HPC in the News \
Blue Waters Seeking Partner Institutions to Offer Course on Designing and Building Applications for Extreme Scale Systems
The Blue Waters project and the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana are offering an online course on Designing and Building Applications for Extreme Scale Systems for graduate students are seeking other university partners that are interested in offering the course for credit to their students. The course includes online video lectures, and quizzes and homework assignments with access to accounts on the NSF supported Blue Waters supercomputer. 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. A description of the course requirements and links to example materials are provided below. 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.
NCSA News: Durbin Calls for Stronger Federal Investment in Scientific Research
U.S. Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) called for greater federal investment in scientific and biomedical research in a speech at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Durbin discussed two pieces of legislation, The American Cures Act and the American Innovation Act, which would create a mandatory fund to provide steady, predicable funding for breakthrough research at America’s top research agencies’". The American Cures and Innovation Acts will make funding for critical science research projects less political and more predictable. They will allow America's smartest scientists and researchers to spend less time figuring out how to cut their budgets and more time finding new ways to produce clean energy and clean water and other solutions that the world needs," Durbin said.
Nor-Tech Pioneers Low-Cost Supercomputer Solution
Nor-Tech (Northern Computer Technologies), the leading provider of HPCs for CAE and related applications, recently engineered a game-changing low-cost supercomputer configuration that reduces the HPC purchase cost by 2/3 to 3/4 (about $20,000 less for an 8 GPU server). The solution is a good fit for nearly all, but not all organizations. For over a decade, the technology community has been aware that consumer grade GPUs perform as well, and in some cases better than commercial grade GPUs at a price that is anywhere from 2/3 to 3/4 less. The main sticking point has been the traditional supercomputer chassis configuration, which only accommodates the significantly more expensive commercial grade GPUs. This puts GPU supercomputers out of the price range of most organizations—including some research institutions that need extraordinary processing power, but have budget constraints. To read further, please visit http://www.prweb.com/releases/2015/09/prweb12975373.htm.
HPC Movers and Shakers
Mateo Valero Selected as Recipient of 2015 IEEE-CS Seymour Cray Computer Engineering Award
Mateo Valero, a professor in the Computer Architecture Department at UPC in Barcelona, has been named the recipient of the 2015 IEEE Computer Society Seymour Cray Computer Engineering Award. Prof. Valero, Director of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center at the National Center of Supercomputing in Spain, was selected as the recipient for the award “in recognition of seminal contributions to vector, out-of-order, multithreaded, and VLIW architectures.” The Seymour Cray Computer Engineering award is one of the IEEE Computer Society’s highest awards, and is presented in recognition of innovative contributions to high-performance computing systems that best exemplify the creative spirit demonstrated by Seymour Cray. The award consists of a crystal memento, a certificate, and a US$10,000 honorarium. To read further, please visit http://www.computer.org/web/pressroom/2015-ieee-cs-seymour-cray-computer-engineering-award.
XSEDE News from Family and Friends
Argonne Pushing Boundaries of Computing in Engine Simulations
Argonne National Laboratory researchers are launching a new simulation project from the Virtual Engine Research Institute and Fuels Initiative (VERIFI) that will harness 60 million computer core hours to enable more effective engine simulations. The research will be conducted on MIRA, which currently is the fifth-fastest supercomputer in the world. "This has the potential to be pioneering work, because we haven't seen anyone really trying to understand these boundary conditions, model parameters, and uncertainties at this level of detail," says Subtend Som, the project's principal investigator and principal mechanical engineer at Argonne's Center for Transportation Research. "You really need access to these types of computing resources to resolve these questions." The research will focus on investigating how multiple variables interact simultaneously to impact the functioning of an engine. To read further, please visit http://www.anl.gov/articles/argonne-pushing-boundaries-computing-engine-simulations-0.
SC 15 News
SC15 Releases Latest Invited Talk Spotlight: Reproducibility in HPC
Ensuring reliability and reproducibility in computational research raises unique challenges in the supercomputing context. Specialized architectures, extensive and customized software, and complex workflows all raise barriers to transparency, while established concepts such as Validation, Verification, and Uncertainty Quantification point ways forward. The topic has attracted national attention: President Obama’s July 29, 2015 Executive Order “Creating a National Strategic Computing Initiative” includes accessibility and workflow capture as objectives; an XSEDE14 workshop released a report “Standing Together for Reproducibility in Large-Scale Computing”; on May 5, 2015 ACM Transactions in Mathematical Software released a “Replicated Computational Results Initiative”; and this conference is host to a new workshop “Numerical Reproducibility at Exascale”, to name but a few examples. In this context I will outline a research agenda to establish reproducibility and reliability as a cornerstone of scientific computing. To read further, please visit http://www.hpcwire.com/off-the-wire/sc15-releases-latest-invited-talk-spotlight-reproducibility-in-hpc/.
SC15 Invited Talk Spotlight: Dr. Rosa Badia
Programming models play a key role providing abstractions of the underlying architecture and systems to the application developer and enabling the exploitation of the computing resources possibilities from a suitable programming interface. When considering complex systems with aspects such as large scale, distribution, heterogeneity, variability, etc. it is indeed more important to offer programming paradigms that simplify the life of the programmers while still providing competitive performance results. StarSs (Star superscalar) is a task-based family of programming models that is based on the idea of writing sequential code which is executed in parallel at run-time taking into account the data dependencies between tasks. To read further, please visit http://www.hpcwire.com/off-the-wire/sc15-invited-talk-spotlight-dr-rosa-badia/.
Call for Papers and Participation
2nd CALL FOR PAPERS: 10th INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON LANGUAGE AND AUTOMATA THEORY AND APPLICATIONS (LATA 2016)
March 14-18, 2016 - Prague, Czech Republic
Paper Submission Deadline - October 19, 2015 (23:59 CET)
LATA is a conference series on theoretical computer science and its applications. Following the tradition of the diverse PhD training events in the field developed at Rovira i VirgiliUniversity in Tarragona since 2002, LATA 2016 will reserve significant room for young scholars at the beginning of their career. It will aim at attracting contributions from classical theory fields as well as application areas. LATA 2016 will take place in Prague, a city full of history and cultural attractions, and one of the political and economic cores of central Europe. The venue will be the campus of the CzechTechnicalUniversity in the Dejvice quarter. Submissions should be uploaded to https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=lata2016.
2nd CALL FOR PAPERS, TUTORIALS, PANELS - The Seventh International Conference on Computational Logics, Algebras, Programming, Tools, and Benchmarking
March 20 - 24, 2016 - Rome, Italy
Submission Deadline - November 3, 2015
The advent of advanced computing embracing various forms of computational intelligence, large-scale strategies, and technology-oriented approaches relays on fundamental achievements in systems and feature specification, domain-oriented programming and deployment platforms and benchmarking. dealing with logics, algebras, advanced computation techniques, specialized programming languages, and tools for distributed computation. Mainly, the event targets those aspects supporting context-oriented systems, adaptive systems, service computing, patterns and content-oriented features, temporal and ubiquitous aspects, and many facets of computational benchmarking.
General page: http://www.iaria.org/conferences2016/COMPUTATIONTOOLS16.html
Submission page: http://www.iaria.org/conferences2016/SubmitCOMPUTATIONTOOLS16.html
Call for Participation for 2016 ACM Richard Tapia Diversity in Computing Conference
September 14-17, 2016 - Austin, Texas
The Tapia conference has always been a premier venue to acknowledge, to promote and to celebrate diversity. Given the current global academic, professional and societal climates, the Tapia 2016 conference theme, "Diversity Matters!", recognizes the Tapia Conference's commitment to diversity in all its wonderful forms. We target a program comprised of an array of technical, Professional and personal enrichment and development opportunities. And, of course, the Tapia conference offers the unique opportunity to engage in large and small group discussions about diversity and broadening participation. For complete information, please visit http://www.tapiaconference.org/?utm_source=Tapia+2016+Call+for+Participation&utm_campaign=Tapia+2016+Call+for+Participation&utm_medium=email
Upcoming Workshops and Trainings
Writing a Successful XSEDE Allocation Proposal
October 7, 2015 - 12:00pm CT
Categories: Training, Education & Outreach, General User News
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: https://portal.xsede.org/help-desk.
Research News From Around the World
TACC Supercomputers Power RNA-Seq Analysis Tools at Summer Bioinformatics Workshop
Undergraduate biology labs are designed to prepare students for real-life biology work. These labs usually involve tried and true exercises like animal dissections, investigating enzymes, and microscope work. While traditional lab work is important, the field is rapidly evolving with the proliferation of big data and burgeoning technology. Computation and biology are now inextricably linked, perhaps signaling a need to trade in goggles for time manipulating the command line. But is the field ready for this change? “The primary purpose is to get this into the classroom so that students will be doing the same experiments and working with the same datasets as any biologist in a lab at an institution,” said Jason Williams, Education, Outreach, and Training Lead at iPlant. To read further, please visit https://www.tacc.utexas.edu/-/bioinformatics-for-the-masses.
University of Copenhagen Utilizing SGI Supercomputer
SGI, a global leader in high-performance solutions for compute, data analytics, and data management, announced that through the use of advanced genetic algorithms processed on a SGI supercomputer, scientists at the Linding Lab within the Biotech Research & Innovation Centre (BRIC), University of Copenhagen (UCPH), have discovered how genetic diseases such as cancer systematically attack the networks controlling human cells. By developing advanced algorithms to integrate data from quantitative mass-spectrometry and next generation sequencing of tumor samples, the UCPH researchers have been able to uncover cancer related changes to phospho-signaling networks at a global scale. The studies are some of the early results of the strategic collaboration between SGI and the Linding Lab at UCPH. The landmark findings have been published in two back-to-back papers in today’s Cell journal. To read further, please visit http://www.sgi.com/company_info/newsroom/press_releases/2015/september/ucph.html.
LBNL to Improve Batteries with Electrolyte Genome Project
A new breakthrough battery — one that has significantly higher energy, lasts longer, and is cheaper and safer — will likely be impossible without a new material discovery. And a new material discovery could take years, if not decades, since trial and error has been the best available approach. But Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) scientist Kristin Persson says she can take some of the guesswork out of the discovery process with her Electrolyte Genome. Think of it as a Google-like database of molecules. A battery scientist looking for a new electrolyte would specify the desired parameters and properties, and the Electrolyte Genome would return a short list of promising candidate molecules, dramatically speeding up the discovery timeline. To read further, please visit http://insidehpc.com/2015/09/lbnl-to-improve-batteries-with-electrolyte-genome-project/.
SDSC Makes Sense of Cyberinfrastructure
Cyberinfrastructure can be both an integrated resource and a way for researchers to expand the limits of their fields. The U.S. National Science Foundation's (NSF) Jim Kurose sees a need for his agency to see cyberinfrastructure as a driver of the national economy and global competitiveness in areas including advanced manufacturing, visualization, drug discovery, and personalized medicine. "There is the notion of this important interplay between industry, federal government, and academia in the area of computing as well as cyberinfrastructure," Kurose told attendees at the 2015 eXtreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) conference. He cites reference architectures or models as a solution to the challenge of delivering a way for scientists to exploit existing cyberinfrastructure resources. Kurose says the models are designed to expedite science by helping researchers understand their place in the overall scheme, so they can know what contributions they need to make and where they can reuse others' previous contributions. To read further, please visit http://www.hpcwire.com/2015/08/17/making-sense-of-cyberinfrastructure/.
MIT Builds a 3D Printer That Can Use 10 Materials at Once
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers say they have built a three-dimensional (3D) printer capable of building objects with 10 photopolymer materials at once. The researchers at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory say they built the MultiFab 3D printer using off-the-shelf components that cost less than $7,000. By comparison, current industrial multimaterial 3D printers can handle up to three materials at once and cost as much as $250,000. The MultiFab 3D printer mixes together microscopic droplets of photopolymers that it extrudes through inkjet printheads similar to those used in office printers. It currently uses only ultraviolet-curable photopolymers hardened by a light-emitting diode lighting system, but the researchers think it could handle additional materials such as co-polymers, hydrogels, and solvent-based materials. To read further, please visit http://www.computerworld.com/article/2975867/3d-printing/mit-builds-a-3d-printer-that-can-use-10-materials-at-once.html.
Educator News, Conferences, and Opportunities
Online Course Teaches Kids to Program While Having Fu
With technology skills becoming as important as readin’, ritin’ and ’rithmetic in today's digital world, many parents want to ensure that their children develop the right skills for the future. But many don’t know where to begin and how to make learning tech skills fun for their kids. A new online course, “Server design 1,” is using one of the most popular video games ever – Minecraft, which has more than 100 million registered users and has been a hit among younger players – to teach code to children between 8 and 14. The course teaches kids how to create a Minecraft world that they develop and design themselves using Java code. This is the latest online course designed by Youth Digital, a technology education organization whose mission is to “create creators” by teaching children how to code, develop apps and design 3D modeling in a fun but challenging manner. To read further, please visit http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2015/08/18/online-course-teaches-kids-to-program-while-having-fun/.
Samsung’s Solve for Tomorrow $2M Technology Contest Now Open
Samsung is pleased to announce the launch of the 2015/2016 Solve are for Tomorrow STEM-based technology contest. From now until October 30, we are accepting applications from teachers in all disciplines representing grades 6-12, and there’s no limit to the number of teachers that can enter from each school. All applicants will have a chance to win a share of $2 Million in technology and prizes for their school. Prizes will be awarded at each stage of the competition, from the 255 State Finalists to the final Five National Winners. Entrants must answer a few, simple questions about their school and STEM education at http://www.samsung.com/us/solvefortomorrow/home.html. One school per state will win a technology kit to produce a video addressing the challenge; “Show how STEM can be applied to help improve your local community.” To help you along the way our supporters at BrainPOP have provided a collection of free, STEM-themed content you can use as an additional resource as you develop your submission and carry out your planned curriculum! For more information, please visit http://www.samsung.com/us/solvefortomorrow/home.html.
Study Identifies New Cheating Method in MOOCs
MIT News
Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University have detailed a new technique of cheating in massive open online courses (MOOCs), and they recommend prevention tactics. They note the method is enabled by specific elements in MOOC design, such as the ability to set up multiple accounts for free. The technique is dubbed copying answers using multiple existences online (CAMEO), which involves creating multiple accounts, including a master account that will ultimately be certified, while the others are used to "harvest" the right answers to assessment questions for the primary account. The researchers also devised an algorithm that can spot CAMEO users by seeking pairs of related accounts in which one account responds to most of the answers wrongly and the other provides mostly right answers on the first try. To read further, please visit http://news.mit.edu/2015/cheating-moocs-0824.
Student Engagement and Opportunities
Cellphones Help Track Flu on Campus
Duke Today
Wearable devices or smartphone applications could help identify college students who are at risk of catching the flu, according to researchers at Duke University and the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. The team used a mobile app to track the interactions of students, then developed a model that enabled them predict the spread of influenza from one person to the next over time. For 10 weeks during the 2013 flu season, students used Android smartphones with built-in software, iEpi, which used Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and global-positioning systems technology to monitor where they went and who they came in contact with from moment to moment. The students also recorded their symptoms every week online. The model determined how likely each student was to spread or contract the flu on a given day. To read further, please visit http://today.duke.edu/2015/08/trackingflu.
More Students Taking AP Physics, Computer Science Exams
Participation rates for Advanced Placement science exams—specifically physics and computer science—have risen sharply over the last year, according to data released Sept. 3 by the College Board. The number of students taking the physics test doubled between 2014 and 2015. The College Board, the nonprofit that administers the AP program, said that represents the largest annual growth in any AP course in history. "These numbers for the AP Physics course blew my socks off and gave me hope for the country," David Coleman, the president of the College Board, said in a webinar earlier this month. To read further, please visit http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/curriculum/2015/09/more_students_taking_ap_physics_computer_science_exams.html.
CodeNow Launches #CodeHow Videos
CodeNow, a nonprofit focused on teaching underrepresented, diverse high school students how to code, is launching #CodeHow, an online video tutorial series designed specifically for teens and accessible for free on YouTube. #CodeHow is a series of short concept videos, 3 to 6 minutes in duration, that feature young CodeNow alumni explaining important programming and computer science concepts and ideas — for example, variables, arrays, if/else statements, and other introductory fundamentals. Each of the videos includes the most important aspects students should understand about a concept. To read further, please visit http://www.eschoolnews.com/2015/09/03/codenow-launches-codehow-876/.
Standardized Tests May Be Holding Back the Next Generation of Computer Programmers
The Washington Post
Educating students to pass standardized tests, which command most school administrators' time, leaves little room for computer science classes to train the next generation of coders and scientists, according to a Google/Gallup study published this week. "It was the number one problem that principals gave," says Gallup's Brandon Busteed. "They're overwhelmed by what they need to be tested on" and do not have the resources to teach non-core curriculum subjects. The study found about 60 percent of students in grades 7-12 said their schools offer dedicated computer science classes, while 52 percent said computer science is taught as part of other classes. However, those statistics differ significantly when accounting for race and income. For example, black students have less exposure to computer science, and only 48 percent of students from households that make less than $54,000 a year said they have access to dedicated computer science classes. Under-representation also was uncovered in schools with computer science on the curriculum, as three out of four principals said most classes focus on computer graphics instead of coding. To read further, please visit https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2015/08/20/standardized-tests-may-be-holding-back-the-next-generation-of-computer-programmers/.
Perspective: Here’s Why American Students Don’t Learn Computer Science
America’s youth isn’t getting a decent education when it comes to the basics of technology, and now we’re seeing some data on why that’s the case. A survey conducted by Google and Gallup shows that many Americans believe computer science should be taught between kindergarten and the 12th grade. Yet most schools don’t offer the courses due to budget constraints, a lack of teachers, and the need to focus more on subjects included in standardized tests. The results are another mark against standardized tests, which have become a point of contention among parents, students, teachers, principals, and essentially anyone else who doesn’t profit off their continued existence. Yet these reviled constructs aren’t the only cause of computer science courses’ woes. To read further, please visit https://gigaom.com/2015/08/24/heres-why-american-students-dont-learn-computer-science/.
'Disrupting' Tech's Diversity Problem With A Code Camp For Girls Of Color
Silicon Valley is great at disrupting business norms — except when it comes to its own racial and gender diversity problem. In an open letter last week, the Rev. Jesse Jackson sounded the alarm yet again. He urged tech giants and startups to speed up the hiring of more African-Americans and Latinos — "to change the face of technology so that its leadership, workforce and business partnerships mirror the world in which we live." One nonprofit group, Black Girls CODE, isn't waiting around for more diversity reports. The group is taking action with regular weekend coding seminars for girls of color. And this summer, it's held boot camps where young girls learn the basics of tech design and development. To read further, please visit http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2015/08/17/432278262/hacking-tech-s-diversity-problem-black-girls-code.
Computational Science News of Interest
Top 25 Computer Science Colleges, Ranked by Alumni Earnings
University of California, Santa Barbara, is the top computer science school in the U.S., according to a new salary-centric report from compensation specialist PayScale. The research company ranked 187 colleges and universities with computer science programs based on the median pay of the schools' compsci alumni. By that measure, University of California, Santa Barbara, led the pack, with its graduates reporting a median mid-career salary of $147,000, PayScale said. Close behind UC Santa Barbara are University of California, Berkeley, which topped last year’s PayScale ranking, and Columbia University. For the complete list, please visit http://www.networkworld.com/article/2976020/careers/top-25-computer-science-colleges-ranked-by-alumni-earnings.html.
Social Media
How Social Bias Creeps Into Web Technology
The Wall Street Journal
Predictive and decision-making Web technologies are susceptible to the unconscious social biases of their designers and programmers, to the degree they can reflect those prejudices in their functions. An example is Google's ad-targeting system, which gave male users a higher probability of being shown ads for high-paying jobs than female users, according to a recent study. "Computers aren't magically less biased than people, and people don't know their blind spots," notes data scientist Vivienne Ming. Machine-learning software is especially vulnerable to bias, according to Andrew Selbst, co-author of an upcoming study on the phenomenon. Such programs learn from a limited set of training data and then refine their knowledge based on real-world data and experience, adopting and often amplifying biases in either data set. Selbst says compounding the difficulty of tracing bias to the source so it can be corrected is the proprietary nature of most software and the complexity of the algorithm used by the computer. To read further, please visit http://www.wsj.com/articles/computers-are-showing-their-biases-and-tech-firms-are-concerned-1440102894.
Google Reveals How It Scales Its Network
CIO Journal
Google described its networking-scaling effort in a paper presented at the ACM SIGCOMM 2015 conference in London. The impetus for the detailed disclosure of its network operations is Google's move to open up its infrastructure and offer Google Cloud platform services to others, says Google fellow Amin Vahdat. The initiative dates back to 2005 with Google's less expensive decision to use custom-built instead of vendor-supplied switches, which heralded a wave of advances in software-defined networking. Google reports its current network, Jupiter, is powered by off-the-shelf switches scaled to more than 1 petabit per second of total bisection bandwidth. Like Google's five previous network generations, Jupiter employs centralized control management software boasting a 100-fold improvement in capacity over the first generation. To read further,, please visit http://blogs.wsj.com/cio/2015/08/19/google-reveals-how-it-scales-its-network/.
