read further, please visit http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/hardware/europe-wants-a-supercomputer-made-from-smartphones/.
Columbia University Study Finds MOOC Reality Not Yet Meeting High Expectations
Researchers at Columbia University's Teachers College have released a comprehensive study on massive open online courses (MOOCs) suggesting the technology is not yet attaining its goals. Based on 83 interviews with those involved with MOOCs at 62 primarily U.S. institutions, the study features 13 case studies showing the successful implementation of MOOCs to address institutional goals. Improving access to education and broadening institutional reach is a primary MOOC goal for most institutions, according to the study. And although MOOCs do offer educational opportunities to millions of people globally, most participants are already well educated and employed, the study found. To read further, please visit http://www.tc.columbia.edu/news.htm?articleID=9481.
Carnegie Mellon, Microsoft Research Automate Privacy Compliance for Big Data Systems
Carnegie Mellon News
Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and Microsoft Research have developed a prototype automated privacy compliance system that runs on the data analytics pipeline of the Bing search engine. The researchers say their system is the first time automated privacy compliance analysis has been applied to the production code of an Internet-scale system. The researchers showed that a team of just five workers can manage a daily compliance check on millions of lines of code written by several thousand developers. "During our implementation on Bing, we found that more than 20 percent of the code was changing on a daily basis," says CMU Ph.D. student and lead researcher Shayak Sen. At these large scales, automated methods offer the best hope of verifying compliance. As part of the project, the researchers developed a new programming language, called Legalease, that could be easily learned and used by privacy advocates. To read further, please visit http://www.cmu.edu/news/stories/archives/2014/may/may21_privacycompliance.html.
Free Game Programming Curriculum Invades Math Classes
Campus Technology
Code.org and the New York City Foundation for Computer Science Education (CSNYC) plan to use the Bootstrap curriculum to help educators learn how to teach students algebraic and geometric concepts with computer programming. The two nonprofits will use middle-school lessons within schools and districts where they have a presence. Code.org and CSNYC promote adding computer science classes to schools starting in early grades. The curriculum is free and aligns with Common Core math standards. Launched as a 10-week after-school program, Bootstrap is now transitioning to become an in-school program in which students learn a programming language and other concepts and create a game. To read further, please visit http://campustechnology.com/articles/2014/05/01/free-game-programming-curriculum-invades-math-classes.aspx.
Educator News and Opportunities
Join the National CS Principles Summit Online
In a new twist for 2014, CSTA is thrilled to invite you to our first ever-virtual summit in conjunction with our annual conference in July. As an online participant of the Computer Science Principles Summit you have access to presentation slides, handouts, and supplemental resources as well as the ability to interact with attendees participating virtually and on-site. This is free professional development for CS educators made possible by enthusiastic support from Google. Register on the CS Principles Summit website so you can receive summit updates and the option to join a pre-conference tutorial on Google Hangouts-On-Air. CS Principles Summit Site: https://sites.google.com/a/csta-hq.org/csps.
STELAR Youth Motivation Webinar: Findings from ITEST
June 19, 2014 3pm - 4pm ET
Please join the STELAR Center for a webinar on Youth Motivation on Thursday, June 19, at 3pm Eastern Time. The webinar will focus on current findings from the ITEST program related to youth motivation and STEM career development. Participants will hear from ITEST projects working across the U.S. to learn specific strategies for as well as successes and challenges with fostering and assessing youth motivation and STEM career interest. The presentation will include project-level findings of youth development in these areas. http://stelar.edc.org/events/stelar-youth-motivation-webinar-findings-itest.
U.S. Department of Education Green Ribbon Schools Postsecondary Sustainability Awards
Submission Deadline – February 1, 2015
U.S. Department of Education Green Ribbon Schools (ED-GRS) has introduced a new Postsecondary Sustainability Award for the 2014-2015 cycle. For this award, state selection committees are particularly encouraged to document how the nominees’ sustainability work has reduced college costs, increased completion rates, led to employment, and ensured robust civic skills among graduates; and to make an effort to consider diverse types of institutions. Interested colleges and universities should contact their state higher education authorities for information on how to apply in their states. Like the PK-12 awards, this category is entirely voluntary. Hearing from interested colleges and universities may be helpful to state authorities considering 2014 - 2015 participation. State higher education authorities should contact U.S. Department of Education Green Ribbon Schools for more information. They can find updated criteria and other state implementation guidance on our website. For more information, visit http://www2.ed.gov/programs/green-ribbon-schools/eligibility.html.
Purdue University Representative Names to CSTA Board of Directors
STA is delighted to announce the results of the 2014-15 CSTA Board of Directors election. Listed below are the successful candidates who will be joining (or continuing to serve on) the Board as of July 1, 2014.
Myra Deister, At-Large Representative
Sunny Hills High School, Fullerton, CA
Laura Blankenship, 9-12 Representative, The Baldwin School
Bryn Mawr, PA
Mina Theofilatou, International Representative
Greek Ministry of Education, Argostoli, Greece
Tammy Pirmann, School District Representative
School District of Springfield Township, Warrington, PA
Aman Yadav, Teacher Education, Representative
Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN
Fred Martin, University Faculty Representative
UMass Lowell, Lowell, MA
For more information with regard to these new Board members, please visit http://csta.acm.org/About/sub/AboutFiles/2014Election.html.
Campaigns Emerge to Attract More Women to Careers in IT
TechTarget
Nonprofit associations, academic organizations, and major corporations are launching efforts to attract more women to the information technology (IT) field. According to the Computing Technology Industry Association (CompTIA), 95 percent of girls say they like technology, but only 9 percent are interested in pursuing an IT career. Despite the IT field's high salaries and job satisfaction, as well as low unemployment rates, women represent only 28 percent of core IT occupations, CompTIA reports. Through its recently launched Dream IT program, CompTIA is providing educational resources and sending speakers to schools and community programs to talk to girls about IT opportunities. Major IT companies also working to draw women to the field. For example, Cisco participates in the annual Girls in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) Day, organized by the International Telecommunication Union. To read further, please visit http://searchnetworking.techtarget.com/news/2240220770/Campaigns-emerge-to-attract-more-women-to-careers-in-IT.
Student Engagement and Opportunities
Summer Hack-a-thon Opportunities for Talented Students
Some of the best employment opportunities for students are discovered through participation in hack-a-thons. Industry representatives are on hand and scouting for students with exceptional talent to work for them as interns. Hack-a-thons are intensive and enriching learning experiences for students. If you know students who love developing technology products, like mobile apps, please share these opportunities with them:
YC HACKS
Application deadline - June 27
, 2014
Invitations Sent - July 7, 2014
A hackathon hosted by YCombinator! YC Interviews guaranteed.
320 Pioneer Way, Mountain View, CA 94041
Saturday, August 2, 2014 at 12:00PM - Sunday, August 3, 2014 Early Evening
Apply here: https://ycombinatorevents.wufoo.com/forms/yc-hacks-application/
CAL HACKS
A collegiate hackathon held at the Memorial Stadium with UC Berkeley.
Memorial Stadium, Berkeley, CA
Friday, October 3, 2014 - Sunday, October 5, 2014
To apply, please visit http://www.calhacks.io/.
White House Office of Science and Technology Policy's Fall 2014 Policy Internship Program
Applications for Fall 2014 Due – June 20, 2014
The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, or OSTP, is seeking students for fall 2014 internships. The OSTP advises the President on the effects of science and technology on domestic and international affairs. The office serves as a source of scientific and technological analyses and judgment for the president with respect to major policies, plans and programs of the federal government Policy internships are open to interested students from all majors and programs, including law school programs. Law students (and any other students) who are interested in policy may apply. Applicants must be U.S. citizens who are enrolled, at least half time, in an accredited college or university during the period of volunteer service. Students in undergraduate, graduate and professional programs in all fields are encouraged to apply.
While these positions are without compensation, the assignments provide educational enrichment, practical work experience and networking opportunities with other individuals in the science and technology policy arena. For more information, visit http://www.whitehouse.gov/administration/eop/ostp/about/student.
NASA GIRLS and NASA BOYS Mentoring Project
Application Deadline – June 22, 2014
NASA is looking for the next generation of scientists, engineers and innovators. To jump-start the future of potential explorers, Women@NASA has created a mentoring project that offers a one-of-a-kind experience for middle school students. Participants will get to explore the possibilities of a career in the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics.
The project will feature one-on-one mentoring from NASA employees. Participants will complete online lessons with their mentors while virtually connected through Skype or Google Chat.
Applicants must be U.S. citizens in grades 5-8 or home-school equivalent. The mentoring project will take place over a five-week period during the summer.
For more information and to register online, please visit http://women.nasa.gov/nasagirls/.
Questions about this opportunity should be directed to hq-women@nasa.gov.
The Lighter Side – Computational News and Innovations
Tracking Lost Luggage Part of AT&T's Vision of the Future (video)
USA Today
AT&T demonstrated its User-Defined Network Cloud and other innovative technologies that could be available soon at a recent company event in New York City. Smart Luggage with embedded Global Positioning System technology would let travelers track a suitcase's whereabouts, receive alerts when it is off the plane, and find it by tapping an app that lights up an LED beacon on the luggage. Users would need to power the Smart Luggage the night before they travel using a USB port built into the suitcase. Meanwhile, AT&T researchers also have developed a SmartMic app that turns mobile devices into a wireless microphone for use in conference halls as well as lecture halls using Web Real Time Communications technology. For example, a professor would connect her laptop to an audio system in the room so everyone can hear, and would select the speaker through the SmartMic website. To read further, please visit http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/columnist/baig/2014/05/20/att-smart-luggage-part-of-vision-of-future/9300071/.
