XSEDE Happenings
Blue Waters and XSEDE Host Extreme Scaling Workshop
July 15-16, 2012 – Chicago, Illinois
The National Center for Supercomputing Applications' Blue Waters and Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) projects are hosting the sixth in a series of Extreme Scaling workshops. Petascale systems provide computational science teams with effective, scalable, sustained petascale computing platforms. Our community expects these systems to provide sustained petascale performance on a broad range of science and engineering applications and algorithms, from applications that are compute-intensive to those that are data- and memory-intensive. The workshop will address algorithmic and applications challenges and solutions in large-scale computing systems with limited memory and I/O bandwidth. The presentations and discussions are intended to assist the computational science and engineering community in making effective use of petascale through extreme-scale systems across the spectrum of local campus-scale to national systems. For more information, please visit https://www.xsede.org/web/xscale/home
XSEDE 12 – It’s Not Too Late to Register!
Among the exciting XSEDE12 speakers are Richard Tapia, mathematician, professor, diversity advocate, and 2011 recipient of the National Medal of Science, as well as an international speaker who will be announced soon. The conference also promises valuable networking opportunities, an Internet cafe with a top-floor view of the city,
Registration link: http://www.regonline.com/builder/site/Default.aspx?EventID=1059727
Hotel, Parking and Travel info: https://www.xsede.org/web/xsede12/hotel/travel
Conference website: https://www.xsede.org/xsede12
XSEDE12 Features Diverse Speakers from Around the World
XSEDE12—the inaugural conference for science, education, outreach, software, and technology related to the National Science Foundation’s eXtreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment—will feature a diverse slate of international speakers, ranging from some of the best computational scientists in the world to some of the most innovative leaders working to bring about profound societal change through technological leadership. The conference also will feature a keynote address from distinguished mathematician, professor, and diversity advocate Richard Tapia. For a complete list of speakers, please visit
https://www.xsede.org/web/xsede12/welcome.
XSEDE Scholars (XSP) Conference Schedule Now Available for XSEDE12
The XSP will be holding special sessions for Scholars during the upcoming XSEDE12 conference. The schedule Is listed below. All questions regarding the schedule can be addressed to Alice Fisher at afisher@rice.edu.
XSEDE Scholars Program Schedule During XSEDE12
| Day | Time | Event |
| Sunday, 7/15 | 4-6pm | XSP reception |
| Sunday, 7/15 | 6-8pm | General student program dinner/welcome |
| Monday, 7/16 | 8am-5pm | Student tutorials |
| Monday, 7/16 | 6-7pm | XSEDE Scholars and Faculty Council dinner |
| Monday, 7/16 | 7-8:30pm | Networking session among Faculty Council and Scholars |
| Tuesday, 7/17 | 8am-4pm | Keynote speaker; plenary and technical sessions: https://www.xsede.org/web/xsede12/program/schedule |
| Tuesday, 7/17 | 4-6pm | XSP meeting/dinner: Graduate students talk with undergrads about research in small groups |
| Tuesday, 7/17 | 6pm | Student social event |
| Wednesday, 7/18 | 8am-5pm | Student programming contest |
| Wednesday, 7/18 | evening | Conference reception/poster session (including student posters)/viz showcase |
| Thursday, 7/19 | 8am-1:30pm | Plenary and technical sessions, panel discussions; awards luncheon; closing speaker |
| Thursday, 7/19 | afternoon | Students depart. |
| | | *Light breakfast and lunch will be provided by conference. |
Upcoming Conferences and Workshops
SDSC Summer Institute: Big Data Supercomputing
August 6-10, 2012 – La Jolla, California
SDSC is expanding upon its successful Gordon Summer Institute program to include both its Gordon and Trestles supercomputers. This is a unique opportunity for participants to focus on specific challenges in their research, such as optimizing a computationally intensive piece of code to make the best use of SDSC’s HPC resources. Current/potential users of SDSC resources are invited to apply. Experience working in a UNIX/Linux environment is essential. The registration fee is $150. Scholarships available to cover on-campus room and board for participants from U.S. academic and non-profit institutions, but not travel to or from the UC San Diego campus. For more information, please visit http://www.sdsc.edu/Events/summerinstitute/.
CSIG’12: Geoinformatics Education and Training for the 21st Century Geoscience Workforce
August 6-10, 2012 – La Jolla, California
The 9th Cyberinfrastructure Summer Institute for Geoscientists (CSIG’12) will be held at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, University of California, San Diego. Funded by the National Science Foundation, the theme for CSIG’12 is “Geoinformatics Education and Training for the 21st Century Geoscience Workforce”, reflecting the emphasis on preparing geoscientists for cyber-enabled research and education. As in prior years, CSIG’12 will include a broad survey of information technologies and their impact on science and education, but also focus on a few key technical topics, with in-depth presentations. Lectures provided by geoinformatics researchers and practitioners will introduce the technical topics and provide descriptions of the state-of-the-art, with examples taken from current geoscience-related cyberinfrastructure efforts. The topics will be chosen from among a broad selection including, data discovery, data access, and data mining; data and system interoperability; services-oriented architecture; workflow systems; use of semantic technologies and development and use of ontologies; high-performance computing; and cloud computing. For more information, please visit http://www.geongrid.org/index.php/education/summer_institute/csig_2012/.
8th IEEE International Conference on eScience
October 8-12, 2012 – Chicago, Illinois
Paper Submission Deadline Extended – July 18, 2012
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.mAlso, 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, including submission guidelines and topics, please visit http://www.ci.uchicago.edu/escience2012/
XSEDE Training at a Glance
I2PC Summer School on Multicore Programming
July 9-13, 2012 – Urbana-Champaign, Illinois
For more information, please visit http://i2pc.cs.illinois.edu/summer.html.
SDSC 2012 UC-HIPSCC International Summer School on AstroComputing
July 9-20, 2012 – La Jolla, California
For more information, please visit http://hipacc.ucsc.edu/ISSAC2012.html.
TACC Summer Supercomputing Institute 2012
July 30- August 3, 2012 – Austin, Texas
Application Deadline – June 15, 2012
Fore more information, please visit http://www.tacc.utexas.edu/summer-institute.
SDSC Supercomputing Summer Institute
August 6-10, 2012 – La Jolla, California
Registration Deadline – June 8, 2012
For more information, please visit http://www.sdsc.edu/Events/summerinstitute/index.html.
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
Lawrence Livermore National Lab, IBM Team Up on Supercomputer Initiative
IBM and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory are collaborating on an initiative to harness supercomputing to help industry identify trends and develop new technologies. An upcoming supercomputer named Vulcan will rely on some of the same ultrafast technology used by Lawrence Livermore’s Sequoia, which was recently named the globe’s fastest supercomputer. IBM says Vulcan will focus on evaluating unclassified data to facilitate the formation of new technologies in applied energy, green energy, manufacturing, data management, and other fields. Pacific Northwest National Laboratory's Steven Ashby says the federal government must set standards for how data should be organized as well as invest in basic research in computer science and mathematics to uncover patterns in massive data troves. To read further, please visit http://www.nextgov.com/big-data/2012/06/national-lab-ibm-team-supercomputer-initiative/56497/.
University of California, Berkeley Researchers Become Prophets of Zoom
Deep-zooming software, known as zoomable user interfaces (ZUIs), enable information such as text, images, and video to sit on a single, limitless surface that can be viewed at whatever size works best. One type of presentation software, developed by Prezi, is based on this kind of "infinite canvas." Before giving a demonstration, the presenter can pick waypoints on the canvas to be visited in sequence by pressing a button. The software is equipped with smooth pans, zooms, and rotations from one to the next. In addition, researchers at Microsoft, the University of California, Berkeley, and Moscow State University are developing ChronoZoom, software that displays timeline presentations with a zoom-based approach. Events are described along a timeline using text, images, and video. The researchers say the zoom-based approach can transform multipage Web sites into a single broad surface that simultaneously displays all content. Meanwhile, researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) are developing VisIt, software that shows particle behavior in nuclear reactions as simple animations. VisIt's zooming ranges from viewing the Milky Way galaxy to a grain of sand, says LBNL's Becky Springmeyer. To read further, please visit http://www.economist.com/node/21556097
Educator Curriculum, Opportunities and Information
Period of Transition: Stanford Computer Science Rethinks Core Curriculum
Stanford University's computer science faculty embarked on an initiative to reinvent its core curriculum about five years ago. "We needed to make the major more attractive, to show that computer science isn't just sitting in a cube all day," says Stanford associate chair for education Mehran Sahami. "Computer science is about having real impact in the world." The goal of the curriculum rethink was to show computer science majors direct, real-world applications of their skills, as well as attract students from other fields to see how computer science impacted their disciplines. So that students would have more flexibility, Sahami pared the curriculum to six core courses, three of which focus on theory while the others stress systems and programming. Students can opt for specialist tracks in subjects such as artificial intelligence, systems, theory, graphics, and human-computer interaction. Stanford's revised computer science program has experienced an 83 percent gain in enrollment in its first two years. To read further, please visit http://engineering.stanford.edu/news/period-transition-stanford-computer-science-rethinks-core-curriculum.
Google Funds Computer Teachers and Raspberry Pis in England
Google is partnering with the Teach First charity to train and fund British teachers specializing in computer science. Additional funds will be provided for teaching aids, such as Raspberry Pis or Arduino starter kits, notes Google chairman Eric Schmidt. He says the United Kingdom has been throwing away its great computing heritage by focusing on how to use software instead of how to make it. "Put simply, technology breakthroughs can't happen without the scientists and engineers to make them," Schmidt says. "The challenge that society faces is to equip enough people, with the right skills and mindset, and to get them to work on the most important problems." Teach First puts exceptional graduates on a six-week training program before sending them to schools where they teach for a two-year period. The Google funds will be used to train more than 100 first-rate science teachers over the next three years, with the majority focused on computer science. "It's vital to expose kids to this early if they're to have the chance of a career in computing," Schmidt says. Each of the 100 teachers will be given a budget to buy equipment related to their teaching. To read further, please visit http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-18182280.
Student Engagement Opportunities and Information
Tech Companies Announce 'Girls Who Code' Initiative
Four technology firms--Twitter, General Electric, Google, and eBay--say they are joining the "Girls Who Code" organization, which seeks to increase the number of young women in the fields of programming and engineering. The organization will soon launch a mentoring and teaching initiative in New York. Girls Who Code was founded by hedge fund lawyer Reshma Saujani, a former New York deputy public advocate, who plans to begin the coding program in the city this summer. She intends to expand the program to other cities in 2013. Saujani notes that although 57 percent of college graduates are women, only 14 percent of computer science and engineering degrees are awarded to them. Twitter engineer Sara Haider says the company would begin "an eight-week intensive program to teach basic principles of computer science and coding as well as sessions on design, research, and entrepreneurship." To read further, please visit http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/26/tech-companies-announce-girls-who-code-initiative/.
Virtual School of Computational Science and Engineering
Programming Heterogeneous Parallel Computing Systems (July 10 - 13, 201
Science Cloud Summer School (July 30 - August 3, 2012)
Proven Algorithmic Techniques for Many-core Processors (August 13 - 17, 2012)
The Virtual School of Computational Science and Engineering (VSCSE) helps graduate students, post-docs and young professionals from all disciplines and institutions across the country gain the skills they need to use advanced computational resources to advance their research. Often the practical aspects of computational science fall between the cracks, as computer science departments focus on what computer scientists need to know and domain science and engineering departments focus on the applications of computer science to those disciplines. The Virtual School was created to help students fill those knowledge gaps, preparing them to use emerging petascale (and then exascale) computing resources. Participating in the Virtual School also helps students build networks of fellow researchers who they can turn to for support and collaboration. Virtual School courses are delivered simultaneously at multiple locations across the country using high-definition videoconferencing technology. For more information and to register, please visit https://hub.vscse.org/. Questions? Please contact info@vscse.org.
SDSC 2012 UC-HIPSCC International Summer School on AstroComputing
July 9-20, 2012 – La Jolla, California
This is the third UC-HiPACC International Summer School on AstroComputation. The 2010 school at UCSC was on galaxy simulations and the 2011 school at Berkeley and LBNL was on computational explosive astrophysics. A key feature of the UC-HiPACC summer schools has been the access by all students to accounts on a powerful supercomputer on which the lecturers have put relevant codes and sample inputs and outputs, and the inclusion in the school of workshops each afternoon in which the students can learn how to use these tools. For the 2012 summer school on AstroInformatics, all students will have accounts on the new Gordon data-centric supercomputer at SDSC, and many relevant astronomical datasets and simulation outputs will be put on Gordon's massive FLASH memory for the use of the students. For more information about the workshop, including speakers and topics, please visit http://hipacc.ucsc.edu/ISSAC2012.html.
Faculty Opportunities
NSF Call for Proposals: US-China Collaborative Software Research
The NSF Office of Cyberinfrastructure (OCI) and the Division of Computer and Network Systems (CNS) in the Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate (CISE) are interested in encouraging collaborations with China-based researchers who are currently funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, NSFC. This interest is one outcome from the US and China Workshop Series to Build a Collaborative Framework for Developing Shared Software Infrastructure, which was supported jointly by the NSF and the NSFC (workshop website: http://www.nsf-nsfc-sw.org/). US-based researchers with current NSF awards can submit supplemental funding requests to their awards to collaborate with China-based researchers who are currently funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, NSFC. Topics must fit the Software Infrastructure for Sustained Innovation (SI2) program of OCI (http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2011/nsf11589/nsf11589.htm ) in the broad area of software development in support of science and engineering research, or the core programs of the CNS Division of CISE, (http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2011/nsf11555/nsf11555.htm). Supplemental funding requests may include international planning visits, and may include funding for students. For more information, please visit http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2012/nsf12096/nsf12096.jsp?WT.mc_id=USNSF_25&WT.mc_ev=click.
News at 11:00: XSEDE Staff and Partners in the News
Georgia Tech's Keeneland System Going Production July 2, 2012
The Keeneland system, awarded to Georgia Tech by NSF, is going production as a Level 1 Service Provider on July 2, 2012. The XSEDE Software Testing and Deployment (ST&D) group is already working with the Keeneland staff to integrate this system into XSEDE using ST&D’s Service Provider checklist. NICS is a close partner with Georgia Tech on this system and support for Keeneland will be coordinated through NICS.
Last But Not Least – Computational News of Interest
Over-55s Pick Passwords Twice as Secure as Teenagers'
People over the age of 55 pick passwords that are twice as strong of those chosen by people under 25 years old, according to University of Cambridge researchers, who recently analyzed the passwords of nearly 70 million Yahoo! users. The researchers also calculated the password strengths for different demographic groups and compared the results. A comparison among different nationalities found that German and Korean speakers chose the strongest passwords, while Indonesians picked the weakest. Password strength is measured in bits, where cracking one bit is equal to the chance of correctly guessing a coin toss, and each additional bit doubles the password's strength. The researchers, led by Cambridge's Joseph Bonneau, found that user-chosen passwords offer less than 10 bits of security against online attacks, and about 20 bits of security against offline attacks. The researchers note their finding is surprising, since even a randomly selected six-character password comprised of numbers and upper- and lower-case letters should offer 32 bits of security. Bonneau attributes the discrepancy to people choosing much easier passwords than those theoretically permitted. He recommends assigning people randomly picked nine-digit passwords instead, which would yield 30 bits of security against every conceivable attack. To read further, please visit http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21428665.900-over55s-pick-passwords-twice-as-secure-as-teenagers.html.
Europeans Develop Open Source Software for Biosciences
Life sciences researchers for the first time will be able to examine the spread of cancer cells in a three-dimensional environment and determine how effectively viruses and targeted drugs enter cells. New open source software for multidimensional image visualization, processing, and analysis has made this possible. A German and Finnish team has spent the past 10 years working to streamline and optimize the BioImageXD software. The team was able to generate precise software specifications for processing imaging data using open source principles, and develop software that would be accessible to all researchers. BioImageXD can help bioscience and biomedical researchers generate new analysis methods, simultaneously process myriad images, and analyze millions of molecules. To read further, please visit http://cordis.europa.eu/fetch?CALLER=EN_NEWS_FP7&ACTION=D&DOC=1&CAT=NEWS&QUERY=01382e0fe6e3:6d98:23b767cc&RCN=34770.
Chess Legend Garry Kasparov Versus Turing
Chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov took on Alan Turing's chess program during the University of Manchester's Alan Turing Centenary Conference, and defeated Turochamp in just 16 moves. Turing wrote the program more than 60 years ago, designing it to play semi-intelligently using rules of thumb to pick smart moves. He tried to implement the program as soon as the Manchester Ferranti Mark 1 computer was built at the university, but did not finish the work. Although Turing designed Turochamp to play two moves ahead, and calculate the hundreds of moves available, Kasparov thinks at least 10 moves ahead. The Russian grandmaster played Turochamp during his lecture at the conference, and praised Turing for his research. "He wrote algorithms without having a computer--many young scientists would never believe that was possible," Kasparov says. "It was an outstanding accomplishment." To read further, please visit http://www.manchester.ac.uk/aboutus/news/display/?id=8432
