XSEDE Happenings.
NSF Research Data Planning Meeting
October 2-3. 2012 – Arlington, Virginia
The National Science Foundation (NSF) encourages participation in its upcoming Research Data Alliance Planning Meeting. As part of the Research Data Alliance (RDA) initiative, attendees will share information and discuss possible solutions for integrating data on disparate systems. A white paper on the DataWeb Forum (part of the RDA) is available to help facilitate discussion, and all participants are urged to review it prior to the meeting. For more information, including registration, please visit http://d2i.indiana.edu/data2012/DataWebForum. Questions can be addressed to Dane Skow at dskow@nsf.gov. To view the White Paper, please visit http://www.cni.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/DataWebForum_Concept_Paper.pdf.
Registration Now Open for the OpenACC GPU Programming Workshop
October 16-17, 2012 – Various Locations
One hundred registrants will be accepted for the OpenACC GPU Programming Workshop. The workshop includes hand-on access to Keeneland, the newest XSEDE resource, which is managed by the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) and the National Institute for Computational Sciences, an XSEDE partner institution. Based on demand, the workshop is scheduled to be held at ten different sites around the country. Anyone interested in participating is asked to follow the link below and then register by clicking on the preferred site. Only the first 100 registrants will be accepted. The workshop is offered by the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, the National Institute for Computational Sciences, and Georgia Tech. Questions? Please contact Tom Maiden at tmaiden@psc.edu. For more information and to register, please visit http://www.psc.edu/index.php/training/openacc-gpu-programming. www.psc.edu/index.php/training/openacc-gpu-programming
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
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
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.
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. .
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
A Year’s Worth of Research in a Few Hours: OSG Accelerates Cochlear Implant Modeling
To further contributions to the treatment of hearing loss, CI research is determining which parameters of sound are most important to neural correlation or, in other words, how our brains bring together multiple signals when processing sound. Through research at the University of Wisconsin at Madison’s Waisman Center, Tyler Churchill investigates ways to improve hearing with cochlear implants. After graduating from the US Naval Academy and serving active duty, Churchill returned to Wisconsin to pursue an advanced degree in physics at UW Madison, where he specializes in psychoacoustics ("What did you hear?"). In particular, he is exploring what is different, at the physiological level, between normal hearing and electric hearing. To read further, please visit https://www.opensciencegrid.org/bin/view/Management/ResearchHighlight31.
Google Provides New Open Source Course Building Software
Google just announced a new research experiment to open source the code they used to run their recent MOOC, Power Searching with Google (http://www.powersearchingwithgoogle.com/). Course Builder (https://code.google.com/p/course-builder/) contains software and instructions for presenting course material (https://code.google.com/p/course-builder/wiki/ImplementCourseMaterial), including student activities, basic assessments and instructions for using other Google products to create a course community (https://code.google.com/p/course-builder/wiki/ManageCommunity) and to evaluate the effectiveness of your course. To develop Course Builder users will be experienced course designers, and will have basic familiarity with HTML and JavaScript. This could be an interesting way to explore the use of the cloud to provide learners with a self-paced learning environment as well as real time feedback on understanding. For more information on this research project please visit http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/.
New Design Tool Nixes Mouse; Users Create Shapes With Hands Only at Purdue University
Purdue University researchers have developed Handy-Potter, a design tool that enables users to create three-dimensional objects with their hands by using a depth-sensing camera and algorithms to interpret hand movements and gestures. "It allows people to express their ideas rapidly and quickly using hand motions alone," says Purdue professor Karthik Ramani. "We're democratizing the design process. You don't have to be an engineer or an accomplished potter to use this." Ramani says Handy-Potter represents a potentially significant advance in how people interact with computers, and it could have applications in areas including games, architecture, art, and engineering design. "You create the shape while you are completely focused on the idea rather than bothering yourself about the right usage of the tool," he says. To read further, please visit http://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/releases/2012/Q3/new-design-tool-nixes-mouse-users-create-shapes-with-hands-only.html.
Bioinformatics Challenge Relies on NCSA Brains and Brauwn
Preparation for the Archon Genomics X PRIZE presented by Express Scripts® is going public with the global "Bioinformatics Challenge." The Challenge solicits comments on the validation software that will be used to judge the $10 million competition next fall. Teams will compete to sequence 100 human genomes from 100 centenarians in 30 days. Along with EdgeBio, NCSA is providing brains and computational brawn for the development of the validation software, says Victor Jongeneel, senior research scientist at NCSA and Illinois' Institute for Genomic Biology (IGB).
"We have been actively involved in preparing the software and infrastructure for the public phase, in close collaboration with the folks at EdgeBio," says Jongeneel. "We have also provided resources for EdgeBio to process and analyze the datasets produced for the public phase and to test the bioinformatics software." To read more, please visit http://www.ncsa.illinois.edu/News/12/0914Bioinformatics.html.
Educator News and Curriculum
Turning Gamers Into Citizen Scientists
As part of a multi-part series on gaming, CNN investigates how everyday gamers are making huge contributions to science and medicine. One example is EteRNA -- an online video game in which players solve puzzles that also happen to mimic the way strands of RNA will behave in nature. The game has become a digital hotbed for a group of citizen scientists as willing to publish their findings in a scientific journal as they are to share videogame exploits. EteRNA is one of a small but growing cadre of games that seek to deploy video gamers -- virtually none of whom have backgrounds in the sciences -- to help solve riddles that could lead to major medical breakthroughs. In some cases, they are helping to crack the molecular code of viruses that have stumped scientists for decades in a matter of days. To read further, please visit http://cie.acm.org/news/turning-gamers-citizen-scientists/.
Where are the Women CIOs?
For the second year in a row, the number of women CIOs in the United States has declined, according to a recent survey of CIOs and senior IT executives. To find out why women are still having a difficult time getting into the C-suite, CIO.com interviewed three well-respected women CIOs, representing three different industries. As these leaders point out, women as CIOs do face unique challenges. No matter how far women have advanced up the corporate ladder, it is still a man's world at the top level of most organizations. With this in mind, these female CIOs suggest several ways that young women leaders can prepare for a future CIO role. To read further, please visit http://www.cio.com/article/711863/Where_Are_the_Women_CIOs_Three_Speak_Out.
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,musing Alice in high school and using Alice in community college and university. For more information, please visit http://www.cs.duke.edu/csed/aliceSymposium2013
Student Engagement Opportunities and Information
Graduate Information Days at Clemson University School of Computing, November 4-5, 2012 – Clemson, South Carolina
Application Deadline – October 1, 2012
The Brilliant Orange Graduate Information Days is an opportunity for high-achieving undergraduate juniors, seniors, and masters students everywhere to investigate the benefits of graduate education at Clemson University in one of the four graduate programs in the School of Computing. We offer Doctoral degrees in both Computer Science and Human-Centered Computing, a Master of Fine Arts in Digital Production Arts, and a Master of Science in Computer Science. During the event, students will have opportunities to meet professors, researchers, and graduate students in all four programs. Accepted students are expected to participate in all event activities. Please apply at http://www.cs.clemson.edu/IamBrilliant.html. A faculty reference is required with all applications. If you have questions, please send email to Dr. Mark Smotherman (mark@clemson.edu).
Call for Fellowship Applications for Third LinkSCEEM Cross-Sectional HPC Workshop
November 11-15, 2012 - Cairo University, Egypt
Application Deadline – October 9, 2012
The LinkSCEEM-2 FP7 project would like to announce fellowship opportunities for advanced High Performance Computing (HPC) training during the Third LinkSCEEM Cross Sectional HPC Workshop from November 13-15 , 2012 at the American University in Cairo. The workshop targets young researchers from the region and will address programming training needs of current and prospective HPC users from various computational scientific fields. Access to LinkSCEEM HPC infrastructure will be provided for training purposes. Hands-on guidance in preparing projects for HPC usage will be given during the workshop. Applicants should visit http://cyprusinstitute.limequery.org/56753/lang-en to express their interest in attending the Third LinkSCEEM Cross Sectional Workshop. For more information on the workshop, please visit http://www.linksceem.eu/ls2/news-and-activities/events/events/event/19-third-linksceem-cross-sectional-hpc-workshop.html
The Gerald A. Soffen Memorial Fund 2012 Travel Grant Applications Now Available
Application Deadline – October 15, 2012
This opportunity is for undergraduate and graduate students pursuing studies in fields of space science and engineering.
The Travel Grants, in the amount of $500, enable student recipients to attend professional meetings to present their research. Jerry Soffen, a biologist by training, led a distinguished career in NASA, including serving as the Project Scientist for Viking and as an architect for the NASA Astrobiology Institute. The Travel Grant continues Jerry’s dedication to educating and involving future generations in space science and engineering pursuits. The electronic application materials and instructions are located on the Soffen Fund website:
http://SoffenFund.org.
Questions regarding the application or application process may be sent to
info@SoffenFund.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
News at 11:00: XSEDE Partners and Staff in the News
Open Science Grid Funded Through 2016- A Few Words from Ruth Pordes, Executive Director, OSG
“The goals of the "next five years" are expressed through the summary of the proposal text: Our unique partnership will continue to innovate and deliver a fabric of distributed high throughput computing (DHTC) services that advance the discovery capabilities of scientists, researchers and academics from a broad range of disciplines by transforming their computational throughput. Moving forward, the OSG project will continue to contribute to DOE’s and NSF’s goals to serve science and research by building on the experience and knowhow of our skilled personnel and the capabilities of our widely adopted suite of services to transform the scientific computing landscape on our campuses.” For the complete statement, please visit https://www.opensciencegrid.org/bin/view/Main/FundingNews.
Last But Not Least – Computational News of Interest
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.
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.
MIT’s EyeRing Helps Visually Impaired Point, Press, and Hear Information
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers have developed EyeRing, a wearable intuitive interface that allows the visually impaired to point at an object to see or hear more information about it. The new technology is made up of a ring, a smartphone, and an earpiece. The user points the ring at an object, and clicks a button to capture an image and send it to the smartphone for processing. Then an application on the phone will speak the word or describe the item to the user. The user needs to pair the finger-worn device with the mobile phone application only once, and then a Bluetooth connection will be automatically established when both are running, according to the researchers. The smartphone application analyzes the image using the researchers' computer vision engine. The type of analysis depends on the pre-set mode, such as color, distance, or currency. "Upon analyzing the image data, the Android application uses a Text to Speech module to read out the information though a headset," according to the MIT researchers. To read further, please visit http://phys.org/news/2012-08-eyering-visually-impaired.html.
