HPC Happenings
XSEDE13 Submission Deadlines Extended to March 15, 2013
XSEDE13 is being planned to be a great technical conference along with other exciting events and features. The conference needs your submissions and active participation to make it a success. Please consider making technical submissions to XSEDE13 and share your technical work with others in the community. For more information, please visit https://www.xsede.org/web/xsede13/call-for-participation.
Announcing the 20th Annual Open Science Grid User School
Application Period = March 4-29, 2013
OSG User School - June 24-27, 2013
XSEDE13 Conference - July 21-25, 2013
If you could access thousands, maybe millions, of hours of computing, how would it transform your research? What discoveries would you make? We are looking for qualified students to attend the 2013 Open Science Grid (OSG) User School, where they will learn how to use high-throughput computing to harness vast amounts of computing power for research. Using lectures, discussions, role plays, and lots of hands-on work with OSG experts in high-throughput computing, students will learn how HTC systems work, how to run and manage many jobs and huge datasets to implement a full scientific computing workflow, and where to turn for help and more info. Worried about costs? Successful applicants will get financial support to attend the OSG School (June 24-27) at the beautiful University of Wisconsin in Madison. Plus, some students will receive financial support to attend XSEDE13 (July 22-25) in San Diego, California. Ideal candidates are science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) graduate students whose research demands large-scale computing. Also, advanced undergraduates are encouraged to apply. Others may apply too; funding is tight this year, but we consider all great candidates! Fore more information, please visit https://www.opensciencegrid.org/bin/view/Education/OSGUserSchool2013 or send email to osg-school-2013-info@opensciencegrid.org. A flyer can be downloaded at https://www.opensciencegrid.org/twiki/pub/Education/OSGUserSchool2013/2013-osg-user-school-flyer.pdf
New for SC13: Emerging Technologies Track
Submission Deadline - July 31, 2013
The Emerging Technologies Track is a new element of the Technical Program at SC13. It is aimed at providing a showcase on the SC13 show floor for novel projects at a national or international scale. It is different from other aspects of the technical program, such as contributed presentations and posters, in that it will provide a forum for discussing large-scale, long-term efforts in high performance computing, networking, storage, and analysis, rather than a recent research result that such a project might have achieved. Emerging Technologies will provide space in a booth at an attractive central location of the SC13 show floor. The booth will facilitate displays, presentations, and spontaneous discussions among participants and visitors. Possible presentation styles are manifold and can be chosen by the proposers. Emerging Technologies welcomes exhibitions of real hardware prototypes and demonstrations of software as well as project presentations in poster form, animated displays, and scheduled presentations or discussions. Successful projects will display future technologies with the potential to influence computing and society as a whole. For more information, please visit http://sc13.supercomputing.org/content/emerging-technologies?goback=.gde_1775643_member_218892969.
In the News: XSEDE Staff and Partners in the News
Video: TACC's Kelly Gaither and Others Testify at House Subcommittee Hearing
In this video from February 15, 2013, the House Subcommittee on Research holds a hearing on Applications for Information Technology Research Development. To view the video, please visit http://insidehpc.com/2013/03/07/video-taccs-kelly-gaither-and-others-testify-at-house-subcommittee-on-research/?goback=.gde_4178444_member_220617661.
Terascale, Petascale, Exascale and Beyond: A Q&A With Ten of he Top Scientific and Academic Minds in Texas
In a span of 15 years, advanced computing moved from the "terascale" (systems capable of performing one trillion operations a second) to the "petascale" (systems capable of performing one quadrillion operations a second) — a 1,000 times speed-up in performance. Scientists and engineers are now discussing the best way to achieve exascale computing, another thousand fold increase over the petascale era, which came into being in 2008. Exascale computing will eventually impact all scientific and engineering applications. But what will the impact of 'exascale and beyond' computing look like? The answer will depend in large part on the creativity of scientific and technological innovators. To read further, please visit http://www.tacc.utexas.edu/news/feature-stories/2012/terascale-petascale-exascale-beyond.
HPC Call for Participation
Extreme Scaling Workshop - Call for Submisssion
August 15-16, 2-13 - Boulder, Colorado
Submission Deadline - May 15, 2013
The NSF funded Blue Waters and eXtreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) projects are hosting the seventh in a series of Extreme Scaling workshops. Scientists, engineers, scholars, and high-performance technologists from colleges, universities, laboratories, industry, HPC centers, and other organizations conducting related to this type of work are encouraged to submit presentations. Workshop proceedings will be produced that will include the accepted papers and white papers and a summary of recommendations from the discussions among the presenters and participants. Send submissions to Scott Lathrop at lathrop@illinois.edu by May 15, 2013. Notice of acceptances will be issued by June 1, 2013. Further information on this year's Extreme Scaling Workshop can be found at https://www.xsede.org/web/xscale/xscale13.
IEEE Cluster 2013 – Call for Participation
September 23-27, 2013 - Indianapolis, Indiana
Submission Deadline – May 18, 2013
IEEE Cluster 2013 conference organizers are seeking input from the high performance computing community, in an effort to make the "Clusters and Cyberinfrastructure Strategy event as informative as possible. Conference organizers are particularly interested in content related to:
* Current and future directions in cluster technology
* Clusters driving innovation in industrial and academic research
* Clusters in education and outreach
* Clusters and clouds in cyberinfrastructure strategy
* Clusters in distributed visualization
To learn more about Cluster 2013, please visit http://pti.iu.edu/ieeecluster-2013/. For complete submission information and guidelines, please visit http://pti.iu.edu/ieeecluster-2013/.
Call For Papers: EuroMPI 2013
September 16-18, 2013 - Madrid, Spain
Submission Deadline - March 29, 2013
EuroMPI is the preeminent meeting for users, developers and researchers to interact and discuss new developments and applications of message passing parallel computing, in particular in and related to the Message Passing Interface (MPI). The annual meeting has a long, rich tradition, and the 20th European MPI Users' Group Meeting will again be a lively forum for discussion of everything related to usage and implementation of MPI and other parallel programming interfaces. Traditionally, the meeting has focused on the efficient implementation of aspects of MPI, typically on high-performance computing platforms, benchmarking and tools for MPI, shortcomings and extensions of MPI, parallel I/O and fault tolerance, as well as parallel applications using MPI. The meeting is open towards other topics, in particular application experience and alternative interfaces for high-performance heterogeneous, hybrid, and distributed memory systems. For more information, please visit http://www.linkedin.com/groupAnswers?viewQuestionAndAnswers=&discussionID=221012777&gid=4178444&trk=eml-anet_dig-b_nd-pst_ttle-cn&ut=1WltK_QBT8D5E1.
Upcoming Conferences, Seminars and Workshops.
Neuroscience Gateway XSEDE Tutorial
March 14th, 2013 - 10:00am= 12:00PM
San Diego Supercomputer Center
This workshop introduces participants to the Neuroscience Gateway (NSG) being developed for the computational neuroscience community with funding from the National Science Foundation. The NSG provides easy and user friendly environment to access XSEDE high performance computing (HPC) resources to run computational neuroscience software such as NEURON, GENESIS, MOOSE etc. More information about the Neuroscience Gateway is available at http://www.nsgportal.org. For further details and registration information, please visit https://www.xsede.org/web/xup/course-calendar.
Ivan Sutherland, the "Father of Computer Graphics"- Computers Without Clocks
March 15, 2013 – 9:30am- 12:30pm
University of California, San Diego
The 2012 Kyoto Prize Laureate Dr. Ivan Sutherland, the “Father of Computer Graphics,” will be leading an interactive workshop on the potential of asynchronous computing at the Calit2 Auditorium, Atkinson Hall, on the UCSD campus. The workshop is designed for Educators, Advanced Students and Industry Professionals in IT.
Speakers:
• Dr. Ivan Sutherland, Visiting Scientist, Portland State University, Kyoto Prize Laureate 2012
• Dr. Rajit Manohar, Professor, Cornell University - Founder of Computer Systems Laboratory
• Dr. Peter Beerel, Professor, USC Viterbi School of Engineering
Advance registration required at cwalrad@daven.com by Monday, March 11, 2-13.
SEA Software Engineering Conference 10`3
April 1-5, 2013 – Boulder, Colorado
Registration Deadline – March 18, 2013
Software Engineering Assembly is organizing a technical conference to keep software engineers up-to-date and to foster networking and collaboration within UCAR/NCAR and with our peer institutions. The conference is intended as a forum for broad discussion on multiple aspects of software engineering, and includes sessions on diverse topics relevant to software engineering theory and practice. The conference is intended to appeal to software engineers working at UCAR/NCAR and at other institutions developing software focused on scientific disciplines (e.g. NOAA, NIST, NREL, Universities, SWRI, NASA, DOE, other supercomputing centers, IGES, USGS, etc.) For more information, please visit http://www.regonline.com/builder/site/Default.aspx?eventid=1182089.
The Fourth International Green Computing Conference (IGCC13)
June 27-29, 2013 - Arlington, Virginia
IGCC13 will provide a forum for presenting and discussing innovative research on a broad range of topics in the fields of sustainable and energy-efficient computing, and computing for a more sustainable planet. The conference will hold a technical program, panels, workshops, and tutorials on these topics. IGCC13 will be technically co-sponsored by the IEEE. For complete workshop information, please visit http://cm.wsu.edu/ehome/index.php?eventid=51862&.
Research Features From Across the Country and Around the World
Northwest Institute for Advanced Computing to Tackle Big Problems
Seattle Times
The University of Washington (UW) and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) recently formed the Northwest Institute for Advanced Computing, with the goal of solving some of the world's most challenging problems. The institute is designed to find ways to mine the huge amounts of data generated every day by scientific instruments and household electronics, says PNNL associate director Doug Ray. For example, Ray says new computational techniques can help design a smart electric grid system, and analyzing biological data can help find causes and cures for diseases. Ray notes that computer modeling also can be used to study climate change, and cell phone data could be analyzed to find ways of minimizing traffic jams. To read further, please visit http://blogs.seattletimes.com/today/2013/01/new-advanced-computing-institute-to-tackle-big-problems/.
How Computers Push on the Molecules They Simulate
Berkeley Lab News Center
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory researchers have identified and characterized the source of computer model and simulation errors and devised a way to separate the realistic aspects of a simulation from the artifacts of the computer method. "A simulation of a physical process on a computer cannot use the exact, continuous equations of motion; the calculations must use approximations over discrete intervals of time," says Berkeley Lab's David Sivak. The researchers used Langevin dynamics to model the behavior of molecular machines, and saw significant differences between what their exact theories predicted and what their simulations produced. The researchers say the result confirmed that even in the absence of an explicit driving force, the finite-time-step Langevin dynamics simulation acted by itself as a driving nonequilibrium process, resulting in systematic errors caused by failing to separate this shadow work from the actual protocol work they had explicitly modeled in the simulations. To read further, please visit http://newscenter.lbl.gov/news-releases/2013/01/03/computers-push-molecules/.
New York University Researchers Develop Tool to Evaluate Genome Sequencing Method
New York University
Researchers at New York University’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences and School of Medicine, the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory have developed a tool designed to measure the validity of genome sequencing. Their method is based on an earlier system, called Feature Response Curve (FRCurve), which offers a global image of how genome-sequencing methods, or assemblers, are able to handle different regions and different structures in a large, complex genome. However, FRCurve can only measure the accuracy of certain kinds of assemblers at one time, which makes comparing the range of sequencing methods impossible. The researchers' method, called FRCbam, can evaluate a much wider class of assemblers by reverse engineering the latent structures that were obscured by error-correction and data compression, performing the operation rapidly using efficient and scalable mapping algorithms. To read further, please visit http://www.nyu.edu/about/news-publications/news/2013/01/02/researchers-develop-tool-to-evaluate-genome-sequencing-method.html.
Computing in 2165
Scientific American (12/31/12) Ed Regis
Many experts believe it is impossible to predict the state of computing within the next 150 years, although author George Dyson expects analog computation to comprise most of the important computation by then, while "the notion of all-digital computation will be a quaint relic." Former Microsoft CTO Nathan Myhrvold speculates that future computers will be vastly more powerful, and he predicts that computers' superior intelligence to humans in performing narrow tasks will expand "until they are smarter than us at everything." Meanwhile, Microsoft Station Q researcher Michael Freedman anticipates that tomorrow's computers will be small and capable of direct communication with the human brain. "Special sunglasses or hats may confer the ability to muddle through with a foreign language by directly interacting with speech centers," he says. There also will be pervasive computation in the environment, "with difficult tasks being done in low-power, cryogenic, Josephson logic computers scattered all about," Freedman says. To read further, please visit http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=computing-in-2165.
Educator Opportunities and Information
Students Rush to Web Classes, but Profits May Be Much Later
New York Times
In less than a year since Stanford University professors Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng launched Coursera, the online education company has attracted a million users and $22 million in venture capital. Other approaches to online education are emerging, as universities across the U.S. are increasing their online offerings, hoping to attract students from around the world. However, none of these programs have developed a method for turning their growing popularity into profit. Coursera has created revenue streams through licensing, certification fees, and recruitment data provided to employers. However, New York Law School professor James Grimmelmann says "no one’s got the model that’s going to work yet," and it may be "a decade later that somebody figures out how to do it and make money." Koller and Ng hope to keep courses freely available to poor students worldwide. To read further, please visit http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/07/education/massive-open-online-courses-prove-popular-if-not-lucrative-yet.html?_r=0.
S4HS 2013 at Carnegie Mellon University
July 31 - August 2, 2013 - Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
The School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University is running its 8th Annual CS4HS (Computer Science for High School) summer workshop at their main campus in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The workshop includes activities that help high school teachers understand the breadth of computer science beyond Java programming. (Teachers in K-8 are welcome to apply if they are teaching computing related courses and wish to expand their offerings soon.) We provide hands-on activities that teachers can use in their classrooms to show their students how to use computational thinking principles to solve problems, explore the use of robots and other software to solve real-world problems, and learn more about the various fields of study within computer science including machine learning and human computer interaction. Teachers will visit the local Google office in Pittsburgh to speak with Google engineers about how to help prepare their students for jobs in the computing industry, and there will be an open forum to discuss ways to improve the perception and relevance of computing in K-12. For more information, please visit http://www.cs.cmu.edu/cs4hs/summer13/.
Student Engagement and Information
Big Data, Java and Other Developer Skills: Top Hiring Priorities
eWeek
Big data-related jobs ranked fourth among the top information technology (IT) skills hiring executives are looking for in 2013, according to a recent Dice.com survey of more than 1,000 tech-focused recruiters and hiring managers. Java/Java 2 Platform Enterprise Edition, mobile development, and .NET development skills ranked first, second, and third, respectively, in the survey. In terms of big data analysis, "opportunities range from data analysts who work with complex streams of data and compile trend reports, to high-end data scientists at the Ph.D. level with a strong background in natural-language processing and forecasting analytics," says Dice.com's Alice Hill. By 2015, 4.4 million IT jobs will support big data, but the talent required to fill the available positions is insufficient and only about 1.9 million of those jobs will be filled, according to Gartner. To read further, please visit http://www.eweek.com/it-management/big-data-java-and-other-developer-skills-top-hiring-priorities/.
Teams Can Now Apply for the SC13 Student Cluster Competition!
Application Deadline - April 1, 2013
Team submissions are now being accepted for the SC13 edition of the Student Cluster Competition, a spirited event featuring young supercomputing talent from around the world competing to build and operate powerful cluster computers. Created as an opportunity to showcase student expertise in a friendly yet spirited competition, the Student Cluster Competition aims to introduce the next generation of students to the high-performance computing community. Over the last couple of years, the competition has drawn teams from around the world, including Canada, China, Costa Rica, Germany, Russia, Taiwan and the United States. For more information, please visit http://sc13.supercomputing.org/content/sc13-student-cluster-competition-now-accepting-team-applications?goback=.gde_1775643_member_218463701.
XSEDE Scholars Application Process Now Open
Application Deadline – April 1, 2013
The XSEDE Scholars Program is a yearlong program for U.S. students from underrepresented groups in computational sciences. The program provides opportunities to learn more about high performance computing and XSEDE resources, network with cutting-edge researchers and leaders, and belong to a cohort of student peers to establish a community of academic leaders. XSEDE 2013-14 Scholars will receive a travel grant to attend the XSEDE13 conference in San Diego, July 22-25, 2013 and will participate in at least six online technical training and mentoring webinars with other scholars throughout the year. Underrepresented minority undergraduate or graduate students, studying at research institutions, who are interested in the computational sciences, are especially encouraged to apply. The online application is located at Bit.ly/xsedescholars.
Career Opportunities
Infrastructure Services Group Lead
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
LBNL is a dynamic organization, highly motivated and focused on results. Our mission: to accelerate science by delivering unparalleled networking capabilities, tools, and innovations. As an organization, we are small enough to be agile, but large enough to offer rewarding challenges on a global scale. They are looking for a star with technology implementation and operational support experience in multiple disciplines, focusing on core IT services and support - including mail, storage, Virtual Machines, web services, cyber security, and identity management - built on a mix of platforms (including Unix, Linux, and FreeBSD). Technical skill must be augmented by experience in IT service management, and project management. For more information, please visit http://www.linkedin.com/jobs?viewJob=&jobId=5036187&trk=eml-anet_dig-b_premjb-ttl-cn&ut=1bcpnc2HuKD5E1.
QA Automation Engineer
IBM Global Services - Ireland
IBM Ireland Lab are currently hiring Junior and Senior QA and Automation Engineers to join their Social Software Development Team at IBM’s Technology Campus in Mulhuddart, Co Dublin. IBM’s Social Software helps organizations of all sizes work smarter, become more agile, and foster innovation. IBM’s Smarter Software Portfolio includes products such as IBM Lotus Connections, LotusLive Connections and many more social software and collaboration solutions. The work that we do in our state-of-the-art Development Lab is highly automated and intricate. Applications are written largely in Java, using state of the art engineering and development frameworks and focus on enterprise validation of systems and performance capabilities. Working alongside the best and brightest minds in the software industry, you will plan the design, set-up, debugging and maintenance of full system environments. This will involve working with clients, and creating test plans for cutting edge applications, emulating real world client configurations and environments. As part of a matrix organization with a strong mentoring ethos you are encouraged to excel within a team that promotes risk taking and rewards success. Our focus is on delivery with a level of flexibility around when and where you work, that many other companies just can’t offer. For more information, please visit http://www.linkedin.com/jobs?viewJob=&jobId=4462208&trk=eml-anet_dig-b_premjb-ttl-cn&ut=1375b-x2aPD5E1.
Creative Software Developer
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
At the core of the Scientific Networking Division is ESnet, the Energy Sciences Network. ESnet interconnects the US national laboratory system, is widely regarded as a technical pioneer, and is currently the fastest science network in the world. In the upcoming year, the Scientific Networking Division will embark on an important challenge: expanding its program in applied research, development and integration. With the vision to be a pioneer in developing innovative network technologies, the Division is seeking an exceptionally competent, flexible and innovative software engineer that is willing to think beyond the conventional. We are working at the leading edge of software-defined networking, OpenFlow, dynamic network infrastructure, network visualization, network knowledge plane, multi-domain and multi-layer architectures. The successful candidate will be the one that brings strong and diverse coding skills, focus, and ability to work with a fast-paced team. For more information, please visit http://www.linkedin.com/jobs?viewJob=&jobId=5069926&trk=eml-anet_dig-b_premjb-ttl-cn&ut=3HfIORL-TgD5E1.
Infrastructure Services System Administrator: ServiceNow
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (Berkeley Lab), a pioneer in research and science, has an immediate opening for an Infrastructure Services System Administrator (Computer Systems Engineer (CSE) 2) within the Scientific Networking Division.
The successful candidate will join ESnet’s Infrastructure Group, which manages a broad range of services and technologies, including blade servers, multiple flavors of Linux and Unix, mass storage, IT service management/automation tools, security infrastructure and virtualization platforms. The primary responsibilities of this position are to perform system administration for ESnet’s Service-Now implementation, including coding, scripting and configuring items in ESnet’s Service-Now instances. Additional responsibilities include supporting core services, and security services, and network measurement servers. Work will include new infrastructure deployment projects, as well as operational support of established systems and services. For more information, please visit http://www.linkedin.com/jobs?viewJob=&jobId=5069895&trk=eml-anet_dig-b_premjb-ttl-cn&ut=3El_Ea8VbkD5E1.
On the Lighter Side: Computational News of Interest
Could Technology Help Catch Lying Politicians?
The Engineer
Computer scientists say voice-recognition systems eventually could be used in conjunction with artificial intelligence technology to determine if a person is telling the truth. Acorn Computers co-founder Hermann Hauser, for example, has met with Google executives about the possibility of developing an "evidence meter" that could be used to determine if a politician is lying. "The idea is if voice recognition is good enough, which it clearly is now, it can run continuous voice recognition at the bottom of your TV screen whenever they interview David Cameron or the opposition leader," Hauser says. "So this running evidence-meter below the news item I think could be a very cool thing to implement." However, although the voice recognition technology is readily available, the artificial intelligence technology that would be required to create such a fact-checking system is more problematic. To read further, please visit http://www.theengineer.co.uk/blog/could-technology-help-catch-out-lying-politicians/1015620.article.
MIT Researchers Build Quad HD TV Chip
MIT News
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers have developed a high-efficiency video coding (HEVC) chip, which demonstrates that implementing HEVC algorithms in silicon chips is possible and shows how its design principles could be used. The HEVC standard exploits the fact that in successive frames of video, most of the pixels stay the same. MIT's chip increases efficiency by pipelining the decoding process. A chunk of data is decompressed and passed to a motion-compensation circuit, but as soon as the motion compensation begins, the decompression circuit takes in the next chunk of data. After motion compensation is complete, the data passes to a circuit that applies the corrective data and, finally, to a filtering circuit that smoothes out whatever rough edges remain. The application of the corrective data is a single calculation known as matrix multiplication. To read further, please visit http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2013/mit-researchers-build-quad-hd-tv-chip-0220.html.
Why Microsoft Is Pushing a Touch-Based Web of Tomorrow
Wired News
Microsoft believes the future of the Internet is the touch-based gestures that are used on smartphones. Despite theories that the Web is obsolete, the amount of time users spend on the Web, about 70 minutes per day, has not declined in recent years, according to recent studies. Many new user interfaces are full-screen experiences that require touch gestures to bring up various windows. Microsoft says these developments will enable the Web to become a blank canvas, uninhibited by features found in conventional Web browsers. Some new user interfaces offer unique features such as pinning Web sites to the Start Screen similar to the way app icons are placed on desktops. "When you spend 40 to 50 percent time of your time on [the browser], it really shouldn’t be second-class status," says Microsoft's Ryan Gavin. "You really have to innovate in a few key areas--like hardware acceleration, letting the browser tap into performance capabilities of the device." To read further, please visit http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2013/02/microsoft-touch-web/
