Upcoming Conferences and Workshops
2012 Broadening Participation in Data Mining Workshop - Call for Participation
April 27-28, 2012 - Anaheim, California
The primary aim of the workshop is to foster mentorship, guidance, and connections of underrepresented groups in Data Mining, while also enriching technical aptitude and exposure. This workshop provides a venue in which to encourage students from such groups to connect with junior and senior research members in industry, academia, and government. The hope is to create and help grow meaningful lasting connections between researchers, thereby strengthening the Data Mining Community. Workshop sponsors include CRA-W, CDC, NSF, and Robert Bosch. For more information and to apply for the workshop, please visit http://dataminingshop.com/application.php.
I-CHASS/CDH Humanities HpC Summer Institute - Call for Participants
June 10-14, 2012 - Champaign, Illinois
August 5-9, 2012 - Columbia, South Carolina
August 25-26, 2012 - Columbia, South Carolina
Application Deadline - January 15, 2012
Funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, The Humanities High Performance Computing Collaboratory (HpC) is a summer institute for graduate students and faculty who are conducting scholarship in the digital humanities. HpC offers two five-day workshops, one with the University of Illinois' Institute for Computing in Humanities, Arts, and Social Science (I-CHASS), and the other at the University of South Carolina's Center for Digital Humanities (CDH). Attendees will receive a comprehensive education in four computational concentrations: computer vision, augmented reality, game design, and mobile app development and receive instruction in digital humanities project design and management. Additionally, participants will join a yearlong virtual community where scholars will support their peers in authoring digital humanities projects. Please apply by sending a letter of interest that outlines your current technical and intellectual investment in digital humanities and resume to Michael Simeone, mpsimeon@illinois.edu. HpC will select a total of 25 applicants for participation in the institute. For more information, including our FAQ, please visit http://www.dhhpc.org.
NSF-SPONSORED INTERDISCIPLINARY WORKSHOP ON COMPUTATIONAL THINKING THROUGH COMPUTING AND MUSIC
June 21-22, 2012 - Lowell, Massachusetts
The University of Massachusetts, Lowell Departments of Music and Computer Science are pleased to offer our first NSF-sponsored interdisciplinary Performamatics workshop on Computational Thinking through Computing and Music. The purpose of this workshop is to share our techniques and materials and to provide an environment in which other pairs of professors can work together to develop interdisciplinary relationships and materials of their own to use in courses at their home institutions. Workshop participants are required to attend in interdisciplinary pairs, preferably from the same institution. This will ensure that the workshop itself models interdisciplinary collaboration and produces outcomes that connect directly to participants' own situations. Professors and instructors from 2- and 4-year colleges are encouraged to attend. For more information and to apply, please visit http://teaching.cs.uml.edu/~heines/TUES/ProjectHome.jsp.
XSEDE Happenings
News from XSEDE - the latest issue of XSEDE's public newsletter
News from XSEDE is a monthly newsletter providing information on scientific discoveries made possible by the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment and the people, places and programs involved. Read about the newest members of the XSEDE supercomputer family -- Gordon and Stampede, the HPC award recently presented to PSC, and scientific breakthroughs on a drug-processing protein, aerosols, and natural language processing. For more information, please visit https://www.xsede.org/xsede-newsletter-novdec-2011.
New XSEDE User News Administrative Interface
For those posting user news items, you no longer need to use the 'teragrid' login but just your portal login and access the following staff page:
https://portal.xsede.org/web/staff/post-user-news
Please share this link with all folks that post user news items. Please feel free to contact the portal staff via the feedback page to let them know if you have any input or suggestions. To navigate to the User News page, please go to the Staff Area -> Admin -> Post User News. You must be a staff member to post user news. Be sure to share any news that you feel would be valuable to your fellow users!
XSEDE Training News
TACC Training, in-person and online courses
January 17, 19 and 20, 2012
Thursday, January 12, in person and online: One-day course as an introduction to the PETSc library, which provides a toolkit for distributed linear algebra, in particular, of solvers for sparse linear algebra systems. The PETSc library is installed and supported on TACC systems. The course will be webcast and will include labs.
Location: Texas Advanced Computing Center, Austin, Texas
Thursday-Friday, January 19-20, in person: Cornell Center for Advanced Computing staff present, Data Analysis on Ranger and Longhorn, covering data formats, transfer, movement, storage, visualization tools and techniques for large data, MapReduce with Hadoop, data analysis with MATLAB, optimization, and parallel I/O.
Location: Cornell University, Ithaca, New York
Friday, January 20, in person: One-day workshop on Introduction to Scientific Visualization on Longhorn, offered by SURA in collaboration with TACC and Old Dominion University. Hands-on training (bring your own laptop) will address introduction to visualization, remote access to Longhorn, and obtaining XSEDE allocations.
Location: Old Dominion University, Norfolk, Virginia
For additional details on these training opportunities and to view upcoming training opportunities, please visit https://www.xsede.org/web/xup/course-calendar.
XSEDE New User Training Webinar
January 27, 2012 - Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
PSC hosts this XSEDE new user training. A 90 minute webinar providing general overview and reference information for first-time users of XSEDE resources at any of XSEDE's service providers. For more information and to register, please visit https://portal.xsede.org/course-calendar/-/training/class/23.
Accelerating Applications with OpenACC
April 18-19, 2012 - Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
PSC, together with NVIDIA and PGI, is pleased to announce a hands-on workshop on GPGPU programming using OpenACC, an open standard for compiler directives to make accelerators easier to program. Using OpenACC directives in standard C and Fortran, programmers insert compiler hints into their code to automatically execute compute-intensive regions of code on accelerators, simplifying code development and improving performance portability. For more information and to register, please visit http://www.psc.edu/training/OpenACC/.
Research News and Announcements
Flash Forward: SDSC Launches Data-Intensive Supercomputer (Excerpt from HPCwire)
Gordon, the largest flash memory-based computer on the planet, was officially launched at a ceremony that took place on Monday at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC). Two years in the making, and backed by a $20 million Track 2 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF), Gordon represents the first really big purpose-built supercomputer for data-intensive The intention of SDSC and the NSF is to draw in data-intensive science codes that have never had a platform this size to push the envelope. To read further, please visit http://www.hpcwire.com/hpcwire/2011-12-06/flash_forward:_sdsc_launches_data-intensive_supercomputer.html.
Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center Wins High-Performance Computing Award
HPCwire, a leading electronic-news outlet for high-performance computing and communication (HPC), awarded a 2011 Reader's Choice Award to the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) for Best Use of HPC in an Edge HPC application. The award recognizes PSC for its work with Blacklight, PSC's SGI¨ Altix¨ UV1000 system, the world's largest shared-memory system, a resource of XSEDE, the National Science Foundation cyberinfrastructure program. Because of Blacklight's large amount of shared memory, scientists have been able to access up to 16 terabytes at a time, a feature that has enabled ground-breaking work in several fields, including fields of computer science - natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) - that haven't traditionally made substantial use of HPC. To read further, please visit http://psc.edu/publicinfo/news/2011/112111_HPCAward.php.
Purdue Researchers could improve laser-manufacturing technique
Engineers have discovered details about the behavior of ultrafast laser pulses that may lead to new applications in manufacturing, diagnostics and other research. Ultrafast laser pulses are used to create features and surface textures in metals, ceramics and other materials for applications including the manufacture of solar cells and biosensors. The lasers pulse at durations of 100 femtoseconds, or quadrillionths of a second, and cause electrons to reach temperatures greater than 60,000 degrees Celsius during the pulse duration. The pulses create precise patterns in a process called "cold ablation", which turns material into a plasma of charged particles. To read further, http://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/research/2011/111219ShinPlasma.html.
TACC's Ranger supercomputer assists Guatemalan human rights effort
In December 2011, The University of Texas at Austin launched a digital archive of 10 million pages of records from the Guatemalan Historical National Police Archive (known as Archivo Histórico de la Policía Nacional or AHPN). The documents are now publicly accessible to researchers, human rights activists, prosecutors and ordinary citizens online through a UT library website. The Guatemalan government denied the existence of records relating to state repression until a chance investigation in Guatemala City in 2005 led to the discovery of the AHPN and its nearly 80 million pages of police records dating from 1882 to 1996. For those searching for disappeared friends and family, studying state repression, or exploring the legacy of U.S. involvement in Guatemala, the documents are invaluable. To read further, please visit http://www.tacc.utexas.edu/news/feature-stories/2011/guatemalan-human-rights-effort.
With mounting evidence from supercollider, Indiana University physicists find themselves in thick of new results
Indiana University physicists who have spent years working with scientists around the world looking for the Higgs boson, that theorized particle thought to give mass to other particles, today learned the experiment they are tied most closely to -- the ATLAS detector -- and a second independent experiment both have seen similar results providing the best proof yet that this particle does exist. IU physicists gathered at Swain Hall West on the Bloomington campus last month, to view the announcement from the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, that two of the $10 billion Large Hadron Collider's experiments, ATLAS and CMS, had collected and analyzed new data sufficient enough to make significant progress in the search for the Higgs boson. And while the new data was not enough to make any conclusive statement on the existence or non-existence of the elusive Higgs, predictions are that 2012 will be the year of confirmation. To read further, please visit http://newsinfo.iu.edu/news/page/normal/20651.html.
Cornell Switching light on and off -- with just a few photons
Cornell researchers have demonstrated that the passage of a light beam through an optical fiber can be controlled by just a few photons of another light beam. Such all-optical control is the idea behind photonics, where beams of light replace electric currents in circuits, yielding higher speed and lower power consumption. Just as a transistor can switch an electric current on or off, photonic circuits need a way for one light beam to switch another. One of the holy grails is single-photon switching, where just one photon controls the passage of another. To read further, please visit http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/Nov11/PhotonSwitch.html.
Campus Champions
Learning More About the XSEDE Campus Champions
The Campus Champions program supports campus representatives as a local source of knowledge about high-performance and high-throughput computing and other digital services, opportunities and resources. This knowledge and assistance empowers campus researchers, educators, and students to advance scientific discovery.
Through the Campus Champions program, your campus will have direct access to XSEDE and input to its staff, resource allocations for the use of your campus researchers, and assistance in using those resources. For a complete listing that indicates whether the Campus Champion site is an Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR) state or a minority-serving institution (MSI), please visit https://www.xsede.org/current-champions.
Educator Programs and Curriculum
MIT+ K12: Making video to make a difference
The MIT School of Engineering is launching an exciting new K12 education program -- and they need your help to make it work. They want to put great experiments and great ideas into action. The idea is to get MIT students to make short (5-8 minute) videos that explain basic topics or ideas in engineering and science for K12 students. Ian Waitz, MIT's Dean of Engineering, launched the MIT+K12 project, driven by a series of questions: How can we change the perception of the role of engineers and scientists in the world? What can MIT do right now to improve STEM education at the K12 level? For more information and to help MIT answer these questions, please visit http://k12videos.mit.edu/.
CSERD Would Like Your Feedback
Shodor is hoping to get some final feedback on the Computational Science Education Reference Desk (CSERD). As part of their ongoing mission to provide a useful site, they are seeking your input. Please take a few moments to fill out this brief survey about the CSERD site and its usefulness. All responses are anonymous and will not be shared. To participate, please visit https://www.research.net/s/CSERD_Winter_2011.
2nd Annual USA Science and Engineering Festival
April 28-29, 2012 - Washington, DC
Building on the success of the inaugural Science Festival in 2010, the 2nd USA Science & Engineering Festival will inspire the next generation of scientists and engineers with school programs and nationwide contests throughout the 2011/2012 school year and this event is the finale expo. The Science Festival is the nation's largest celebration of all things science and engineering and features over 2,000 hands-on activities and over 150 performances. There will be exciting new programs including a Book Fair, Featured Science & Engineering Authors and a Career Pavilion that includes a College Fair, a Job Fair and a Meet the Scientist/Engineer Networking area. For more information, please visit http://www.usasciencefestival.org/?utm_source=Everyone&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=December+14th+2011+Newsletter.
NSF Debuts CS Bits & Bytes Newsletter for Teachers and Students
The National Science Foundation, in support of Computer Science education is proud to announce its rollout of CS Bits & Bytes, a biweekly newsletter highlighting innovative computer science research. The NSF CS Bits & Bytes series is aimed at high school teachers and students and emphasizes how computer science permeates and improves our lives and supports progress in many other disciplines. CS Bits & Bytes issues include profiles of the individuals who do this exciting work and include links to interactive activities and videos. If you'd like to receive this e-newsletter, please visit http://www.nsf.gov/cise/csbytes/.
2012 Space Exploration Educators Conference
February 2-4, 2012 - Space Center Houston
Make plans to attend the 18th Annual Space Exploration Educators Conference! This conference is for all K-12 educators. Activities presented use space-related themes to teach across the curriculum and can be used for science, language arts, mathematics, history and more. Attend sessions hosted by scientists and engineers working on the International Space Station, Mars exploration and the planets beyond. Hear from astronauts who will be leading the charge in exploration. Attend sessions presented by educators and receive ready-to-implement classroom ideas. Attendees can earn up to 24 hours of continuing professional education credit. For more information, please visit http://spacecenter.org/TeachersSEEC.html.
Faculty Opportunities
2012 Glenn Faculty Fellowship Now Open
Application Deadline - February 12, 2012
NASA John Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio is accepting applications from full-time, qualified STEM faculty in accredited US colleges and universities for the summer 2012 NASA Glenn Faculty Fellowship Program (NGFFP). The ten-week fellowship starts on Monday, June 4, 2012 and ends on Friday, August 10, 2012. The opportunity is open to US citizens. Underrepresented faculty at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and other Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs) are highly encouraged to apply. For more information and to apply, please visit http://rt.grc.nasa.gov/university-affairs/.
Student Engagement and Opportunities
Caltech's MURF UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH FELLOWSHIPS
Application Deadline - January 11, 2012
The MURF program aims to increase the participation of underrepresented students (such as African American, Hispanic, and Native American, females who are underrepresented in their discipline, or first-generation college students) in science and engineering Ph.D. or M.D./Ph.D. programs and to make Caltech's programs more visible to students not traditionally exposed to Caltech. Competitive applicants will have completed sophomore-level courses in desired research field, have demonstrated through academic and/or co-curricular activities a passion for research, and can articulate how their research interests align with Caltech's research areas. For more information, please visit www.murf.caltech.edu
UC Berkeley to host Summer 2012 Research Program
Application Deadline - January 31, 2012
UC Berkeley is hosting a summer research program, SUPERB-Information Technology for Sustainability, an NSF-funded summer Research Experiences for Undergraduates site in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences. Students will have the chance to do computing research with faculty and graduate students to solve important environmental problems. SUPERB-ITS participants receive a $4,500 stipend, room and board on campus in the International House, and up to $600 for travel expenses. The SUPERB-ITS website can be found at http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Programs/ugrad/superb/superb.html. To apply online, please visit http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Programs/ugrad/superb/superbapp/application.shtml .
ACM Queue Launches Online Programming Challenge
Competition Start Date - January 15, 2012
Competition End Date - February 12, 2012
ACM Queue Magazine is offering an online programming competition based on the 2011 International Collegiate Programming Competition (ICPC) Challenge problem. The Queue ICPC Challenge consists of a game called "Coercion" in which participants code "players" in C++, C#, Java, Python or JavaScript to compete with other programmers. Participants will have four weeks to develop their players, and can compete against preliminary players. The game is open to all ACM Queue readers. To enter the game, please register for a free ACM Web account at http://queue.acm.org/icpc/index.cfm?page=register.
Shodor Offers Spring Saturday Exploration Workshops for Students in Grades 6-8
Shodor is offering six Saturday workshops during the spring that will explore a variety of areas in science, technology, engineering or mathematics (STEM). These workshops combine hands-on activities with computer and network explorations, enabling students to discover the role of computers and communications technologies in modern science. Offered in partnership with North Carolina Central University, these workshops will allow students to participate in CybAdventures. CybAdventures is a morning of hands-on experiments or computational activities that are both entertaining and informative. Topics range from chemistry to geospatial sciences. For more information and to register, please visit http://www.shodor.org/succeed/workshops/current/.
Rice University Leadership Alliance Summer Research Early Identification Program (SR-EIP)
Application Deadline - February 1, 2012
The Leadership Alliance offers a summer research experience for undergraduates who would like to work eight to ten weeks under the guidance of a faculty or research mentor at a participating institution. Research experiences are available in all academic disciplines. For more information, please visit http://www.theleadershipalliance.org/Programs/SummerResearch/ResearchExperiences/tabid/244/Default.aspx.
Summer 2012 Paid Summer Research Internships for Underrepresented Students via CRA-W/CDC DREU
Application Deadline - February 15, 2012
The CRA-W/CDC Distributed Research Experiences for Undergraduates (DREU) Program matches promising undergraduates with a faculty mentor for a summer research experience at the faculty member's home institution. The objective of the DREU is to increase the number of women and students from underrepresented groups, including ethnic minorities and persons with disabilities, entering graduate studies in the fields of computer science and engineering Funding for the student consists of $6000 for the summer (10 weeks), plus relocation travel assistance when appropriate. For more information, including application guidelines for students and faculty, please visit http://parasol.tamu.edu/dreu/?.
News at 11 - XSEDE Partners in the Spotlight
ECSS symposium series on YouTube
As mentioned earlier in this blog, the ECSS staff is conducting a monthly symposium series and if you happened to miss the last two sessions in the series, you can tune in on YouTube. This is a great opportunity to catch these informative talks on your schedule and at your leisure. To view these seminars, please visit http://www.youtube.com/user/xsedeorg?feature=fupldc&email=first_upload.
Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center Wins High-Performance Computing Award
HPCwire, a leading electronic-news outlet for high-performance computing and communication (HPC), awarded a 2011 Reader's Choice Award to the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) for Best Use of HPC in an Edge HPC application. The award recognizes PSC for its work with Blacklight, PSC's SGI Altix UV1000 system, the world's largest shared-memory system, a resource of XSEDE, the National Science Foundation cyberinfrastructure program. Because of Blacklight's large amount of shared memory, scientists have been able to access up to 16 terabytes at a time, a feature that has enabled ground-breaking work in several fields, including fields of computer science - natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) - that haven't traditionally made substantial use of HPC. To read further, please visit http://www.psc.edu/publicinfo/news/2011/112111_HPCAward.php.
Who, What, Where - XSEDE Across the Country
Make your plans for XSEDE12
July 16-20, Chicago - Chicago, Illinois
Bridging from the eXtreme to the campus and beyond
Begin making your plans for the annual conference of XSEDE, which is scheduled for July 16-20, 2012, XSEDE12 promises to bring together staff and users for an engaging, productive five days at the Intercontinental hotel on Michigan Avenue, in the heart of the city's downtown and its prime shopping area, the Magnificent Mile. Please bookmark the following link and check back for updates, which will be posted as they become available: https://www.xsede.org//xsede12.
Contribute to the XSEDE Education Blog Spot
XSEDE News and Information is updated continually. To submit information for inclusion, please send email to amason@ucsd.edu.
