HPC Happenings
SC13 News: RDA Birds of a Feather
November 20, 2013 – Denver, Colorado
Room 501/502, 5:30pm- 7:00pm
The ubiquity of today's data is not just transforming what is, it is transforming what will be - laying the groundwork to drive new innovation. Today, research questions are addressed by complex models, by large data analysis tasks, and by sophisticated data visualization techniques, all requiring data. To address the growing global need for data infrastructure, the Research Data Alliance (RDA) was launched in 2013 as an international community-driven organization. Join members of the Research Data Alliance and XSEDE project in a shared conversation around the utility of RDA for data-driven challenges in HPC. More information can be found at http://sc13.supercomputing.org/schedule/event_detail.php?evid=bof157
More SC News: Emerging Technologies at SC13 – Interview
SC13 will feature a new Emerging Technologies exhibit as part of the Technical Program. To learn more, InsideHPC caught up with the innovators behind the curtain, Torsten Hoefler from ETH Zurich and Bob Lucas from ISI. The interview can be found at http://insidehpc.com/2013/10/23/interview-sc13-emerging-technologies-booth-scoop-future/?goback=.gde_1775643_member_5798855253591867396.
The National Center for Supercomputing Applications Becomes a Satellite Location for XSEDE OpenACC Programming Workshop
November 5, 2013 – Urbana, Illinois
XSEDE, along with the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois will be presenting an OpenACC GPU programming workshop on Nov. 5, 2013. OpenACC is the accepted standard using compiler directives to allow quick development of GPU capable codes using standard languages and compilers. It has been used with great success to accelerate real applications within very short development periods. This workshop assumes knowledge of either C or Fortran programming. It will have a hands-on component using Blue Waters at NCSA. Due to demand, this workshop will be telecast to several satellite sites. Please note that the hands-on accounts will be limited to 150 students, available across all sites and awarded by order of registration. To register, please visit https://portal.xsede.org/course-calendar/-/training-user/class/152/session/278.
The Observer Effect – A Sci-Fi Original Coming to SC13 (video)
This video trailer is a teaser for The Observer Effect, a SCI-FI original story by Rich Brueckner that will be featured in the PrintN’Fly Guide to SC13 Denver. Tagline: An accident at an airport security checkpoint sets off a chain of events that cause a grand computer experiment to go awry.” Sponsored by Mellanox, the PrintN’Fly Guide to SC13 Denver will feature interviews on Exascale, high performance networking, and the 25th anniversary of the conference as well as restaurant and bar reviews for downtown Denver. Look for it right here in early November! To view the video, please visit http://insidehpc.com/2013/10/22/printnfly-guide-sc13/?goback=.gde_1775643_member_5798445962485587971#!.
Visit XSEDE in Booth 422 at SC13`
At SC13, XSEDE will be located in Booth 422, just a row over from a main aisle and XSEDE partner, the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). XSEDE will promote XSEDE14 and all partners, especially those also on the exhibit floor. We encourage XSEDE partners in attendance at SC13 to also help promote the project. For those of you who attended XSEDE13 in San Diego, this is also a time to hear about XSEDE14 in Atlanta taking place July 13-18 of next year. For more information, please visit http://sc13.supercomputing.org/.
HPC Conference Call for Participation
Call for Special Issue Articles - Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing (JPDC)
"Scalable Systems for Big Data Management and Analytics"
Submission Deadline – November 15, 2013
Topics of interest for the special issue include but are not limited to:
* Scalable Big Data Software Platforms
* Big Data applications on Clouds, GPGPUs and Accelerators
* Management and analytics of semi-structured, Graph and Scientific datasets
* Data-intensive workloads on emerging platforms
* Algorithms, approaches and evaluation of Big Data platforms
* Storage and Management of Big Data on Clouds
* Novel Big Data algorithms and applications in all fields of sciencenand engineering
The submitted papers must be written in English and describe original research which is not published nor currently under review by other journals or conferences. Author guidelines for preparation of manuscript can be found here: http://www.elsevier.com/journals/journal-of-parallel-and-distributed-compu ting/0743-7315/guide-for-authors. For more information, please contact: Srinivas Aluru (aluru@cc.gatech.edu).
Call for Abstracts - Rice University 2014 Oil & Gas HPC Workshop
March 6, 2014 – Houston, Texas
Submission Deadline – December 6, 2013
Notification of Abstract Acceptance – January 10, 2014
Submission Deadline for Student Poster Abstracts – January 17, 2014
Notification of Student Abstract Acceptance – January 31, 2014
The Oil and Gas HPC Workshop, hosted annually at Rice University, is a premier meeting place for engaging in discussion focused on high performance computing and computational science and engineering for the oil and gas industry. The program committee is pleased to invite you to participate in the 7th annual workshop and encourages you to submit abstract(s) for consideration for the technical program. For more information, please visit http://rice2014.og-hpc.org/?utm_source=Oil+%26+Gas+HPC+Workshop+Community&utm_campaign=6928632946-Rice_2013_OG_HPC_Call4Abstracts&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_59170dce43-6928632946-31504533.
10th International Conference of Computational Methods in Sciences and Engineering (ICCMSE 2014) – Call for Papers
April 4-7, 2014 - Athens Greece
Extended Abstract Deadline – February 28, 2014
Researchers are asked to contribute to Symposium #12 "Accelerate Discovery and Design of New Materials Applications in Nuclear Power by High Performance Supercomputing". Further information can be found at http://www.iccmse.org/. Questions can be sent to Liviu Popa-Simil at lps2@laaos.org.
HASTAC 2014 Annual Conference - Call for Proposals/Papers
April 24-27, 2014 - Ministerio de Cultura, Lima, Peru
Extended Submissions Deadline: November 30, 2013
The challenges facing the Western hemisphere are multidimensional and complex. Urban agglomeration, economic development, ecological crisis, military conflict, digital privacy, impediments to advanced learning, negotiations of multiple cultural and historical perspectives—these are problems with scientific and human factors that must be considered together. HASTAC 2014 challenges participants to consider the interplay of science, technology, the social sciences, the humanities, and the arts in the context of addressing the urgent contingencies facing the evolving hemisphere. For more information including submission guidelines, please visit http://hastac2014.org/.
Upcoming Conferences, Workshops and Webinars
SC13
November 17 - 22, 2013 - Denver, Colorado
SC13, the premier annual international conference on high-performance computing, networking, and storage, will be held in Denver, Colorado. The Technical Papers Program at SC is the leading venue for presenting the highest-quality original research, from the foundations of HPC to its emerging frontiers. The conference committee solicits submissions of excellent scientific merit that introduce new ideas to the field and stimulate future trends on topics such as applications, systems, parallel algorithms, and performance modeling. For more information, please visit http://sc13.supercomputing.org/content/papers.
Research Features From Across the Country and Around the World
A Day to Remember the First Computer Programmer Was a Woman
The New York Times
Ada Lovelace wrote the first computer program in 1842, a feat that is commemorated on Oct. 15. However, 171 years later most programmers are men, and just 18 percent of computer science degrees are awarded to women, according to Symantec and the Anita Borg Institute, which works to recruit and promote women in tech. Women software developers also earn only 80 percent of what male developers do for the same job, and just 5 percent of venture-backed technology startups are founded by women. Since girls begin to move away from computer science when they are young, most likely due to a lack of role models, it might help to educate young girls about Lovelace. As Lovelace's history indicates, women have played a significant role in the software industry, and some say the tide is changing again in Silicon Valley. " To read further, please visit http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/15/a-day-to-remember-the-first-computer-programmer-was-a-woman/?_r=0.
IBM Launches Accelerated Discovery Lab
EE Times
IBM recently unveiled its Accelerated Discovery Lab (ADLab), which aims to augment the data-mining concept in practical application domains with smart analytics derived from its Watson question-and-answer technology combined with deep domain knowledge for each area being researched. "Instead of looking for answers that are already known--where it's just a matter of finding them--we are learning how to search for things that are not yet known," says IBM's Jeff Welser. IBM has assembled domain expertise in biology, medicine, finance, weather, mathematics, computer science, and information technology. The goal is to accelerate the pace of discovery in each of these areas by automating the process of uncovering new governing principles in each domain. "The significance of Moore's Law for big data is not so much that the amount of data is doubling every year, but rather in how one can discover which elements of that data are relevant, which can actually be utilized, and which will provide more context when trying to solve specific problems," Welser says. To read further, please visit http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1319758.
Educator Opportunities and Information
Call for Participation - Opportunity to Collaborate to Offer Parallel Computing Course on Your Campus
The XSEDE project and the University of California, Berkeley are offering an online course on parallel computing for graduate students and advanced undergraduates and are seeking other university partners that are interested in offering the course for credit to their students. The course includes online video lectures, quizzes, and homework assignments with access to free accounts on the NSF supported XSEDE supercomputers. Participating institutions will need to provide a local instructor that will be responsible for advising the local students and officially assigning grades. Students will complete the online course quizzes and exercises as part of their grade and can then undertake a final group project supervised by the local instructor. The course will begin on January 21, 2014 and end on May 2, 2014. Course materials can be reviewed at https://www.cac.cornell.edu/VW/apc/default.aspx. The XSEDE and Berkeley staff will meet with local instructors online every two weeks and also help with answers to student questions using an online forum. Local instructors may design their own group project or choose from a number of projects that have been undertaken by students in the past. For examples of class projects done in previous semesters at UC Berkeley, see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2vjL834tX4&list=SPYTiwx6hV33vMPVw_n-svAjkcRlMRSH9f&index=29 for students presenting their projects in the Spring 2013 offering, or the posters from Spring 2009 at http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~demmel/cs267_Spr09/posters.html.Instructors interested in the collaborative class should contact Steve Gordon, lead for the XSEDE education program at sgordon@osc.edu or by phone at 614-292-4132.
American Computer Science League(ACSL) Deadline Approaching!
Application Deadline – December 1, 2013
The ACSL contest requires that teachers and students prepare for the categories of the short answer portion of the test. Early registration gives teachers and students more time to prepare. ACSL preparation materials are sent upon registration. The categories used on the first test are: Computer Number Systems, Recursive Functions and What Does This Program Do. On this portion of the test the only materials allowed are paper and pencil. For the first contest, the 72-hour take home programming problem in each division, can be done using just IF-THEN-ELSE statements. As in the past, ACSL will include a free previous year's question set CD for all CSTA members registering for the first time. For more information, please visit www.acsl.org. For questions, please send email to info@acsl.org.
Code.org Aims to Introduce More Than 10M Students to Computer Programming
ZDNet
Code.org has unveiled "Hour of Code," an initiative that aims to enhance computer science education for more than 10 million students worldwide by taking them through an hour-long introduction to computer programming. The global campaign is the organization's first step in establishing computer science as a fundamental field in education, says Code.org CEO and co-founder Hadi Partovi. "I firmly believe that bringing computer science education to every student is the gift that the tech industry owes America," Partovi says. Code.org also wants to help fill the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) gap in the job market. As part of its effort to narrow the STEM gap, the Hour of Code initiative also is open to educators. The initiative's game-like tutorials will offer an introduction to the basics of coding to both students and teachers. There also will be several prizes awarded, including 10GB of free Dropbox storage space to the first 100,000 participating educators. For more information, please visit http://www.zdnet.com/code-org-aims-to-introduce-more-than-10m-students-to-computer-programming-7000021925/.
BBC Plans to Help Get the Nation Coding
BBC News
The BBC plans to launch an initiative in 2015 that will promote software programming in the United Kingdom. Partnering with the government, educators, and technology companies, the BBC will work to stimulate a national conversation about digital creativity and encourage audiences to embrace technology. The program will provide a range of tools that will enable people to gain skills to solve problems, tell stories, and build new businesses in the digital world. The BBC wants to "bring coding into every home, business, and school in the UK," says BBC director general Tony Hall. "We want to inspire a new generation to get creative with coding, programming, and digital technology." The initiative comes at a time when government and technology experts are fearful of a massive skills gap because schools are not teaching key computing skills and interest in the subject matter has fallen. The technology sector will need 1 million more workers over the next 10 years, says Go On UK's Martha Lane Fox. "We've got to help to encourage people to go into that sector." To read further, please visit http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-24446046.
Stanford FabLearn Fellows Program
Application Deadline – November 11, 2013
The Transformative Learning Technologies Lab at Stanford University, with support from the Cyberlearning Program at the National Science Foundation (NSF), is pleased to open applications for the first cohort of Stanford FabLearn Fellows. Each Stanford FabLearn Fellow — an educator in formal or informal education — will be a pioneer in generating an open source curriculum for Makerspaces and FabLabs all over the world, and in collecting data to inform research about the “makers” culture and digital fabrication in education. This year-long commitment (January – December 2014) will provide a group of 10 teachers and educators with the resources to transform their own successful education activities and experiences in Makerspaces and Fablabs into shareable, open source educational materials, and also analyze and collect data on the effects and outcomes of hands-on learning in STEM education. This program targets teachers or educators that are actively using or building Fablabs and Makerspaces in schools, museums, and other learning spaces. For application guidelines and to learn more, please visit http://fablearn.stanford.edu/2013/uncategorized/fablearn-fellows/.
20th Annual Space Exploration Educators Conference
February 6-8, 2014 - Space Center Houston, Texas
Early Bird Registration Closes – November 10, 2013.
This conference is for all K-12 educators. Activities presented use space-related themes to teach across the curricula and can be used for science, language arts, mathematics, history and more.
Attend sessions hosted by scientists and engineers working on the International Space Station, Mars exploration and the planets beyond. Hear from astronauts who will be leading the charge in exploration. Attend sessions presented by educators and receive ready-to-implement classroom ideas. Attendees can earn up to 24 hours of continuing professional education credit.
For more information, visit http://spacecenter.org/education-programs/teacher-programs/teachers-seec/.
If you have any questions about the conference, please call 281-244-2129 or email seec@spacecenter.org.
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Student Engagement and Information
2014 NASA's Reduced Gravity Education Flight Program
Proposal Deadline – November 6, 2013
NASA is offering undergraduate students an opportunity to test experiments in microgravity aboard NASA's reduced gravity aircraft. The opportunity is part of NASA's Reduced Gravity Education Flight Program, which gives aspiring explorers a chance to propose, design, fabricate and fly a reduced-gravity experiment. Selected teams will test and evaluate their experiments aboard NASA's reduced-gravity airplane. The aircraft flies about 30 roller-coaster-like climbs and dips during experiment flights to produce periods of weightlessness and hypergravity ranging from 0 g to 2 g.
NASA will announce selected teams on Dec. 18, 2013. The teams will fly in the spring/summer of 2014. Once selected, teams may also invite a full-time, accredited journalist to document the team's experiment and experiences. Journalists working with a team may request to be evaluated for a potential flight spot with the team. All applicants must be full-time undergraduate students, U.S. citizens and at least 18 years old.
For more information about the opportunity and instructions for submitting a proposal, visit http://microgravityuniversity.jsc.nasa.gov.
Please email any questions about this opportunity to jsc-reducedgravity@nasa.gov.
Reduced Gravity Education Flight Opportunity for Students at Minority Serving Institutions
Proposal Deadline – November 6, 2013
NASA is offering undergraduate students from minority serving institutions an opportunity to test experiments in microgravity aboard NASA's reduced gravity aircraft.
This opportunity is a partnership between the Minority University Research and Education Program and NASA's Reduced Gravity Education Flight Program, which gives aspiring explorers a chance to propose, design and fabricate a reduced-gravity experiment. Selected teams will test and evaluate their experiments aboard NASA's reduced-gravity airplane. The aircraft flies about 30 roller-coaster-like climbs and dips during experiment flights to produce periods of weightlessness and hypergravity ranging from 0 gravity, or g, to 2 g.
All applicants must be full-time undergraduate students, U.S. citizens and at least 18 years old.
For more information, visit https://microgravityuniversity.jsc.nasa.gov/murep/.
Questions about this opportunity should be emailed to jsc-reducedgravity@nasa.gov.
2014 NASA Space Technology Research Fellowships
Application Deadline – November 13, 2013
NASA is seeking applications from U.S. graduate students for the agency's Space Technology Research Fellowships. The research grants, worth as much as $68,000 per year, will coincide with the start of the 2014 fall term. Applications will be accepted from students pursuing or planning to pursue masters or doctorate degrees in relevant space technology disciplines at accredited U.S. universities. The grants will sponsor U.S. graduate student researchers who show significant potential to contribute to NASA's strategic space technology objectives through their studies. To date, NASA has awarded grants to 193 student researchers from 68 universities located in 33 states and one U.S. territory.
Sponsored by NASA's Space Technology Mission Directorate, the fellowships are improving America’s technological competitiveness by providing the nation with a pipeline of innovative space technologies. For more information, visit http://tinyurl.com/NSTRF14.
Please email any questions about this opportunity to hq-nstrf-call@mail.nasa.gov.
Fall 2014 Simons Postdoctoral Fellowship
University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, California
Application Deadline - December 15, 2013
The Simons Institute at the University of California, Berkeley and the Computing Sciences Area at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) invites applications for the Simons Postdoctoral Fellowship in the "Theory of Computing for Science." The fellowship allows recent graduates with a Ph.D. (or equivalent) to acquire further scientific training in an exciting new collaboration between the Simons Institute and Berkeley. The postdoctoral fellows will be part of a research project in partnership with Berkeley Lab's Computational Research Division, National Energy Research Scientific Computing (NERSC) Division, or Scientific Networking Division (home of ESnet), which include state-of-the-are computing and networking facilities in addition to basic research in Computer Science, Applied Mathematics, and Computational Science. Fellows will also serve one semester as Fellows in the Simons Institute in the "Algorithmic Spectral Graph Theory" or "Algorithms and Complexity in Algebraic Geometry" programs during the fall of 2014. For more information and to apply, please visit https://lbl.taleo.net/careersection/2/jobdetail.ftl?lang=en&job=76466.
Applications Open for Paid Summer 2014 Internships
Submission Deadline – January 10, 2014
LBNL (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory) has just opened its Summer 2014 application for:
These internships support STEM workforce development at the DOE laboratories. Interns perform research under staff scientists or engineers on DOE projects. For more information, please visit http://today.lbl.gov/2013/10/28/applications-open-for-summer-2014-internships/
SC13 Student Cluster Challenge: How Much Supercomputing Can You Do With $2,500 Worth of Hardware?
New this year in the SC13 Student Cluster Challenge is the Commodity Track, which gives teams a budget of $2,500 to see how much bang they can get for the buck. The teams in the Commodity Track will be required to run the exact same applications as the Standard Track big iron teams. These apps include the HPCC benchmark (with a separate LINPACK), NEMO5, WRF, GraphLab, and a “Mystery App” that will be revealed during the competition. For more information, including competition rules, please visit http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/10/25/hpc_on_the_cheap/#!.
NASA IRIS Challenge: Tracking a Solar Storm
Challenge Ends – January 31, 2014.
Join the Tracking a Solar Storm Challenge and guide students as they learn about the sun’s anatomy, the space weather it generates, and why studying the sun is important. Launched on June 27, 2013, the Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph, or IRIS, spacecraft is actively studying the dynamics of our sun’s atmosphere using an ultraviolet telescope and imaging spectrograph. Designed around the IRIS mission, this challenge is an opportunity for students to learn about the IRIS mission and the instruments scientists use to gather solar data as well as to study the sun’s weather, track a solar storm and predict its effect on Earth. Students will demonstrate what they have learned by collecting data and producing a video or slide show space weather report.
To learn more about the challenge, visit http://irischallenge.arc.nasa.gov/.
Please email any questions about this challenge to arc-quest-challenge@mail.nasa.gov.
Faculty Proposal Opportunities
NSF Call for Proposals: Coastal SEES: Science, Engineering and Education for Sustainability
Full Proposal Deadline - January 21, 2014
Coastal SEES is focused on the sustainability of coastal systems. For this solicitation we define coastal systems as the swath of land closely connected to the sea, including barrier islands, wetlands, mudflats, beaches, estuaries, cities, towns, recreational areas, and maritime facilities; the continental seas and shelves; and the overlying atmosphere. For complete information, please visit http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2014/nsf14502/nsf14502.htm?WT.mc_id=USNSF_25&WT.mc_ev=click.
Career Opportunities
Software Programmer
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Req # 76471
The Advanced Computing for Science (ACS) Department, in the Computational Research division (CRD) at Berkeley Lab –develops software and tools to enable scientists to address complex and large-scale computing and data analysis problems beyond what is possible today. ACS engages in partnerships with scientists to understand their computing and data analysis challenges and develop leading-edge solutions that fit the needs of the scientists. Current research areas and projects include new abstractions for composing science computation and data analysis workflows, data analysis infrastructure for new particle discovery, tools to enable effective utilization of cloud computing, enabling effective utilization of multi-core processor architectures, developing processing pipelines for astronomical data, using experimental data to understand climate change impacts, and enabling synthesis across large datasets. For more information and to apply, please visit https://lbl.taleo.net/careersection/2/jobdetail.ftl?lang=en&job=76471.
On the Lighter Side – Computational Science News on the Edge
MIT's 'Kinect of the Future' Looks Through Walls With X-Ray-like Vision
IDG News Service
Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have demonstrated a device dubbed the "Kinect of the future" that can see through walls and pinpoint the movements of someone with an accuracy of plus or minus 10 centimeters. The system, which represents a person as a red dot on a computer screen, allows for three-dimensional tracking, and could be used for gaming as well as for determining when someone has fallen at home. "What we're doing here is localization through a wall without requiring you to hold any transmitter or receiver [and] simply by using reflections off a human body," says Fadel Adib, a Ph.D. student on the project from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. "What is impressive is that our accuracy is higher than even state-of-the-art Wi-Fi localization." To read further, please visit http://www.networkworld.com/news/2013/101113-mit39s-39kinect-of-the-future39-274776.html.
