HPC in the News
XSEDE, UC Berkeley Team Up to Offer Online Course
Course Duration - January 20- May 8, 2016
XSEDE Seeking Partner Institutions to Offer Course in Applications of Parallel Computing
XSEDE project and the University of California, Berkeley are offering an online course on parallel computing for graduate students and advanced undergraduates. Additionally, they are seeking other university partners that are interested in offering the course for credit to their students. The course includes online video lectures, and autograded quizzes and homework assignments with access to free accounts on the NSF-supported XSEDE supercomputers. Last year the course included participants from 14 different institutions with students from a variety of backgrounds that successfully completed the course. 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. For more information, please visit https://www.xsede.org/news/-/news/item/7307.
The 2015 Grace Hopper Celebration ABIE Award Winners
The Anita Borg Institute (ABI), a non-profit organization focused on the advancement of women in computing, has announced the winners of the 2015 Grace Hopper Celebration ABIE Awards, Each year, the GHC ABIE Awards recognize female leaders in the categories of technical leadership, social impact, innovative teaching practices, emerging leadership and international change agent. The winners are nominated by their peers and chosen by a panel of fellow technologists and past ABIE Award winners based on their extraordinary achievements and commitment to excellence. To view the winners, please visit http://www.cccblog.org/2015/09/15/the-2015-grace-hopper-celebration-abie-award-winners/.
White House Smart Cities Initiative
The White House has kicked off the first ever Smart Cities Week (September 15-17, 2015) in Washington, DC, announcing new steps in support of a new National Smart Cities Initiative. The National Smart Cities Initiative will invest over $160 million in federal research and leverage more than 25 new technology collaborations to help. To read further, please visit http://www.cccblog.org/2015/09/14/white-house-smart-cities-initiative/.
The White House Initiative on HBCUs Celebrates the 125th Anniversary of Second Morrill Act
The White House Initiative on HBCUs celebrates the history and legacy of 19 historically Black universities that received land-grant status after the passing of the Second Morrill Act on August 30, 1890. The Federal Government passed the first Morrill Act in 1859 to advance agricultural sciences in the United States, and extended it to Confederate states in 1862. A second Morrill Act was established in 1890 to address discriminatory admissions practices in the formerly Confederate states, granting land-grant HBCUs the same legal status as the 1962 institutions. Over the 125 history of the 1890 HBCUs, they have demonstrated academic excellence and leadership, and have greatly contributed to the intellectual capital of the Nation. Today, we celebrate this triumphant moment in American history when this nation boldly addressed discrimination by creating a system of institutions that were so strong and vital that they have persisted and excelled, well beyond the laws that sustained legal discrimination for almost a century. To read further and to view a list of those being honored, please visit https://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2015/08/28/white-house-initiative-hbcus-celebrates-125th-anniversary-second-morrill-act.
France and Spain Team Up to Jumpstart Europe's Exascale Computing Ambitions
France's Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) and Spain's Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) have announced a high-performance computing (HPC) partnership to further the European push toward exascale computing. Both groups entered into an agreement to promote "a globally competitive HPC value chain and flagship industry" aligned with the European Commission's agenda to concentrate on technology, infrastructure, and real-world HPC applications. "BSC and CEA fully support the Commission's strategy of aiming 'to make Europe the world leader in HPC' and ensuring it has 'independent access to this technology,'" says CEA's Jean Gonnord. To read further, please visit http://www.zdnet.com/article/france-and-spain-team-up-to-jumpstart-europes-exascale-computing-ambitions/.
HPC Movers and Shakers
Argonne’s Paul Messina on the Code Optimization Path to Exascale
To borrow a phrase from paleontology, the HPC community has historically evolved in punctuated equilibrium. In the 1970s we transitioned from serial to vector architectures. In the 1980s parallel architectures blossomed, and in the 1990s MIMD systems became the norm for most supercomputer architectures. From the 1990s until today we have been in a period of relative stasis in terms of system balance and tradeoffs. Now we’re entering a new phase of rapid evolutionary change triggered by the quest for exascale despite the end of Dennard scaling. With clock speeds not increasing – in fact sometimes decreasing – the only way to go from petaflops to exaflops is to increase hardware parallelism. Nodes, the building blocks of systems, will have many more cores, more hardware threads, more vector units, and, in some cases, more accelerators or co-processors. Memory hierarchies will be deeper, further complicating the design of application software. To read further, please visit http://www.hpcwire.com/2015/09/14/alcfs-paul-messina-on-the-code-optimization-path-to-exascale/.
XSEDE NEWS FROM PARTNERS AND FRIENDS
SDSC Participates in Coursera Global Skills Initiative
The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California, San Diego, is participating in a new program to add technology-oriented courses to the online learning network Coursera to better prepare job seekers in the highly specialized tech sector. Coursera last month launched its Global Skills Initiative, bringing top companies and universities together to produce a set of courses, called specializations, which teach a particular skill area that ends with a real-world “capstone” project. The goal is to advance access to job-relevant skills around the world. Time to completion varies based on one’s personal schedule, but most learners are able to complete the specialization in about seven months. The first course in the SDSC specialization, sponsored by Splunk, a software company focused on analyzing machine-generated data, is called “Introduction to Big Data,” to start September 15. To read further, please visit http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/pressrelease/sdsc_participates_in_coursera_global_skills_initiative.
Science, Faithfully Rendered at TACC
Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) researcher Paul Navratil, with support from the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), is leading an effort to design GraviT, a new framework that would enable tens of thousands of scientists and engineers who use the U.S.'s supercomputers to add ray tracing visualizations to their research, regardless of the type of computing systems or hardware they are using. Ray tracing simulates the photons of light as they bounce from a light source off an object and into the eye, based on the laws of optics. Ray tracing's physically realistic rendering creates more realistic reflections and shading than rasterization-based visualizations, and helps people understand the spatial relationships between the parts of the visualization. In addition, since the objects being rendered are described computationally, they also are more scientifically accurate. GraviT automatically recognizes the type of problem a researcher is working on, and then appropriately distributes data from the simulation to multiple computer processors for visualization. To read further, please visit http://www.nsf.gov/discoveries/disc_summ.jsp?cntn_id=135761&org.
SC15 News You Can Use
SC15 Announces Intel’s Diane Bryant as HPC Matters Plenary Speaker
SC15 today announced that Intel’s Diane Bryant, senior vice president and general manager of Intel’s Data Center Group, has been selected as the HPC Matters plenary speaker at the 27th annual SC15 conference on high performance computing (HPC), networking, storage and analysis. Starting in 2013, the SC conference organizers launched “HPC Matters” to encourage members of the computational sciences community to share their thoughts, vision, and experiences with how high performance computers are used to improve the lives of people all over the world in more simple terms. Four pillars provide structure to the program: Influencing Daily Lives; Science and Engineering; Economic Impact; and Education. To read further, please visit http://sc15.supercomputing.org/hpc-matters-plenary-announcement.
SC15’s Multi-Technology Network, SCinet, Tested With Spirent Federal
Spirent Federal Systems, a leader in network, services and devices testing for federal agencies and critical infrastructure providers, announced today that SCinet, is using its high-speed Ethernet solutions to test the performance of its wide-area-network infrastructure. SCinet, the powerful network that is providing more than 1 Terabits per second (Tbps) of capacity for the SC Conference, is provisioning multiple 40/100G Ethernet links that will be showcased November 16-19, 2015 in Austin, Texas. Spirent Federal will be critical in helping to verify these links so that exhibitors can effectively use them for their high performance computing applications and demonstrations. To read further, please visit http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20150915006468/en/SC15%E2%80%99s-Multi-Technology-Network-SCinet-Tested-Spirent-Federal#.VfhAPc5qaLo.
Call for Papers and Participation
Call for Participation: San Francisco Bay Area Cybersecurity Educator Symposium
November 6, 2015 – Microsoft, Moffett Towers, Sunnyvale, California
Registration Opens – OCTOBER 1, 2015
John Mummert, Vice President of Workforce Development assigned to the Bay Area Community College Consortium is asking high school teachers, community college faculty, university faculty, staff, and administrators in the San Francisco/Silicon Valley area to save the date if they are interested in attending a symposium on Cybersecurity.
The symposium will focus on:
Employer Needs
Competitions
Certifications
Pathways/Curriculum
Resources
This event is hosted by the Bay Area Community College Consortium and the Southwest Bay Area SB 1070 Grant. To view and download the event flyer, PLEASE VISIT https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B33GxLrNEY6MYlZnTUFyMkVRR2p4NzlGOHEwM3p2bmhnUU04/view. For questions about this event, please contact John by email at: mummertjohn@fhda.edu.
Upcoming Workshops and Trainings
Introduction to Data Sharing at SeedMe.org
September 23, 2015 – 10:00am- 11:00am PDT
Learn to easily share your research data/results via SeedMe.org.
The webinar will cover following topics
- Short overview of SeedMe
- Sample use cases
- Learn to upload your content from web browser and command line (hands on)
- Learn to share your content with your collaborators (hands on)
To register, please visit https://www.seedme.org/upcoming-training.
Research News From Around the World
A new way of computing could lead to immediate advances in aerodynamics, climate science, cosmology, materials science and cardiovascular research. The National Science Foundation is providing $2.42 million to develop a unique facility for refining complex, physics-based computer models with big data techniques at the University of Michigan, with the university providing an additional $1.04 million. The focal point of the project will be a new computing resource, called ConFlux, which is designed to enable supercomputer simulations to interface with large datasets while running. This capability will close a gap in the U.S. research computing infrastructure and place U-M at the forefront of the emerging field of data-driven physics. The new Center for Data-Driven Computational Physics will build and manage ConFlux. Prof. Barzan Mozafari is co-PI of the center and will oversee implementation of ConFlux. To read further, please visit http://www.eecs.umich.edu/eecs/about/articles/2015/supercomputer-big-data.html.
SDSC Researcher Awarded $1.4 Million NIH Structural Bioinformatics Grant
A bioinformatics researcher at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California, San Diego, has been awarded a three-year National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant worth almost $1.4 million to make biological structures more widely available to scientists, educators, and students. The NIH award, as part of the agency’s Targeted Software Development Awards and its Big Data to Knowledge (BD2K) initiative launched in 2012, was granted to Peter Rose, Site Head of the RCSB Protein Data Bank (PDB) West at SDSC and Project Scientist of the Center’s Structural Bioinformatics Laboratory, and Andreas Prlić, Technical and Scientific Team lead at the RCSB PDB. To read further, please visit http://www.sdsc.edu/News%20Items/PR20150811_rose_grant.html.
UT Austin, Japan Partner to Cut Energy Use at Data Centers
University of Texas at Austin (UT) researchers and Japanese government officials are collaborating on a $13-million project aimed at making data centers more energy efficient. The effort will be hosted by the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), which will receive about $4 million in additional computing capability thanks to the project. The project also involves installing a 250-kilowatt solar farm to power the new computers on sunny days. Although UT will get more computing power, the Japanese government will study the technology to trim costs and energy use elsewhere. "Through this project, we hope to verify the energy efficiency of the new technology and to disseminate it in the U.S.," says Japanese official Fumio Ueda. To read further, please visit http://www.texastribune.org/2015/08/11/ut-japan-partner-cut-energy-use-data-centers/.
A Few Key Signs Betray Betrayal According to Cornell University Researchers
ScienceNews
Although betrayal is a key aspect of the human experience, it also is notoriously difficult to study. "We all know betrayal exists," says Cornell University professor Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil. "But finding relevant data is really hard." However, Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil and his colleagues recently found a useful proxy for studying betrayal: the classic strategy game Diplomacy. Set in Europe before World War I, players take the role of nations and spend most of the game negotiating, planning, and forming alliances with other players before executing their moves. Betrayal is a fixture of the game, known by players as "stabbing" a putative ally. The researchers used an algorithm to analyze 145,000 messages between players of 249 games of Diplomacy to see if there were any patterns of behavior that could predict betrayals. To read further, please visit https://www.sciencenews.org/blog/culture-beaker/few-key-signs-betray-betrayal.
U of Florida Researchers Find Security Flaws in Developing-World Money Apps
The Wall Street Journal
A study of seven mobile-money applications in Brazil, India, Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines by University of Florida researchers found all but one had severely inadequate security measures. "It was worse than we expected," says University of Florida professor Patrick Traynor. One of the apps, India-based MoneyOnMobile, appeared to use encryption to shield data, but did so by transmitting sensitive data to a server unprotected before encrypting it, thus enabling the theft of the data. A second app, Airtel Money, employed encryption but attempted to protect the data using an easily guessable key composed of the same sequence of eight numbers and letters followed by the person's phone number and account number. To read further, please visit http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2015/08/11/researchers-find-security-flaws-in-developing-world-money-apps/.
Summon the Comfy Chairs! Robotic Furniture Coming Soon!
Researchers in Europe and the U.S. are developing a bevy of roboticized furniture they think will fill the gap in the market between simpler domestic robots such as iRobot's Roomba and the humanoid Pepper servant robot recently launched by Softbank. For example, an expressive robot trash can developed by Stanford University's Wendy Ju and David Sirkin is designed to patrol fast-food restaurants for trash, approaching tables and wiggling to get patron's attention. A mobile robot named toybox, developed by Francesco Mondada at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, operates on a similar principle: it features expressive "eyes" that it uses to look at toys, then wiggles and flashes to prompt the child who has left it out to put the toy away. Aaron Steinfeld and his colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University have developed a story-telling robotic chest of draws, dubbed Chester, in collaboration with Disney. To read further, please visit http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21660510-domestic-furniture-may-soon-have-mind-its-own-summon-comfy-chairs.
Educator News, Conferences, and Opportunities
Study: Computer Science Not Offered in Schools Because of Cost
According to a new Gallup research study, "Searching for Computer Science: Access and Barriers in U.S. K-12 Education", while students, parents, and teachers value computer science, administrators don't necessarily perceive that they do. The study reports that less than half of administrators say school board members think computer science education is important. Principals and superintendents cite a lack of time devoted to courses that are directly tied to testing requirements, according to Gallup. They also say that a low availability and budget for computer science teachers is another reason schools don't offer computer science courses. Researchers report that Hispanic students don't have equal access to computers at home. They say that it carries over at school as they use computers less there. The study says that lower-income students and Black students have the least access to computer science learning opportunities at school. To read further, please visit http://www.kitv.com/marketplace/education/study-computer-science-not-offered-in-schools-because-of-cost/35014878.
Coding: The Ultimate Equalizer
Coding is how technology, including software, apps and websites, is created. There are thousands of coding languages, such as JavaScript, Python and SQL, and early exposure helps young people understand and interact with the devices that provide the means to shape our technology-driven culture. Coding is valuable in that it teaches problem solving, design and innovation. It is practical in that it creates solutions to immediate challenges. It is creative in that it allows people to imagine and invent with few boundaries. It is liberating in that one can go from knowing code to owning one's own company. It is equalizing in that code is not limited by the stigmas humans readily cling to, such as race, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation and religion. To read further, please visit http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joel-s-bloom/coding-the-ultimate-equal_1_b_8032318.html.
I teach in a small high school in southeast Alaska, and each year I teach an Introduction to Programming class. I recently learned how to use IPython Notebook, and it has completely changed the way I teach my classes. There is much to improve about CS education at the K-12 level in the United States, and sharing our stories and our resources will go a long way towards improving what we offer to students. To read further, please visit https://peak5390.wordpress.com/2013/09/22/how-ipython-notebook-and-github-have-changed-the-way-i-teach-python/.
The Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA) Conference
July 10-12, 2016 - San Diego, California
The CSTA Annual Conference provides professional development opportunities for K–12 computer science and information technology teachers who need practical, relevant information to help them prepare their students for the future. Here is a link to presentation videos of presentations from the CSTA 2014 conference. CSTA leadership in California is encouraging teachers to submit requests to present at the 2016 conference. The call for proposals is now open and will close October 1, 2015. If you have any questions regarding the upcoming conference or the CSTA in California, please contact Joe Pistone by email at: joseph.pistone@sandiegocsta.org.
UC San Diego’s 'Minecraft Modding for Kids' Teaches Computer Programming While You Play Minecraft
Does your child spend hours playing Minecraft every day? Now there’s a book and software package that can help them learn computer programming while they’re doing it. “Minecraft Modding for Kids,” part of the For Dummies series, is co-authored by three PhDs. at the University of California, San Diego, and was released July 13, 2015. “The book teaches many of the concepts taught in introductory computer science classes,” said Sarah Guthals, now a postdoctoral researcher in computer science at the Jacobs School of Engineering at UC San Diego and lead author. She wrote “Minecraft Modding for Kids” with computer science Ph.D. Stephen Foster and biochemistry Ph.D. Lindsey Handley, both from UC San Diego. In 2013, the trio co-founded ThoughtSTEM, a company dedicated to teaching students in elementary, middle and high schools how to program. Last year, they launched LearnToMod, a software package that teaches users how to program while playing Minecraft. To read further, please visit http://www.jacobsschool.ucsd.edu/news/news_releases/release.sfe?id=1776.
Student Engagement and Opportunities
Insight Data Science Fellows Program
Applications Deadline –Oct 26, 2015 (
Session Begins – January 1, 2016 in New York and California
"An intensive seven week post-doctoral training fellowship bridging the gap between academia and data science"
The Insight Data Engineering Fellows Program is a full-time training fellowship that helps computer scientists and engineers transition to careers in data engineering. When Insight began in June 2012, the goal was to help recent graduates from quantitative academic fields break into the field of data science. In addition to emerging as leaders in the data science community, some of our Fellows with more technical backgrounds were hired on (and are now leading) data engineering teams at companies like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Microsoft. As the program grew, it became clear that there was a strong demand for Fellows who could develop data infrastructures using the leading open source technologies like Hadoop and NoSQL databases. At the same time, there was a large community, from both industry and academic programs like computer science and electrical engineering, that have the core engineering skills and were eager to learn these tools. So, in June 2014 we launched the Insight Data Engineering program to help software engineers and recent graduates become leading data engineers at top-tier Silicon Valley tech companies. For more information, please visit http://insightdatascience.com/.
How New York City is Preparing Girls for our STEM-Focused Future
As a mother and a grandmother — and as women who’ve strived for success in the business and education worlds — we want our girls and young women to go out into the world knowing they can do anything. In today’s technology-driven economy, an important part of that is giving them the skills, support, and confidence to pursue education and careers in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM). When we look at today’s young women, we see the next generation of software developers and electrical engineers. The challenge is starting early: 74% of middle-school girls express interest in STEM subjects, but only 0.4% of girls end up pursuing a college major in computer science. To read further, please visit http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/fari-shorenstein-nyc-teaching-girls-code-article-1.2339708.
Girls Who Code Camp Aims to Combat Stereotypes About Computer Coders
The Washington Post
About 60 high school girls spent seven weeks this summer learning about coding and computer science at the Girls Who Code Summer Immersion Program held at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. The camp was sponsored by the Business Software Alliance (BSA), Lockheed Martin, and the university, and organized by Girls Who Code, a nonprofit group that is seeking to increase the number of women who pursue careers in technology. "I think if there's a significant portion of the population that is discouraged from going into an industry, then, by definition, you are losing a significant chunk of talent," says BSA president Victoria A. Espinel. "There's a huge population of smart people that are not going into coding, and we need to have them going into coding." To read further, please visit https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/these-girls-are-the-computer-coders-of-the-future-and-theyre-already-solving-problems/2015/08/13/96ed6f04-411c-11e5-8ab4-c73967a143d3_story.html.
Tech Lady Hackathon: 'A Really Open Community for Women'
Federal Computer Week
The third annual Tech Lady Hackathon was held last month at the Impact Hub co-working space in Washington, D.C. The event attracted more than 150 coders, mostly women in their 20s and 30s, who participated in a day-long slate of collaborative programming projects and training sessions. One project was led by Shannon Turner of Hear Me Code and involved brainstorming ideas for improving her organization's website, while another session took the form of a workshop on data visualization. Other projects on the agenda included learning application program interface programming, and working to clean data and help visualize it for the Rebuilding Re-entry program, which aims to improve outcomes for men and women with criminal records. "It's a really open community for women, especially people like me who are still sort of entering in more junior levels in technology," says Grace Turke-Martinez, who works on a political consulting firm's data and analytics team. To read further, please visit http://fcw.com/articles/2015/08/10/tech-lady-hackathon.aspx.
Computational Science News of Interest
And the New Yorker Cartoon Contest Winner Is...a Computer
Bloomberg
Microsoft researchers aim to teach artificial intelligence (AI) software how humor works by training it on an archive of New Yorker cartoons and entries into the magazine's cartoon caption contest. Researcher Dafna Shahaf fed the cartoons and contest entries to the software and taught it to select the funniest choices among captions that make similar jokes, relying partly on crowdsourced input from contract workers via Amazon.com's Mechanical Turk. Ranking jokes was the next step, requiring the researchers to manually describe what was happening in each cartoon, and to categorize its context and anomalies. The AI system is capable of weeding out poor caption-contest submissions and narrowing the list to the funnier ones. New Yorker cartoon editor Bob Mankoff thinks AI could become a useful aid for humorists, once the Microsoft system can select captions with greater accuracy. To read further, please visit http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-08-10/and-the-new-yorker-cartoon-contest-winner-is-a-computer.
UC San Diego Security Researchers Hack a Car and Apply the Brakes Via Text
A serious weak point in vehicle security enables hackers to remotely control a vehicle, according to researchers at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). The team demonstrated the vulnerability on a Corvette by turning on the windshield wipers, applying the brakes, or even disable them at low speed. The flaw involves the small black dongles that are connected to the onboard diagnostic ports of vehicles to enable insurance companies and fleet operators to track them and collect data such as fuel efficiency and miles driven. The researchers found the dongles could be hacked by sending them short-message-service text messages, which relay commands to the car's internal systems. "We acquired some of these things, reverse-engineered them, and along the way found that they had a whole bunch of security deficiencies," says UCSD professor Stefan Savage. To read further, please visit http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/aug/12/hack-car-brakes-sms-text.
Social Media
The Future of the Internet Is Social
IMDEA Networks
The IMDEA Networks Institute has announced the successful completion of the European research project enhanced COntent distribution with Social Information (eCOUSIN). The project's findings met the research objective, according to European Commission reviewers. The main goal was to design an innovative network architecture that improves the efficiency of online social networks as well as the quality of the experience for users. Network prediction enables avoidance of performance outages by planning solutions before problems become unavoidable, or, if resource availability permits, users can take advantage of temporary profitable conditions to balance future quality degradation. To read further, please visit http://www.networks.imdea.org/whats-new/news/2015/future-internet-social.
Flickr Photo Data Used to Predict People's Locations
Researchers from University College in England have developed an algorithm that can predict people's location based on the photos they upload to the Flickr file-sharing website. Using photos shared by 16,000 people in the U.K., the team created a database of 8 million images. The algorithm accessed the photos' global-positioning system and time-stamp data to note all the locations where pictures had been taken by a single camera, as well as to predict where people would take photos in the future based on their past movements. The team tested the algorithm by comparing their results with a government survey taken to better understand national travel patterns. To read further, please visit http://phys.org/news/2015-08-flickr-photo-people.html.
