XSEDE Happenings.

Petascale Day is Coming on October 15, 2012

"Petascale" refers to computing and data in the quadrillions, like the more than 11 quadrillion calculations Blue Waters will be able to perform and the more than 380 quadrillion bytes that will be available in NCSA's new tape archive. In scientific notation, 1 quadrillion is 10 to the 15th (10¹⁵). So on 10.15 (October 15) NCSA will celebrate PETASCALE DAY! We're planning a variety of informative and fun activities, and we hope our science and engineering partners, other campus units, and other computing timely needs of supporting data-intensive
scientific discovery and innovations, there is a need of
rethinking the system architectures, programming models, runtime
systems, and tools available for data-intensive HPC. The DISCS
workshop provides a forum for researchers and developers in the
high-performance computing, data-intensive computing, and
parallel computing fields to take the Big Data challenges
together and present innovative ideas, experiences, and latest
developments that help address these challenges. For more information, including topics of interest and submission centers will be inspired to create their own celebrations. Stay tuned to petascale.ncsa.illinois.edu for updates. For more information, please visit http://petascale.ncsa.illinois.edu/.

Visit XSEDE in Booth 2031 at SC12
November 12-16, 2012 – Salt Lake City, Utah

Visit the XSEDE booth at SC12 and meet some of the nation’s top computational researchers and technical staff as they share their knowledge and expertise. Learn more about XSEDE and take away some great giveaways for the whole family. For more information, please visit http://sc12.supercomputing.org/.

HPC Call for Participation for Upcoming Workshops

The International Workshop on Data-Intensive Scalable Computing Systems (DISCS) 2012 Workshop at SC'12 - Call For Papers
November 16th, 2012 - Salt Lake City, Utah
Submission Deadline - September 22, 2012

High-performance computing (HPC) is a major strategic tool
for science, engineering, and industry. Existing HPC systems,
however, are largely designed and developed for computation-
intensive applications with a computing-centric paradigm. With
the emerging and guidelines, please visit
https://www.easychair.org/account/signin.cgi?conf=discs2012.

HPDC 2013 Call for Workshops
June 17-18, 2012 - TBA
Submission Deadline – October 25, 2012

The organizers of the 22nd International ACM Symposium on High-Performance Parallel and Distributed Computing (HPDC'13) call for proposals for workshops to be held with HPDC'13. The workshops will be held on June 17-18, 2013.  Workshops should provide forums for discussion among researchers and practitioners on focused topics or emerging research areas relevant to the HPDC community. Organizers may structure workshops as they see fit, including invited talks, panel discussions, presentations of work in progress, fully peer-reviewed papers, or some combination. Workshops could be scheduled for half a day or a full day, depending on interest, space constraints, and organizer preference. Organizers should design workshops for approximately 20-40 participants, to balance impact and effective discussion. For more information, including submission guidelines, please visit http://www.hpdc.org/2013/venue/.

Upcoming Conferences and Workshops

HUBbub 2012: The HUBzero Conference
September 24-25, 2012 – Indianapolis, Indiana

HUBzero is a platform for creating web sites that support scientific research, education, and collaboration. Released as open source during HUBbub 2010 and a new version being released this year at HUBbub 2011, the HUBzero Platform is the basis of nanoHUB.org and 25 other sites, delivering hundreds of scientific tools and seminars to more than 450,000 visitors each year. HUBzero is supported by a consortium of universities including Purdue, Indiana, Clemson, and Wisconsin. See how the unique HUBzero solution has empowered a wide spectrum of projects in nanotechnology, healthcare research, and other areas of engineering and science. Learn through hands-on tutorials how to set up your own hub using HUBzero's open source software, how to create and publish scientific tools on your hub, how to connect the tools to computing clusters and other Grid resources, and how to add new capabilities to the platform For more information and to register, go to: http://hubzero.org/hubbub.

8th IEEE International Conference on eScience
October 8-12, 2012 – Chicago, Illinois

Researchers in all disciplines are increasingly adopting digital tools, techniques and practices, often in communities and projects that span disciplines, laboratories, organizations, and national boundaries. The eScience 2012 conference is designed to bring together leading
international and interdisciplinary research communities, developers, and users of eScience applications and enabling IT technologies. The conference serves as a forum to present the results of the latest applications research and product/tool developments and to highlight related activities from around the world. Also, we are now entering the second decade of eScience and the 2012 conference gives an opportunity to take stock of what has been achieved so far and look forward to the challenges and opportunities the next decade will bring. A special emphasis of the 2012 conference is on advances in the application of technology in a particular discipline. Accordingly, significant advances in applications science and technology will be considered as important as the development of new technologies themselves. Further, we welcome contributions in educational activities under any of these disciplines. For more information, please visit http://www.ci.uchicago.edu/escience2012/

SACNAS
October 11-14, 2012 - Seattle, Washington
Registration Deadline – September 12, 2012

The 2012 SACNAS National Conference "Science, Technology, and Diversity for a Healthy World" will take place in Seattle, Washington. Join over 3,500 attendees for four days of scientific research presentations, professional development, networking, exhibits, culture, and community. One of the largest annual gatherings of minority scientists in the country, the interdisciplinary, inclusive, and interactive SACNAS National Conference motivates and inspires. For more information and to register, please visit https://sacnas.org/civicrm/event/info?reset=1&id=42.

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.

XSEDE Training at a Glance. .

Extending High-Performance Computing Beyond its Traditional User Communities
October 8-9, 2012 – Chicago, Illinois
For more information, please visit http://psc.edu/index.php/component/jevents/icalrepeat.detail/2012/10/08/20/53|55/extending-high-performance-computing-beyond-its-traditional-user-communities-.

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

UC San Diego Team Aims to Broaden Researcher Access to Protein Simulation


University of California, San Diego researchers have developed graphics-processing unit (GPU)-accelerated software and demonstrated an approach that can sample biological events that occur on the millisecond timescale. The researchers combined an algorithm, an off-the-shelf GPU, and the Assisted Model Building with Energy Refinement software to run a biological simulation on the Anton supercomputer. "This work shows that using conventional, off-the-shelf GPU hardware combined with an enhanced sampling algorithm, events taking place on the millisecond time scale can be effectively sampled with dynamics simulations orders of magnitude shorter than those timescales," the researchers say. The enhanced sampling algorithm refers to accelerated molecular dynamics (aMD), which improves the conformational space sampling of proteins when compared with conventional molecular dynamics simulations (cMD). To read further, please visit http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/pressreleases/uc_san_diego_team_aims_to_broaden_researcher_access_to_protein_simulation#.UCUC36PLvKs.

TACC Maps the Future of Climate Change in India

Using detailed regional climate models and geographic information systems, researchers with the Climate Change and African Political Stability (CCAPS) program developed an online mapping tool that analyzes how climate and other forces interact to threaten the security of African communities. The program was piloted by the Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law at The University of Texas at Austin in 2009 after receiving a $7.6 million five-year grant from the Minerva Initiative with the Department of Defense, according to Francis J. Gavin, professor of international affairs and director of the Strauss Center. For more information, please visit http://www.tacc.utexas.edu/news/feature-stories/2012/ccaps.

 

Journal of Grid Computing Special Issue: Interoperability, Federation, Frameworks and Application Programming Interfaces for IaaS Clouds – Call for Papers

The Special Issue on Interoperability, Federation, Frameworks and Application Programming Interfaces for Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) Clouds will highlight foundational standards and application programmer interfaces (APIs) useful for large-scale, scalable distributed computing. This issue will provide the community with dedicated forum for presenting new research, development, and deployment efforts in running interoperable, federated IaaS cloud systems. Priority will be given to submissions that focus on presenting solutions to challenges faced by current and future infrastructure cloud toolkits and APIs, and on frameworks that allow their use across a broad range of platforms and user communities. Accepted papers will be published in the prestigious Springer Journal of Grid Computing (JOGC), which has impact factor 1,31For more information and submission guidelines, please visit   http://cac.hpcc.ttu.edu/jogc/cloud-interop-2012/.

Toward a R&D Roadmap for Privacy

The Information Technology & Innovation Foundation recently released a report calling for a research and development (R&D) roadmap for privacy, as well as a companion Web site to enable researchers to collaborate on creating a privacy research agenda. "Effectively addressing privacy concerns ... will require a mix of new technologies and policies to ensure data is properly safeguarded and consumers are protected," and a roadmap will "help address consumer privacy concerns, better align R&D investments with strategic objectives, and enable more innovation," the report says. The report warns that "if privacy concerns are not adequately addressed, they may stall or disrupt the deployment of new technologies that offer many potential economic and quality-of-life benefits to consumers." In addition, the report notes that "advances in privacy research and technology could strengthen consumer trust and better protect consumer privacy while enabling continued innovation." To read further, please visit http://www.cccblog.org/2012/08/06/toward-a-rd-roadmap-for-privacy//

Data Supercell at Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center

The Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) has developed and deployed a cost-effective, disk-based file repository and data-management system called the Data Supercell. This innovative technology, developed by a PSC team of scientists, provides major advantages over traditional tape-based archiving for large-scale datasets. The PSC team exploited increasing cost-effectiveness of commodity disk technologies, and adapted sophisticated PSC-developed file system software (called SLASH2) to create a new class of integrated storage services. A patent application is under review. The Data Supercell is intended especially to serve users of large scientific datasets, including users of XSEDE (the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment), the National Science Foundation cyberinfrastructure program, the world’s largest collection of integrated   digital resources and services. “The Data Supercell is a unique technology, building on the increasing cost-effectiveness of disk storage and the capabilities of PSC’s SLASH2 file system,” said Michael Levine and Ralph Roskies, PSC co-scientific directors. To read further, please visit http://www.psc.edu/index.php/newscenter/71-2012press/728-data-supercell-at-pittsburgh-supercomputing-center.

Educator News and Curriculum

Save the Date! The Third Alice Symposium
June 19, 2013 - Durham, North Carolina

Two-day workshops related to Alice 2.3 and Alice 3.1 will both precede and follow the Symposium on June 17-18, 2013 and on June 20-21, 2013. There will be a call for papers, posters and student Alice worlds later in the fall with Deadlines in January/February 2013 for papers and later deadlines for posters and the Alice worlds. There will be several paper tracks including using Alice in middle school, using Alice in high school and using Alice in community college and university. For more information, please visit http://www.cs.duke.edu/csed/aliceSymposium2013

Most STEM Degrees to Latinos Granted by Schools in Six States


A recent Excelencia in Education report featured an analysis of institutions awarding certificates or degrees to Latino students in science, technology, engineering, or mathematics (STEM) fields. The report found that of the top higher education institutions that have granted the most STEM degrees to Latino graduates in the 2009-2010 school year, more than half are found in six states: Arizona, California, Florida, Massachusetts, Nevada, and Texas. The schools were analyzed based on the number of degrees of certificates granted, then ranked by academic level. Overall, Latinos earning STEM degrees made up just eight percent of the total, and just 40 percent of those students came from the top 25 institutions listed in the report. "Given the relative youth of the Latino population relative to the aging of the U.S. population overall, supporting the increased growth of Latinos with postsecondary credentials in STEM is critical to meeting the projected workforce needs of the nation by 2020," the report says. To read further, please visit http://www.nationaljournal.com/thenextamerica/education/most-stem-degrees-to-latinos-granted-by-schools-in-six-states-20120808.

Student Engagement Opportunities and Information

STEM Competition for High School Students
Submission Deadline – October 1, 2012

Siemens Foundation, in partnership with the College Board, is sponsoring the Siemens Competition in Math, Science & Technology, which recognizes remarkable talent early on, fostering individual growth for high school students who are willing to challenge themselves through science research. Through this competition, students have an opportunity to achieve national recognition for science research projects that they complete in high school. Students or teams of students can enter to win scholarships of up to $100,000 for their work. For more information, please visit http://siemens.collegeboard.org/.

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

Now Accepting Applications for the Prestigious Weinberg Fellowship at Oak Ridge National Laboratory

Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) is a multi-program science and technology laboratory managed for the U.S. Department of Energy by UT-Battelle, LLC. Scientists and engineers at ORNL conduct basic and applied research and development to create scientific knowledge and technological solutions that strengthen the nation's leadership in key areas of science; increase the availability of clean, abundant energy; restore and protect the environment; and contribute to national security. ORNL also performs other work for the Department of Energy, including isotope production, information management, and technical program management, and provides research and technical assistance to other organizations.
The Weinberg Fellowship honors former ORNL director (1955-1973) and Enrico Fermi Award winner, Alvin M. Weinberg. This prestigious fellowship is awarded to outstanding early career scientists and engineers in physical and biological sciences and engineering with an interest in energy and energy-related science and technology challenges.
Major Duties/Responsibilities: Opportunities include basic and applied research in chemistry, materials science, biological and environmental science, computational science, nuclear science and engineering, fusion, energy efficiency and renewables, and other energy-related R&D. Weinberg Fellows work at the frontiers of fundamental science and engineering fields that have the potential to transform energy technologies. Appointments are up to two years, with possible renewal for a third.
Qualifications Required: The fellowship requires a Ph.D. in chemistry, materials science, biological or environmental science, computations science, nuclear science, or any other energy-related science including nuclear, mechanical, electrical, and civil engineering. Candidates nearing completion of the Ph.D., but no more than three years past completion of the doctorate, will be considered. For more information, including fellowship application guidelines, please visit http://www.bullhornreach.com/job/493784_prestigious-weinberg-fellowship-oak-ridge-tn?utm_campaign=v1&shortlink=1303604&utm_content=4&utm_source=linkedin.com&referer=www.linkedin.com&utm_medium=referral.

Computer Science Postdoctoral Fellowship at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory - REQ# 75095

The Scientific Data Management Research Group has an immediate opening for a post-doctoral researcher to analyze time-series data from network traffic and related computer science problems. The project investigates and models a general-purpose, reusable and expandable network performance estimation framework to improve the efficiency of resource utilization and scheduling and scientific data transfer management on high-speed networks. The predictive estimation model and the framework will be helpful in optimizing the performance and utilization of fast networks as well as sharing resources with predictable performance for scientific collaborations, especially in data intensive applications. Empirical network performance estimation would be able to provide predictive estimation for a future time window, together with some probabilistic variability estimate. For more information regarding this one year position, including position requirements, please visit https://lbl.taleo.net/careersection/2/jobdetail.ftl?lang=en&job=75095.

Senior Systems Administrator at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory RWQ# 75047

Serve as a senior systems administrator in the Systems, Applications, and Middleware Support Group. Define and develop computing and storage system architectures. Manage the Laboratory’s production Unix/Linux servers that provide web, database and application services for intranet and internet users. Work with development groups to provide systems engineering for upgrades and maintenance of existing and new web based applications. Provide assistance in the design and integration of applications and infrastructure components using industry accepted best practices. For more information, specific requirements and application information, please visit http://www.linkedin.com/groupAnswers?viewQuestionAndAnswers=&discussionID=162833201&gid=1775643&trk=eml-anet_dig-b_jb-ttl-cn&ut=0K_fpkyIp2IRo1

Now Accepting Application for a UNIX Systems Administrator at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Position Posted – September 12, 2012

Berkeley Lab, a pioneer in scientific research, has an immediate opening for a Senior UNIX Systems Administrator  in the IT Systems, Applications, and Middleware Group.  Define and develop computing and storage system architectures. Manage the Laboratory’s production Unix/Linux servers that provide web, database, and application services for internal and external users. Work with development groups to provide systems engineering for upgrades and maintenance of existing and new web based applications.  Provide assistance in the design and integration of applications and infrastructure components using industry accepted best practices.
Special Responsibilities:

• Provide engineering, system administration, and operations support for Berkeley Lab’s IT Systems computing infrastructure
• Evaluate and recommend hardware and software standard configurations for production computing.
• Evaluate and recommend sourced/hosted offerings as applicable.
• Provide direct support to application development teams and provide timely assistance in investigating and correcting problems, setting up special configurations, etc.
• Provide operational support for production business systems, including on-call duties.
• Provide assistance in the design and integration of application and infrastructure components using industry accepted best practices, including capacity planning, disaster recovery, cyber security, configuration management, monitoring and availability management, and system resource management.
• Manage projects to plan, organize, and implement the deployment of new (or decommission of retired) services

For complete information on this position and to apply, please visit http://www.linkedin.com/jobs?viewJob=&jobId=3739159&trk=eml-anet_dig-b_premjb-ttl-cn&ut=2KKR6an4cCN5o1.

News at 11:00: XSEDE Partners and Staff in the News

The University of California Names Winners for Technology Innovation Awards


The University of California (UC) honored nine UC teams with the 2012 Larry L. Sautter Award during the recent UC Computing Services Conference. Teams were honored for developing easy-to-use information technology tools that improve operations and efficiency at campuses. Winning projects for the Golden Awards for Innovation in Information Technology included UC Davis Health System's Research Volunteer Registry, which keeps detailed information about research volunteers in a central database, eliminating the need for multiple registries or filing systems in different departments. The Office of the President's DMPTool helps researchers create data management plans, which now are required by most major federal funding programs. And UC San Diego's Delivering an Amazing Web Experience on Every Device: Responsive Design enables campus Web pages to display and function well on multiple electronic devices such as laptops and mobile devices. "A number of these tools will be of interest throughout higher education," says UC system chief information officer David J. Ernst. "It shows how technology coupled with thinking 'outside the box' can improve operations and service across the UC system and beyond." To read further, please visit http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/article/28143.

Last But Not Least – Computational News of Interest

The Future of the Internet is…a la Carte

The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) recently asked a team of researchers from North Carolina State University (NCSU), the University of Massachusetts, the University of Kentucky, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to develop the key components for a networking architecture that could serve as the backbone of a new Internet that gives users more choices about which services they use. "Ultimately, this should make the Internet more flexible and efficient, and will drive innovation among service providers to cater to user needs," says NCSU professor Rudra Dutta. NSF says the new Internet architecture will hinge on users being able to make choices about which features and services they want to use. The architecture should encourage alternatives by providing different types of services, which would enable users to select the service that best meets their needs. The architecture also should enable users to reward service providers that offer superior services, which will encourage innovation. Finally, the architecture must be able to give users and service providers the ability to exchange information about the quality of the service being provided. To read further, please visit http://web.ncsu.edu/abstract/technology/wms-internet-principles/.

What Makes Paris Look Like Paris? Carnegie Mellon University Software Uncovers Stylistic Core

Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) researchers have developed visual data-mining software that can automatically detect the subtle features that make cities unique, such as street signs, street lamps, and balcony railings. The software analyzed more than 250 million visual elements taken from 40,000 Google Street View images of Paris, London, New York City, Barcelona, and eight other cities around the world to find those features that could be used to distinguish one city from the rest. The software found sets of geo-informative visual elements unique to each city, such as cast-iron balconies in Paris and fire escapes in New York. The researchers presented their findings at the SIGGRAPH 2012 conference. "Our data-mining technique was able to go through millions of image patches automatically--something that no human would be patient enough to do," says CMU professor Alexei Efros. To read further, please visit http://www.cmu.edu/news/stories/archives/2012/august/aug7_citystyles.html.

Georgia Tech Prototype System Goes After DNS-Based Botnets

Researchers at the University of Georgia and the Georgia Institute of Technology have developed Pleiades, a prototype system that can better detect Domain Name Generation (DGA)-based botnets without the normal time-intensive reverse engineering required to find and defeat such malware. "To automatically identify DGA domain names, Pleiades searches for relatively large clusters of NXDomains that have similar syntactic features, and are queried by multiple potentially compromised machines during a given epoch," the researchers say. Pleiades can automatically identify and filter out accidental, user-generated NXDomains due to typos or misconfigurations. "When Pleiades finds a cluster of NXDomains, it applies statistical learning techniques to build a model of the DGA," the researchers say. The researchers deployed and evaluated the Pleiades prototype in a large production Internet service provider network for 15 months and found 12 new DGA-based botnets. To read further, please visit http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/prototype-system-goes-after-dns-based-botnets