HPC Happenings
New "Test of Time" Award to be Given for First Time at SC13!
The Test of Time award recognizes a paper from a past conference that has deeply influenced the HPC discipline. It is a mark of historical impact and requires clear evidence that the paper has changed HPC trends. The award will be presented annually to a single paper selected from the conference proceedings of 10-25 years ago. The inaugural Test of Time Award will be presented in November to William Pugh from the University of Maryland for "The Omega Test: a fast and practical integer programming algorithm for dependence analysis,” published in the proceedings of Supercomputing’91. The selection process involved 9 exceptionally renowned researchers who nominated 13 papers for the period 1988 to 2002, covering the first 15 years of the SC conference series. To read further, please visit http://sc13.supercomputing.org/node/170?goback=.gde_1775643_member_275370886#!.
Invitation to Use Remote Teaching Facility at SC13 in Denver
Faculty members attending the SC13 conference are invited to use one of two remote teaching facilities being set up to allow faculty to remotely teach their courses during the week of SC13. The two-remote facilities are being provided by the HPC Educators Program. The rooms will be available from Monday, November 18, through Thursday, November 21, in rooms Mezzanine A1 and A2 of the Colorado Convention Center. Teaching presentations can be made using Skype or Google Hangout. If you would like to schedule a time to use this facility, please block out the time using the following Doodle poll. Please supply your full name and email address in your Doodle reservation. If there is a time conflict, please contact the person signed up for that slot via email directly from the contact information they provided in the Doodle poll to try to work out a compromise.
Doodle poll to reserve a slot:
Signup for Mezzanine A1: http://doodle.com/w5c2drgu55nt4dzv
Signup for Mezzanine A2: http://doodle.com/dcwfwadnm62mhvdb
XSEDE Seeking Partner Institutions to Offer Course in Applications of Parallel Computing
Course Begins – January 21, 2014
Course Ends – May 2, 2014
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. Course materials can be reviewed at https://www.cac.cornell.edu/VW/apc/default.aspx. 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.
PRACE 8th Project Access - Call for Proposals
Submission Deadline – October 15, 2013
Allocations will be for one year starting from March 2014. The Call is intended to individual researchers, as well as multi-national research groups, asking for resources on a single or multiple machines. The 8th Call is open to academia and industry under specific mandatory conditions including that access is devoted solely for open R&D research purposes. Please carefully check the full eligibility criteria list in the text of the call for proposals. All applications, whether submitted by academia or by commercial companies, will be evaluated against the highest peer-review standards. Applications must demonstrate scientific excellence, include elements of novelty, transformative aspects and have a recognized scientific impact. The PRACE 8th Call for Proposals can be found on the PRACE website at http://www.prace-ri.eu/Call-Announcements. For queries related to applications, please contact: peer-review@prace-ri.eu.
PRACE-Linksceem Winter School
February 10-13, 2014 - Tel Aviv, Israel
The unique two-part program includes:
- Hands-on introductory workshop on using PRACE High Performance Computing (HPC) resources
- Mini-workshop on "The Future of HPC: Israeli Innovation"
The program is free of charge (not including travel and accommodations). Applications are open to researchers, academics and industrial researchers residing in PRACE member countries, European Union Member States, Eastern Mediterranean countries and Associated Countries. The hands-on workshop is limited to 60 participants, so we encourage you to apply early. All classes and training will be in English. For more information and to register, please visit http://prace-ri.eu/PRACE-Winter-School-2014.
HPC Conference Call for Participation
2014 IEEE International Parallel & Distributed Processing Symposium
May 19-23, 2014 – Phoenix, Arizona
Registration of Papers with Abstracts – October 11, 2013
Submission of Registered Papers – October 18, 2013
Authors are invited to submit manuscripts that present original unpublished research in all areas of parallel and distributed processing, including the development of experimental or commercial systems. Work focusing on emerging technologies is especially welcome. Topics of interest can be found at the conference website. For more information, please visit http://www.ipdps.org/.
ParLearning 2014 - Call for Papers
May 23, 2014 - Phoenix, Arizona
Paper submission Deadline – December 30, 3013
The 3rd International Workshop on Parallel and Distributed Computing for Large Scale Machine Learning and Big Data Analytics is being held in conjunction with IPDPS 2014. Authors are invited to submit manuscripts of original unpublished research that demonstrate a strong interplay between parallel/distributed computing techniques and learning/inference applications, such as algorithm design and libraries/framework development on multicore/ manycore architectures, GPUs, clusters, supercomputers, cloud computing platforms that target applications including but not limited to:
- Learning and inference using large scale Bayesian Networks
- Large scale inference algorithms using parallel TPIC models, clustering and SVM etc.
- Parallel natural language processing (NLP).
For more information, including paper guidelines and important dates, please visit https://edas.info/web/parlearning2014/#!.
Upcoming Conferences, Workshops and Webinars
Writing a Successful XSEDE Allocation Proposal
October 10, 2013 (Thursday) - 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. (ET)
This short webinar will introduce users to the process of writing an XSEDE allocation proposal, and cover the elements that make a proposal successful. This webinar is recommended for users making the jump from a startup allocation to a research allocation, and is highly recommended for new campus champions. To register, please visit https://www.xsede.org/web/xup/course-calendar. Please submit any questions you may have via the Consulting section of the XSEDE User Portal at https://portal.xsede.org/help-desk
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.
International Symposium on Network Analysis and Mining for Health
Informatics, Biomedicine and Bioinformatics Net-HI-BI-BI 2013
December 18-21, 2013, Shanghai, China
In conjunction with BIBM 2013
The advancement in technology and computational science influenced a wide range of fields, including research in clinical leading to healthminformatics as emerging vital research area, which is attracting more attention in academia and industry. Health informatics combines computational science and the clinical world for better treatment of patients. The target of this research track is to bring together professionals, researchers and practitioners in the area of health informatics to present, discuss, share the latest finding in the field, and exchange ideas that address real-world problems with real-world solutions. For more information, please visit http://health-informatics.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/.
2014 IEEE International Parallel & Distributed Processing Symposium
May 19-23, 2014 – Phoenix, Arizona
The 28th IEEE-IPDPS will be held 19-23 May in Phoenix at the Arizona Grand Resort, an all-suites family-friendly resort and meeting place. Phoenix has an international airport and is the hub for several US airlines. It is only a six-hour drive from Los Angeles and Las Vegas and the starting point for one-day tours of the Grand Canyon as well as other historic communities in the area. For those who come early or stay late, there are boundless Southwest tourist attractions and activities. For shorter trip times, AGR has a water-world, golf course, and hiking and riding trails on the premises and an indoor athletic club and spa for fitness training. For more information, please visit http://www.ipdps.org/.
Research Features From Across the Country and Around the World
Cray Cascades Over GPU, Coprocessor Edge
HPCwire
Cray has revealed that that its XC30 supercomputer has stepped up its performance capability with the addition of support for both Xeon Phi coprocessors and NVIDIA Tesla 20X accelerators. Until this point, the system held steady with its Xeon-based roadmap, which was offered a fast lane with the company’s Aries interconnect and the Dragonfly topology—a set of system choices that Cray always touted as being primed for acceleration and coprocessor additions. To read further, please visit http://www.hpcwire.com/hpcwire/2013-10-01/cray_cascades_over_gpu_coprocessor_edge.html?featured=top&goback=.gde_4178444_member_277732990#.
U.S. Makes a Top 10 Supercomputer Available to Anyone Who Can 'Boost' America
Computerworld
The federal government is offering the use of a Vulcan supercomputer, which is now operating at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab (LLNL), to U.S. businesses that can help make the country more competitive. Businesses would have to demonstrate they can accelerate advances in science and technology and help develop the country's high-performance computing workforce. Companies could use the government system for proprietary work in exchange for covering "their fair portion of the operating costs of the computer centers," says LLNL's Jeff Wolf. The U.S. government posted an ad in June on its Federal Business Opportunities clearinghouse for vendors to attract attention to the initiative. The lab is now "receiving responses daily and expects the rate to increase as we get through the summer into fall," Wolf says. To read further, please visit http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9240869/U.S._makes_a_Top_10_supercomputer_available_to_anyone_who_can_boost_America_.
Making Digital Heritage a Thing of the Present
CORDIS
The results of a project funded by the European Union show that the three-dimensional (3D) digitization of artifacts and sites is inexpensive, effective, and practical for the long-term conservation of cultural heritage. The Tools and expertise for three-dimensional collection formation (3D-COFORM) project, was launched in 2008 and led by the University of Brighton. The consortium developed a technical research program to address the various aspects of digitization, including 3D capture, 3D processing, material properties, the semantics of shape, integration with media and textual sources, and describing digitalized objects. The project reports improved and more realistic representations of digital cultural heritage artifacts, better documentation, and higher cost-effectiveness. To read further, please visit http://cordis.europa.eu/fetch?CALLER=EN_NEWS&ACTION=D&SESSION=&RCN=35900.
iPlant Awarded $50M Renewal Grant to Advance Cyberinfrastructure for Plant, Animal Research
The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded $50 million to a multi-institution collaborative headquartered at the University of Arizona’s (UA) BIO5 Institute to create a national cyberinfrastructure for the biological sciences, which includes the Texas Advanced Computing Center at The University of Texas at Austin as a key partner. This renewal grant for the iPlant Collaborative (iPlant) also includes Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) in New York and the University of North Carolina Wilmington. The original five-year $50 million project, initiated in 2008, was the largest grant ever awarded by the NSF in the biological sciences. Today, even with the current constraints on funding for federal research, the NSF renewed the iPlant award for another five years, increasing the total investment in the project to $100 million. To read further, please visit http://www.tacc.utexas.edu/news/press-releases/2013/iplant-awarded-50m-renewal-grant.
TACC Receives NSF Grant to Deploy Innovative New Data Resource
The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at The University of Austin and its partners today announced that they will design, build and deploy Wrangler, a groundbreaking data analysis and management system for the national open science community. Supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF), which includes $6M for deployment plus additional funding for operations, the new system is scheduled for production in January 2015. "Wrangler advances the vision in data-centered science to tackle today's most complex, extremely data-intensive challenges and issues," said Bob Chadduck of the NSF Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate's Division of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure. "NSF is proud to support this community-accessible, data-focused resource to advance science, engineering and education." To read further, please visit http://www.tacc.utexas.edu/news/press-releases/2013/wrangler-nsf-grant.
Educator Opportunities and Information
Bill Gates on the Future of Education, Programming, and Just About Everything Else
GigaOm.com
At Microsoft's July Faculty Summit, Bill Gates expressed his views on a range of topics, including education, patents, computer science, and machine learning. Although Gates believes U.S. education is flawed, with the United States having the highest dropout rate for higher education of any wealthy nation, he says massive open online courses (MOOCs) can remedy the situation. Gates says online courses enable students to acquire job skills and enable physical institutions to customize education. He acknowledges that MOOCs are still in the early stages and significant work remains to be done, but notes that MOOCs might be able to help teachers ensure that students get the cognitive and social benefits of attending school in person. In terms of intellectual property, Gates says that software in developed countries pays salaries and enables companies to invest in innovation that brings global improvements. To read further, please visit http://gigaom.com/2013/07/15/bill-gates-on-the-future-of-education-programming-and-just-about-everything-else/.
North Carolina State University Study Finds Clues on How to Keep Kids Engaged With Educational Games
NCSU News
North Carolina State University (NCSU) researchers are developing a game-based curriculum that teaches middle-school students about computer science principles. As part of the project, the team has conducted a study aimed at determining the effectiveness of educational gaming tasks in teaching computer science concepts and at monitoring the level of engagement of students. The researchers divided students from a local middle school into two-person teams, and tested each team on the game "Engage," which allows only one student at a time to control gameplay. They found that for each team, the student more likely to stay engaged was the one actively performing the game tasks, while the second student would often lose focus. The finding could help improve game design, says NCSU professor Kristy Boyer. "For example, we could assign tasks to the navigator [the second student] that are critical to team success and make sure that each student has an opportunity to take the controls during each gameplay session," Boyer says. To read further, please visit http://news.ncsu.edu/releases/wms-boyer-engage-2013/.
Spirit of Innovation Challenge 2013-14
Abstract Submission October 24, 2013
The Spirit of Innovation Challenge is an excellent way to help your students channel their creative thinking and demonstrate their knowledge. The annual program is a multi-phase, business and technical plan competition, free and open to students ages 13 - 18 from around the world. The program invites teens to work in teams of 2-5 students and use science, technology, engineering and math skills along with creativity, collaboration and entrepreneurship to develop innovative products and services to benefit humanity and address global sustainability. The first round submission can be completed in less than five hours from start to finish. Not sure you have all the tools needed for your team to be successful? The Spirit of Innovation Challenge provides free access to mentors, webinars and forums to answer all your questions. Join today at www.ConradAwards.org, or email them for more information at info@conradawards.org.
Applications Open for 2014 Aspirations in Computing Awards
Application Deadline – October 31, 2013
The NCWIT Award for Aspirations in Computing recognizes young women in high school for their computing-related achievements and interests and generates visibility for women’s participation in computing-related pursuits. With one application, high school girls will be considered for the award on both the national and the affiliate levels. Competition for the 2014 NCWIT Award for Aspirations in Computing is open to any U.S. high school-level female (grades 9-12). Application information, prizes and an educator note can be found at https://www.aspirations.org/. Winners will be announced in early December 2013.
Student Engagement and Information
PSC’s MARC Program Helps Minority-Serving Institutions Prepare Students for 21st-Century Biology Careers
American biology education risks becoming a two-class system. The top-tier institutions understand that bioinformatics—using advanced computing techniques on biological problems—will soon be a job requirement in much of biology, and have expended considerable resources to create bioinformatics classes, degree programs and research centers. Students at institutions without such resources or expertise, on the other hand, are in danger of being left behind. PSC's National Institutes of Health Minority Access to Research Careers (MARC) program is helping minority-serving institutions develop classes and programs to give their students the skills necessary to compete in the new science of biology. To read the story of how the MARC program started, in addition to profiles of several of this year's MARC summer students, please visit http://psc.edu/index.php/newscenter/2013/857-marc-program-helps-minority-serving-institutions-prepare-students-for-21st-century-biology-careers.
Aspiring Scientist Takes Google Science Fair Grand Prize
At just 16 years of age, Eric Chen began working in a UC San Diego biology laboratory on a more effective way of developing drugs to treat the flu virus. Now, his name and his study have gone viral. Chen, a senior at Canyon Crest Academy, has been awarded the grand prize in the Google Science Fair. His project, “The Taming of the Flu,” was chosen in the competition open to students ages 13 to 18 from 120 countries worldwide. To read further, please visit http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/feature/aspiring_scientist_takes_google_science_fair_grand_prize?utm_campaign=thisweek&utm_medium=email&utm_source=tw-2013-10-03.
2014 Space Technology Research Fellowships-
Submission Deadline – November 13, 2013
The NASA Space Technology Research Grants Program plans to release its annual call for applications for the NASA Space Technology Research Fellowships this week. Applications will be accepted from students pursuing or planning to pursue masters or doctoral degrees in relevant space technology disciplines. The fellowship awards, worth as much as $68,000 per year, will coincide with the start of the fall 2014 term. NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate (STMD) seeks to sponsor U.S. citizen and permanent resident graduate student researchers who show significant potential to contribute to NASA’s goal of creating innovative new space technologies for our Nation’s science, exploration, and economic future. Please direct your correspondence/inquiries, in writing, to Ms. Claudia Meyer, Space Technology Research Grants Program Executive, at hq-nstrf-call@mail.nasa.gov. For more information, visit http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewsr.html?pid=44675.
International Fellowships Available to Attend Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE) Winter School
February 10-13, 2014 – Tel Aviv, Israel
There is a number of limited funded competitive fellowships available via Linksceem to attend this event that provide financial contribution to flights and accommodation costs. Fellowships will be awarded to suitable candidates who:
1. Are involved in Computational Science/HPC research projects or studies
2. Identify how attending the general user meeting can help them in their future work.
The selection committee will choose the participants at the event based on the criteria outlined below:
1. relevance of background to the workshop
2. country of residence (Eastern Mediterranean prioritised see*)
3. stage of career (young researchers/graduates preferred)
For more information, please visit http://events.prace-ri.eu/conferenceDisplay.py?confId=176. Please also visit http://www.linksceem.eu/ls2/.
Career Opportunities
Compute Scientist Postdoctoral Fellowship in High Performance Scientific Data Management
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
The Science Software Systems Group has an immediate opening for a postdoctoral researcher to conduct applied research in the area of high performance scientific data management and processing. The overall objectives for this work are to develop and deploy technologies that automate data movement and sharing from experiment through processing to sharing/dissemination. The project will focus on experimental data being collected at the Advanced Light Source (ALS): moving data to the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) across the Energy Sciences Network (ESnet). For more information and to apply, please visit https://lbl.taleo.net/careersection/2/jobdetail.ftl?lang=en&job=76206.
Senior C++ Developers
IBM - Mulhuddart - Ireland
The initiative is lead by one of IBM's leading scientists and visionaries in the field. As a member of an energetic team, you can expect to build a high performance distributed analytics platform using multi-threaded, cross-platform C++ engines across distributed OLTP datastores. We are looking for highly skilled, cross-platform, engine software engineers with over 10 years of C++ development experience and strong communication skills to suit this geographically distributed team. Being self-motivated, hard working, problem solving, with a focus on quality and performance are keys to succeeding. For more information and to apply, please visit https://jobs3.netmedia1.com/cp/faces/job_summary?job_id=SWG-0586623.
Computational Systems Biology Software Developer
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory! REQ # 76427
In this position, you will be responsible for working with a team on the creation, elaboration and maintenance of innovative software systems to aid in bio-manufacturing through iterative design, build and test cycles. The project seeks to apply statistical modeling, mechanistic modeling and machine learning to large data sets for the improvement of metabolic engineering of hosts and pathways. The Incumbent will have to work as part of a team comprised of wet lab experimentalists and computational biologist, and will also have to show independence in research and development. The team will be composed of scientists at the Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI), the Joint Genome Institute (JGI), the DOE Systems Biology Knowledgebase (KBase) and LBNL Computational Research Division (CRD). For more information and to apply, please visit
https://lbl.taleo.net/careersection/2/jobdetail.ftl?lang=en&job=76427.
On the Lighter Side - Computational News of Interest
Microsoft Has an Operating System for Your House
Technology Review
Microsoft researchers have created the Lab of Things, software that provides a centralized control panel for Internet-connected devices within a home or building. Smart-home devices are increasingly available, but most work independently, making control and monitoring a challenge. In addition, the Lab of Things will provide standards for developers to create applications that will enable new uses of smart devices in areas with the software installed. The Lab of Things software also "lowers the barrier to deploying field studies in connected homes" because researchers and volunteers are often inconvenienced in studies that combine multiple types of sensors and other devices, necessitating short trials, says Microsoft researcher Arjmand Samuel. The Lab of Things, which builds on the earlier HomeOS, is available on the project’s home page to be installed onto a home computer, after which it will automatically detect devices on the same network. Automation might find its greatest success in office buildings, which offer large potential energy savings. In addition, nursing-home facilities could use the technology to monitor patient movements. To read further, please visit http://www.technologyreview.com/news/517221/microsoft-has-an-operating-system-for-your-house/.
A Faster Internet--Designed by Computers?
MIT News
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers have developed a computer system called Remy that automatically generates transmission control protocol (TCP) algorithms with transmission rates two to three times higher than those designed by humans. TCP regulates the rate of computer transmissions to minimize network congestion, and human engineers have worked to improve TCP congestion-control algorithms over the past 25 years. Remy is a machine-learning system that tests variations on possibilities that seem to work best. Certain network characteristics, such as whether the number of users changes and by how much, are determined by users. In addition, users establish network performance evaluation metrics and a traffic profile. The researchers created an algorithm that focuses Remy's analyses on scenarios in which small network condition variations lead to large performance variations, and to concentrate less on predictable network behavior. To read further, please visit http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2013/a-faster-internet-designed-by-computers-0719.html.
Conductivity Gain for Stretchable Electronics
The Engineer
University of Michigan researchers have found that networks of spherical nanoparticles embedded in elastic materials could make the best bendable conductors, which could make possible flexible electronics that could be used to make flexible displays or implantable devices. "We found that nanoparticles aligned into chain form when stretching," says Michigan's Yoonseob Kim. "That can make excellent conducting pathways." The researchers took electron microscope images of materials at various tensions, and found that under strain, the nanoparticles could filter through the gaps in the polyurethane, connecting in chains as they would in a solution. "As we stretch, they rearrange themselves to maintain the conductivity, and this is the reason why we got the amazing combination of stretchability and electrical conductivity," says Michigan professor Nicolas Kotov. To read further, please visit http://www.theengineer.co.uk/electronics/news/conductivity-gain-for-stretchable-electronics/1016753.article.
