XSEDE Happenings.
Campus Champions Adds Two New Working Groups
There are now two new working groups within the Champion Program -- Student Campus Champions and Regional Campus Champions. The groups have met once and have begun to lay the groundwork for these two programs, including setting the vision, the goals of the two programs, preparation of formal documentation, and the ultimate implementation of each program. The groups consist of 10-12 Champions faculty, students and XSEDE staff. There are currently three students in the Champion program and they are providing valuable insight as to how to best formulate the student program. In addition, there are four Champions who are currently operating as a regional champion site and their input will be invaluable as plans for the regional program begin moving forward. For more information and to get involved, please email Kay Hunt at kay@purdue.edu.
Introduction to Scientific Visualization on Gordon at SDSC
October 24, 2012 – virtual and onsite
Visualization is largely understood and utilized as an excellent communication tool by researchers. This narrow view often keeps scientists from using and developing visualization skillets. This tutorial will provide a grounds-up understanding of visualization and its utility in error diagnostic and exploration of data for scientific insight. When used effectively, visualization can provide a complementary and effective toolset for data analysis, which is one of the most challenging problems in computational domains. In this tutorial, we plan to bridge these gaps by providing end users with fundamental visualization concepts, execution tools, and usage examples. For more information and to register, please visit https://www.xsede.org/web/xup/course-calendar.
HPC Call for Participation for Upcoming Workshops
2013 Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing Conference – Call for Participation
February 7-9, 2013 – Washington, DC
Application Deadline – November 25, 2012
• Panel Proposals Submissions- www.tapiaconference.org/2013/participate.html
• BoF Proposal Submissions - www.tapiaconference.org/2013/participate.html
• Workshop Proposal Submissions - www.tapiaconference.org/2013/participate.html
• Doctoral Consortium Submissions – www.tapiaconference.org/2013/dc.html
• Poster Proposal Submissions - www.tapiaconference.org/2013/participate.html
• Scholarship Applications – Available October 15, 2012
The 2013 Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing Conference has issued a call for participation, inviting submissions for panel discussions, student research posters, birds-of-a-feather sessions and workshops. Additionally, applications are now being accepted for the Doctoral Consortium and student scholarships to attend the conference. Confirmed speakers include Vint Cerf (Google VP and ACM President), Armando Fox (UC Berkeley), Anita Jones (University of Virginia), Jeanine Cook (New Mexico State University), Annie Anton (Georgia Tech), and Hakim Weatherspoon, (Cornell University), among others. For more information, please visit the http://tapiaconference.org/2013/..
Upcoming Conferences and Workshops
EDUCAUSE
November 6-9, 2012 - Denver, Colorado
The EDUCAUSE Annual Conference is the premiere gathering for higher education IT professionals. It provides content and exploration of today's toughest technology issues facing campuses around the world, and convenes some of the brightest minds in the community. When colleagues from around the world converge with some of the most innovative corporate solution providers, you have an event that creates invaluable networking opportunities and professional development. For more information, please visit http://www.educause.edu/annual-conference.
SC12
November 10-16, 2012 - Salt Lake City, Utah
Exhibition - November 12-15, 2012
For 24 years, SC has been at the forefront in gathering the best and brightest minds in supercomputing together, with our unparalleled technical papers, tutorials, posters and speakers. SC12 will take a major step forward not only in supercomputing, but in super-conferencing, with everything designed to make the 2012 conference the most ‘you' friendly conference in the world. We're streamlining conference information and moving to a virtually real-time method of determining technical program thrusts. No more pre-determined technical themes picked far in advance. Through social media, data mining, and active polling, we'll see which technical interests and issues emerge throughout the year, and focus on the ones that interest you the most. For more information and to register, please visit http://sc12.supercomputing.org/content/exhibitor-prospectus.
Third LinkSCEEM Cross-Sectional HPC Workshop
November 11-15, 2012 - Cairo University, Egypt
The LinkSCEEM-2 FP7 project in collaboration with the American University of Cairo (AUC) and the Faculty of Computers and Information - Cairo University (FCI-CU) are jointly organizing a five-day 2-workshop training event between November 11-15, 2012. Lectures on November 11-12, 2012 will be held at Cairo University and will include introductory courses and hands-on training on parallel computing. On November 13-15, 2012, the LinkSCEEM 3-day Cross Sectional HPC Workshop will be held at the American University in Cairo. Lectures will include four parallel training sessions in selected scientific fields targeted towards participants’ interests. For more information, please visit http://www.linksceem.eu/ls2/news-and-activities/events/events/event/19-third-linksceem-cross-sectional-hpc-workshop.html.
XSEDE Training at a Glance. . .
XSEDE Training: HPC Python Tutorial
October 15, 2012 – 9:00am- 4:00pm CT, webcast
For more information, please visit https://www.xsede.org/web/xup/course-calendar/-/training/class/67.
OpenACC GPU Programming Workshop – Onsite at 10 University Locations
October 17, 2012 – 11:00am-5:00pm EDT
For more information and to view the various locations, please visit https://www.xsede.org/web/xup/course-calendar.
Introduction to Scientific Visualization on Gordon at SDSC
October 24, 2012 - 1:00pm-4:30 PDT, La Jolla, California and webcast
For more information, please visit https://www.xsede.org/web/xup/course-calendar/-/training/class/68.
For a complete list of past and future XSEDE training opportunities, please visit https://www.xsede.org/web/xup/course-calendar.
Research Features from Across XSEDE and Campus Champion Partners
Climate Science Triggers Torrent of Big Data Challenges for ORNL Researchers
Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) supercomputers running models to assess climate change ramifications and mitigation tactics are rapidly generating a wide variety of big data in vast volumes. ORNL's Galen Shipman says climate researchers have significantly boosted the temporal and spatial resolution of climate models as well as their physical and biogeochemical complexity, contributing to the amount of data produced by the models. To read further, please visit http://www.hpcwire.com/hpcwire/2012-08-15/climate_science_triggers_torrent_of_big_data_challenges.html.
Harvard Medical School Researchers Write Book Using DNA
Harvard Medical School researchers have encoded an entire book in DNA. The book includes more than 50,000 words, 11 images, and one computer program totaling about 0.7 megabytes of data. The researchers say DNA has unique advantages for data storage, such as improved data density and durability. They also note that DNA can survive for millennia undamaged, and the tools and technologies required for reading out the information will be available in future generations. The researchers divided the information in the book into pieces, and then synthesized each of the pieces into short DNA fragments of about 160 nucleotides. Each fragment carries part of the book, information about its position, as well as the parts necessary for reading and replicating the piece. To read further, please visit http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/researchers-write-book-using-dna/2012/08/19/9a84903c-e95b-11e1-a3d2-2a05679928ef_story.html.
The Big Apple's Big Data Advantage
Microsoft's new research lab in Manhattan will focus on big data analysis, examining massive amounts of information created by the world's digital users, says lab director Jennifer Chayes. She says the facility will study how big data can help answer social science and economic questions, and what it means for the interaction of the social sciences with technology. One project involves studying how people make bets, because if people place bets on certain things, they are usually more invested in that thing, which can be a very effective way of collecting data, Chayes notes. The lab also has researchers that are building Vowpal Wabbit, a machine-learning platform that provides a faster way to analyze huge data sets. Chayes says the lab has strong relationships with all of the major universities in the area, such as New York University, Columbia University, and Cornell University. New York City has adopted the nickname "Silicon Alley," and it is becoming a focal point for data-intensive startups in Web 2.0 and beyond, Chayes notes. To read further, please visit http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2012/08/20/the-big-apples-big-data-advantage/.
As Smart Electric Grid Evolves, Virginia Tech Engineers Show How to Include Solar Technologies
An optimization algorithm could help ensure that solar technologies are integrated with existing technologies such as energy storage and control systems. Virginia Tech electrical engineers have developed an optimization algorithm for selling power back to the electrical distribution industry and storing electricity on a broad scale. "Withholding distributed photovoltaic power, probably gained from rooftop panels, represents a gaming method to realize higher revenues due to the time varying cost of electricity," says Virginia Tech's Reza Arghandeh. "The distributed photovoltaic power adoption can be controlled with the help of real-time electricity price and load profile." Arghandeh worked with professor Robert Broadwater on the distributed energy storage system computation. The discrete ascent optimal programming approach insures convergence of the various power systems after a finite number of computational iterations. To read further, please visit http://eng.vt.edu/news/smart-electric-grid-evolves-virginia-tech-engineers-show-how-include-solar-technologies.
NSF is Building an Army of You
U.S. National Science Foundation researchers have developed a smart, animated, digital double that can interact with other people via a screen when the user is not present. These autonomous identities are not duplicates of human beings, but rather simple and potentially useful personas that could take on difficult tasks, and perhaps even modify people's behavior. The digital double is one of several new autonomous avatar technologies that are currently being developed. For example, the Web site rep.licants.org enables users to create a social media self, which can take over Facebook and Twitter accounts when required. Meanwhile, MyCyberTwin enables users to create copies of themselves that can engage visitors in a text conversation, accompanied by a photo or cartoon representation. Northeastern University researchers are developing animated avatars of doctors and other health-care providers, because tests show that 70 percent of patients prefer talking to a virtual version of a nurse instead of a real one. To read further, please visit http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21528771.200-digital-doppelgangers-building-an-army-of-you.html?full=true.
Foreign Universities and U.S. Policy Makers Seek Ways Around Visa Stalemate
In June, 90 university presidents signed a letter to the White House and Congress about the economic costs of preventing highly skilled foreign scientists from residing in the United States. The letter noted a study showing that foreign-born inventors were contributors to more than 75 percent of the patents issued in 2011 to the U.S.'s top 10 patent-producing universities. The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) recently unveiled a new program called Entrepreneurs in Residence, which features a team of experts advising the agency on ways it can change policies and practices to boost entrepreneurship. Two of its recommendations, developing a new Web portal and forming a team of specialized immigration officers dedicated to helping entrepreneurs, are slated to be implemented. But the program is designed only for temporary visas, and its changes cannot affect Congress' limits on immigration. To read further, please visit http://chronicle.com/article/Foreign-ScientistsUS/133533/.
Educator News and Curriculum
Coursera Hits 1 Million Students, With Udacity Close Behind
Coursera has signed up 1 million students for free online courses and rival Udacity has registered more than 739,000 students. However, Coursera co-founder Andrew Ng says the number of active students is significantly lower since many classes have yet to start and many students register but fail to keep up with the coursework. Students participating in these massive open online courses typically watch short video lectures, complete automatically graded tests or assignments, and participate in online communities to work through concepts, but do not receive official university credit in most cases. Coursera works with some of the world's best-known universities, such as Princeton University and the University of Virginia, while Udacity works with individual professors rather than institutions. To read further, please visit http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/coursera-hits-1-million-students-with-udacity-close-behind/38801.
Coders Get Instant Gratification With Khan Academy Programming
The Khan Academy, which has provided free video lectures on subjects such as mathematics, biology, and history since 2006, recently launched a computer science section. Instead of a video, each computer science lesson contains a pane on the left side for students to enter code and a pane on the right that displays the output. The first lesson involves writing code that will draw a face in the right hand pane. After learning to create graphics, students learn animation and eventually game development. The results of coding changes are immediately displayed in the right pane, offering instant feedback. The lessons also include tips for solving common beginner problems. The tutorials use Processing.js, which is based on the visual arts-centric programming language Processing, but can run inside a Web browser without the need for any plugins. To read further, please visit http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/08/khan-academy/.
Student Engagement Opportunities and Information
A LittleFe Success Story for High School Students at the Oklahoma Supercomputing Symposium
Earlier this month, ten high school students from the Louisiana School for Math, Science, and the Arts and their mentor Brad Burkman, attended the Oklahoma Supercomputing Symposium. With “Blinky”, their LittleFe in tow, the Accelerating Science Group gave a poster and talk during the two-day symposium, A group of researchers had asked Burkman’s Accelerating Science Group to optimize multiplication of dense unstructured small-to-medium thin rectangular matrices ( ~ 30x10^4). Armed with a combined knowledge of C++, OpenMP, MPI and an understanding of data structures and making extensive use of the Blue Waters Undergraduate Petascale Education materials, Henry Niemen’s "Supercomputing in Plain English," (SIPE) and LONI and XSEDE remote training, the students eagerly began their research. The slides from the students' talk can be found at http://symposium2012.oscer.ou.edu/speakers.html#accelerating. The students’ poster can be found at https://sites.google.com/a/lsmsa.edu/accelerating-science-group/.
Indiana University InCNTRE Summer of Network Internship Program
May 20 - July 16, 2013 – Bloomington, Indiana
Application Deadline – November 30, 2012
There are two essential elements to starting a successful career in data networking: real-world experience and hands-on training. InCNTRE's Summer of Networking internship program at IU Bloomington provides both in abundance. Each day of the Summer of Networking includes participation in a real-world project (during the morning) and classroom instruction (during the afternoon) from IU's acclaimed network engineering and research staff. In addition to participation in projects and classroom instruction, students will collaboratively build and operate their own dorm room network. For more information, including project areas, eligibility and stipend awards, please visit http://incntre.iu.edu/summer. Questions can be addressed to summer@incntre.iu.edu
Career Opportunities
Research Storage Administrator
University of Iowa
Posted – October 10, 2012
Application Deadline – October 24, 2012
The University of Iowa Information Technology Services organization (ITS), a campus-wide provider of technology services for academic, research, and service missions, is seeking a Research Storage Systems Administrator which functions under the direction of the Director of Research Services. The successful candidate will have a strong desire to learn and explore innovative solutions to information technology problems in a rapidly evolving research driven environment. For more information, please visit http://jobs.uiowa.edu/pands/view/61679
Postdoctoral Research Position in HPC Scalable Data, Storage, & File
Oak Ridge National Laboratory - Oak Ridge, Tennessee (Knoxville, Tennessee Area)
The Technology Integration (TechInt) Group at ORNL is seeking applicants for the position of Postdoctoral Research Associate in HPC Storage Systems. The TechInt Group is responsible for updating and integrating the networks, files systems, and archival storage infrastructure into the OLCF computing systems. The group researches and evaluates emerging technologies and provides system programming to seamlessly integrate new technologies and tools into the infrastructure as they are adopted. TechInt developed the OLCF’s High-Performance Storage System (HPSS) and is constantly working to increase the speed of data transfer and implement cybersecurity measures for the OLCF’s area-wide network. As the OLCF computing resources continue to scale up, the TechInt group works to develop tools such as compilers, debuggers, and performance-analysis tools that allow users to take full advantage of the leadership-class systems. For more information, please visit http://www.linkedin.com/groupAnswers?viewQuestionAndAnswers=&discussionID=174330082&gid=4178444&trk=eml-anet_dig-b_jb-ttl-cn&ut=3dG7HYiODMlls1.
Science Technical Writer for GE
San Ramon, California
At GE’s new Software Center of Excellence in San Ramon, CA, some of the brightest minds in technology are developing the software, analytics, and user experiences that will transform industries and improve lives by connecting people and businesses to the nearly 50 billion machines and devices that build, move, power, and cure our world. GE calls this vision the “Industrial Internet,” and GE developers are leveraging technology advances such as cloud computing, intelligent devices, and big data and analytics to deliver ground-breaking new ways of tackling some of the world’s biggest challenges The position as a writer is to help define, plan, research and deliver the documentation set supporting the efforts in our new Software Center of Excellence. The incumbent will collaborate with business, development and quality assurance teams to produce and validate a range of high-quality deliverables for consumption by our internal technical customer base. For more information and to apply, please visit https://xjobs.brassring.com/tgwebhost/jobdetails.aspx?jobId=1033415&PartnerId=54&SiteId=5346&JobReqLang=1&JobSiteId=5346&JobSiteInfo=1033415_5346&phid=11679&codes.
Postdoctoral Research Associate in Scientific Data
Oak Ridge National Laboratory - Oak Ridge, Tennessee (Knoxville, Tennessee Area)
The Scientific Data Group in the Computer Science and Mathematics Division (CSM) at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) seeks to hire a post-doctorate researcher to research and develop novel computer science techniques for in transit workflow processing, and data intensive computing. The successful candidate will work in a team with researchers of the Scientific Data Group of CSM and application scientists from the Materials Science and Technology Division. The main aspect of this position will be in working with a multi-laboratories collaboration on a “QMC Framework for Predictive Capabilities in Material Science”, which develops advanced material science software, efficient data management workflows, and data repositories, which will accelerate discovery of advanced materials and fundamentally alter how QMC (continuum quantum Monte Carlo) data are produced, acquired, processed and used by the material science and chemistry communities. For complete information, please visit http://www.linkedin.com/jobs?viewJob=&jobId=3871118&trk=eml-anet_dig-b_premjb-ttl-cn&ut=0X6euy1t-dd5s1. All inquiries can be directed to Scott Klasky at Klasky@ornl.gov.
Linux Cluster Administrator for CMS Experiment
Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory
Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory has an outstanding permanent position open for a Senior Linux Administrator supporting the CMS Computing Facilities Department at Fermilab. The CMS experiment creates several petabytes of experimental data per year from the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC). This data is cataloged and efficiently delivered to the thousands of scientists throughout North America. This role will maintain and integrate scientific computing needs using effective operations of Linux servers, workstations, data storage and batch systems. For more information and to apply, please visit http://www.linkedin.com/groupAnswers?viewQuestionAndAnswers=&discussionID=154583255&gid=1775643.
University of Wyoming Information Technology/Advanced Research Computing Center Systems Administrator (2 positions)
Job ID 5194
The University of Wyoming is currently seeking two Systems Administrators for a startup HPC Condo cluster. This is an excellent opportunity to join and help develop a new team and new technologies for UW IT. These positions will become a defining asset that assists in development, direction, and support of advanced research computing on campus. The positions will be heavily focused on Linux, cluster, and storage support. Additional information on the startup cluster can be found at http://arcc.uwyo.edu/. For more details on the positions, please visit https://jobs.uwyo.edu/psp/EREC/UWEXTERNAL/HRMS/c/HRS_HRAM.HRS_CE.GBL?Page=.
Assistant Professor in Remote Sensing and Ecosystem Change
University of California, Davis
Application Deadline – November 30, 3012
The Department of Land, Air and Water Resources (LAWR) in the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, University of California, Davis invites applications for a tenure track faculty position as Assistant Professor in Remote Sensing and Ecosystem Change. We seek an outstanding scholar to conduct ecological and environmental research using remote sensing geospatial tools, with a core expertise in understanding spatial and temporal ecological patterns and processes to relate responses and change to the physical environment and land-use conditions. The successful candidate should demonstrate a record of achievement with various remote sensing technologies as evidenced by peer reviewed publications. For additional information concerning the position and to submit application materials, please visit http://recruit.ucdavis.edu. Please contact Susan L. Ustin, Search Committee Chair, LAWR, slustin@ucdavis.edu for additional information.
Last But Not Least – Computational News of Interest
Skilled Work, Without the Worker
A new wave of robots is replacing workers around the world in the manufacturing and distribution industries as many factories that utilize robots are becoming more efficient than those that rely on hundreds of thousands of low-skilled workers. The falling costs and growing sophistication of robots have sparked a debate between economists and technologists over how quickly jobs will be lost. "The pace and scale of this encroachment into human skills is relatively recent and has profound economic implications," say Massachusetts Institute of Technology economists Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee. Distribution also is being changed by advanced robotics. Robots can move at the speed of the fastest human sprinters, storing, retrieving, and packing goods for shipment much more efficiently than their human counterparts. Meanwhile, improvement in vision and touch technologies is putting a wide range of manual jobs in jeopardy. To read further, please visit http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/19/business/new-wave-of-adept-robots-is-changing-global-industry.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0.
Computing in the Net of Possibilities
A new information processing principle has been developed by researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization. A complex network computer has the capability of arbitrary calculation execution under completely different conditions than a conventional computer by virtue of it not being based on a binary system of zeros and ones, and it could be built from any oscillating system, in principle. In systems comprised of coupled oscillating elements, the saddle points, or states of the whole system that are stable in some respects and unstable in others, form a network. In response to an outside disruption that unbalances a specific saddle point, the entire system shifts to another one. The nature of the disruption determines which path the system takes in the net of possible states. To read further, please visit http://www.mpg.de/5990686/complex_network_computer-en.
New Free Software to Radically Change City Planning Worldwide.
Researchers at Ciencia Viva's National Agency for Scientific and Technological Culture have developed software that can classify any region in the world according to its pattern of development into one of five types, each with specific characteristics and predictable behaviors that require different policy measures. The researchers say their work represents a major step toward a new type of city planning that is independent of personal visions, interests, and changing politics. "What this means is that now we finally can have a unified characterization of urban areas worldwide that pave the way for city planners all over the world to collaborate, whether comparing urban policies or forecasting typical future scenarios and procedures to deal with them," says researcher Jorge M. Pacheco. The researchers used the Metropolitan Area of Lisbon (MAL), which includes the city, its suburbs, and a ring of rural regions, as a case study for the software. The researchers examined MAL historical urbanization data to develop a mathematical classification based on built-up level, how these areas are distributed on the surface, and the city's spatial patterning density. The five types of development range from cities with small and isolated built-up areas, to those where building is close to saturation and space for new construction is rare. To read further, please visit http://www.alphagalileo.org/ViewItem.aspx?ItemId=123261&CultureCode=en.
