Upcoming Conferences and Workshops

First International Conference on Space, Time, and CyberGIS (CyberGIS'12)
August 6-9, 2012 – Urbana-Champaign, Illinois

The First International Conference on Space, Time, and CyberGIS (CyberGIS'12) aims to bring together researchers, educators, and practitioners for sharing and synergistically advancing the state of the art of CyberGIS and Space-Time Analysis/Modeling/Synthesis; and to foster international collaboration and cooperation in this area. The CyberInfrastructure and Geospatial Information Laboratory (CIGI: http://cigi.illinois.edu) and National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA: http://ncsa.illinois.edu) will host the conference on the campus of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. CIGI researches and develops cutting-edge cyberinfrastructure to advance geospatial sciences and technologies while NCSA has been a world leader in advancing and supporting cyberinfrastructure, and in particular high-performance computing and scientific visualization, for more than 25 years. For more information and to register, please visit http://www.cigi.illinois.edu/cybergis12/index.php

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/.

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

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

Workshop on Managing Systems Automatically and Dynamically (MAD)
At the USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI October 8-10, 2012 – Hollywood, California

The complexity of modern systems makes them extremely challenging to manage. From highly heterogeneous desktop environments to large-scale systems that consist of many thousands of software and hardware components, these systems exhibit a wide range of complex behaviors are difficult to predict. As such, although raw computational capability of these systems grows each year, much of it is lost to (i) complex failures that are difficult to localize and (ii) to poor performance and efficiency that results from system configuration that is inappropriate for the user’s workload. The MAD workshop focuses on techniques to make complex systems manageable, addressing the problem’s three major aspects: For more information please visit http://www.linkedin.com/groupAnswers?viewQuestionAndAnswers=&discussionID=132162306&gid=4178444&trk=eml-anet_dig-b_nd-pst_ttle-cn&ut=377CZVOKV4n5k1.

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.

Exhibitor Information: http://sacnas.org/institutions/exhibiting

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.

Agenda: http://www.educause.edu/annual-conference/agenda-and-program

Registration Information: http://www.educause.edu/annual-conference/register-now

Exhibitor Information: http://www.educause.edu/annual-conference/exhibitor

SC12
November 10-16, 2012 -  Salt Lake City, Utah
Exhibition - November 12-15, 2012

For 24 years, SC has been at the forefront in gathering the best and brightest minds in supercomputing together, with our unparalleled technical papers, tutorials, posters and speakers. SC12 will take a major step forward not only in supercomputing, but in super-conferencing, with everything designed to make the 2012 conference the most ‘you' friendly conference in the world. We're streamlining conference information and moving to a virtually real-time method of determining technical program thrusts. No more pre-determined technical themes picked far in advance. Through social media, data mining, and active polling, we'll see which technical interests and issues emerge throughout the year, and focus on the ones that interest you the most. For more information and to register, please visit http://sc12.supercomputing.org/content/exhibitor-prospectus.

XSEDE Training at a Glance

TACC Summer Supercomputing Institute 2012
July 30- August 3, 2012 – Austin, Texas
For more information, please visit http://www.tacc.utexas.edu/summer-institute.

SDSC Supercomputing Summer Institute
August 6-10, 2012 – La Jolla, California
For more information, please visit http://www.sdsc.edu/Events/summerinstitute/index.html.

The 2012 Pab Lab Boot Camp – Short Course on Parallel Programming
August 17, 2012 – webinar
For more information, please visit https://www.xsede.org/web/xup/course-calendar/-/training/class/47.

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

NIST’s BIG DATA Workshop: Too Much Data, Not Enough Solutions


Argonne National Laboratory Computation Institute director Ian Foster gave a keynote speech at the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology's recent BIG DATA Workshop, an event that brought together experts from academia, industry, and government to study key topics in support of the federal government's Big Data R&D Initiative. Foster says researchers and institutions can meet the needs of big data by accelerating discovery and innovation worldwide with a research information technology (IT) as a service program. In addition, he says IT professionals can leverage the cloud to provide millions of researchers with access to powerful tools, enable a massive shortening of cycle times in the research process, and reduce the research IT needs. Meanwhile, the U.S. National Science Foundation's (NSF's) Howard Wactlar says a paradigm shift is currently taking place, from hypothesis-driven research to data-driven research. To read further, please visit http://www.cccblog.org/2012/06/21/nists-big-data-workshoptoo-much-data-not-enough-solutions/.


$27 Million Award Bolsters Open Science Grid


The U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE's) Office of Science and the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) recently committed up to $27 million to the Open Science Grid (OSG), a nine-member partnership to advance distributed high-throughput computing capabilities at more than 80 sites. "The commitment from the two agencies will take the capabilities and culture we've developed to more campuses throughout the United States," says OSG researcher and University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Miron Livny. "It is about advancing the state of the art to support education and research in more science domains and improve our ability to handle more data." The Office of Science will contribute up to $8.2 million for distributed computing efforts based at DOE national laboratories. The NSF will contribute the remaining balance of the funding, which will be used to promote distributed computing resources at U.S. universities. To read further, please visit http://www.news.wisc.edu/20800.

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, UCSD and Los Alamos National Laboratory Researchers Design Strategies for Extracting Interesting Data from Massive Scientific Datasets

Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), Los Alamos National Laboratory, Tsinghua University, and Brown University have developed software strategies for storing, mining, and analyzing huge datasets that focus on data generated by VPIC, a state-of-the-art plasma physics code. When the researchers ran VPIC on the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center’s supercomputer, they generated a three-dimensional (3D) magnetic reconnection dataset of one trillion particles. VPIC simulated the process in thousands of time-steps, periodically writing a 32-terabyte file to disk at specified times. The researchers applied an enhanced version of the FastQuery tool to index the massive dataset in about 10 minutes. "This is the first time anyone has ever queried and visualized 3D particle datasets of this size," says UCSD researcher Homa Karimabadi. To read further, please visit http://crd.lbl.gov/news-and-publications/news/2012/sifting-through-a-trillion-electrons/.

Student Engagement Opportunities and Information

 

SC12 Broader Engagement Program

Submission Deadline – August 11, 2012

The goal of the Broader Engagement (BE) Program is to increase the participation of individuals who have been traditionally underrepresented in high performance computing (HPC). The program offers special activities to introduce, engage and support a diverse community in the conference and in HPC. Competitive grants will be available to support travel to and participation in the SC’12 technical program. Consideration will be given to applicants from groups that traditionally have been underrepresented in HPC, such as African Americans, Hispanics, Native Americans, Alaska Natives, Native Hawaiians, Pacific Islanders, and other underrepresented groups around the world, including women and people with disabilities. We encourage applications from people in all computing-related disciplines—from research, education and industry. For more information, including grant guidelines, please visit http://sc12.supercomputing.org/content/broader-engagement. Applications will be available at the SC12 Submissions site http://submissions.supercomputing.org/.

SC12 Student Volunteer Programs
Submission Deadline – July 31, 2012’

We encourage undergraduate and graduate students to apply as volunteers to help with the administration of the conference. In exchange for volunteering, you will receive complimentary conference registration, housing (for out-of-town volunteers), and most meals. As a student volunteer, you will have an opportunity to learn about and discuss the latest high performance computing and networking technologies, meet leading researchers from around the world, all while contributing to the success of SC12. Limited support for transportation expenses (such as airfare) are available for international students and students from groups that traditionally have been underrepresented in HPC (African Americans, Hispanics, Native Americans, Alaska Natives, Native Hawaiians, Pacific Islanders, the physically challenge, and women). Student volunteers are expected to be available to work 4-5 hours per day during the week of the conference. We require no special skills or experience for most volunteer positions, but some familiarity with computing platforms, audio/visual equipment or office equipment is helpful. Applications will be available at the SC12 Submissions site http://submissions.supercomputing.org/. For more information, please visit http://sc12.supercomputing.org/content/student-volunteers.

SC12 Experiencing HPC for Undergraduates
Submission Deadline – July 31, 2012’

The Experiencing HPC for Undergraduates program will provide exposure to HPC research topics and techniques to undergraduate students, at the sophomore level and above. The program will introduce you to various aspects of HPC research at the SC12 conference, to make you aware of opportunities to perform research as an undergraduate and potentially in graduate school or in a job related to HPC topics in computer science and computational science. The program will contain selected parts of the main SC Technical Program, with several additional elements. The program will include special sessions of the conference, including panels with current graduate students in HPC areas to discuss graduate school and research, and panels with senior HPC researchers from universities, government  and industrial labs to discuss career opportunities in HPC fields. For more information, please visit http://sc12.supercomputing.org/content/experiencing-hpc-undergraduates. Applications will be available at the SC12 Submissions site http://submissions.supercomputing.org/.

SC12 Doctoral Showcase
Submission Deadline – July 31, 2012

Submissions are now being accepted for the Doctoral Showcase program, which for 2012 has been expanded into two tracks:

• The Dissertation Research Showcase track for Ph.D. students who will be graduating in the next 12 months, and
• The Early Research Showcase track for Ph.D. and master’s students who are in the early stages of their research.

Dissertation Research Showcase

The dissertation research of Ph.D. students in high performance computing, networking, storage and analysis will be spotlighted in the Doctoral Showcase program. This track provides a venue for Ph.D. students who will be graduating in the next 12 months to present a summary of their latest and systematic dissertation research. It provides an opportunity to educate junior graduate students working in high performance computing areas. This program also provides an ideal opportunity for prospective employers in academia, research laboratories and industry to interact with prospective Ph.D.s. Students are asked to submit a two-page summary of their research, publications list and three slides on their major results for consideration by the Doctoral Showcase committee. These accepted Ph.D. students will be invited for presentations at the SC12 conference. Everyone attending the conference is encouraged to attend this program. Come to see the latest and greatest dissertation work done by tomorrow’s HPC experts.

 Early Research Showcase

The Early Research Showcase track provides early-stage research students with an opportunity to present their research and engage with the SC community. This track allows students in the first three years of their Ph.D. to present promising early-stage research, whilst encouraging conversations with SC experts. The format of this track is a poster exhibition that will be co-scheduled with the Dissertation Research Showcase. The showcase invites both students who are researching computational techniques and high performance computing, and students applying computational techniques to their scientific domain. Students are asked to submit a one-page summary of their research. Participating students are encouraged to use the poster session as a forum to introduce new approaches, discuss new technology, learn about relevant literature or define future research goals. Everyone attending the conference is encouraged to attend this program to engage with future HPC experts and provide valuable feedback and learn about future research developments. The Early Research Showcase is an evolution of the Early Adopters Ph.D. Workshops (SC09 to SC11). To make a submission, please use the SC12 submissions site:  http://submissions.supercomputing.org/. More information can be found at http://sc12.supercomputing.org/content/doctoral-showcase-program. ‘

ACM Student Research Poster Competition
Submission Deadline – July 31, 2012

SC12 is soliciting submissions for posters that display cutting-edge, interesting research and work in progress in high performance computing, storage, networking and analytics. Posters provide an excellent opportunity for short presentations and informal discussions with conference attendees.Posters will be prominently displayed for the duration of the conference, giving presenters a chance to showcase their latest results and innovations. Authors of accepted posters will have the opportunity to prepare extended abstracts that will be archived with other SC12 materials in IEEE or ACM digital libraries. It is also planned that the presented posters will be digitally archived and made publicly available after the conference. A best poster award will be presented based on quality of research work and quality of poster presentation. SC12 will also host the ACM Student Research Competition (SRC). This competitive event will feature posters from undergraduate and graduate students showcasing original research. Undergraduate submissions are strongly encouraged and all participating students must be ACM members. Winners will receive prizes and the top finishers will be invited to participate in the ACM Student Research Competition Grand Finals. Otherwise the same guidelines as for regular posters apply. For more information, please visit http://sc12.supercomputing.org/node/53. To make a submission, please use the SC12 submissions site http://submissions.supercomputing.org/.

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

Pegasus Project Leader, White House Advanced Manufacturing Advisor to Speak at HUBzero Conference

Scientists today often link computational tools together and run them in “workflows” thousands of times to simulate on the computer what would otherwise take thousands of experiments in a real laboratory. The Pegasus Workflow Management System, developed by Ewa Deelman and her team at the University of Southern California, makes workflow building — along with running jobs on grid and cloud computing resources and supercomputing clusters — easier so researchers can concentrate on research instead of computer programming. Now, Pegasus is integrated into HUBzero, a ready-made, Web-based cyberinfrastructure being employed for research and education projects in myriad fields that was developed at Purdue. Deelman will present her work at HUBbub 2012, the annual users conference for HUBzero aimed at researchers, practitioners, educators and IT professionals engaged in building and using cyberinfrastructure for research and education. To read further, please visit http://www.rcac.purdue.edu/news/detail.cfm?NewsID=539.

Exascale Computing: The View From Argonne’s Stevens, Papka and Snir 



In an interview, U.S. Argonne National Laboratory directors Rick Stevens, Michael Papka, and Marc Snir contextualize the challenges and advantages of developing exascale supercomputing systems. Snir stresses that building an exascale system by stitching together many petascale computers is impossible, and argues that exascale is needed to provide complex models to match hypothesis to evidence in increasingly complex systems. "As we transition to the exascale era the hierarchy of systems will largely remain intact, so the advances needed for exascale will influence petascale resources and so on down through the computing space," Papka says. Snir anticipates a 10-year window for exascale system deployment at best, and he notes that Argonne "is heavily involved in exascale research, from architecture, through operating systems, runtime, storage, languages and libraries, to algorithms and application codes." Papka says the U.S. Department of Energy exascale initiative opted for a development approach emphasizing co-design to ensure that the delivered exascale resources fulfill the requirements of the domain researchers and their applications. To read further, please visit http://www.hpcwire.com/hpcwire/2012-06-21/exascale_computing:_the_view_from_argonne.html.

Last But Not Least – Computational News of Interest

North American Software Developers Getting Younger: Study 


Thirty-eight years is now the median age of software developers in North America, which is a significant decline from a peak of 46 in 2008, according to a recent Evans Data study. North American developers also are statistically younger than their counterparts in the Europe, Middle East, and Africa region, which have a median age of 39. However, North American developers are older than those in the Asia-Pacific region or Latin America, where the median ages are 34 and 35, respectively. "The median age decline in North America is interesting and most likely reflects two situations we've been experiencing since 2008," says Evans Data CEO Janel Garvin. "The advent of mobile with new devices and distribution channels has attracted younger developers, while at the same time, the recession has resulted in many older developers retiring or being laid off." The average age remains relatively high in North America at 44, which suggests that some very old developers have not left programming. In other regions, the median and mean ages have risen steadily in recent years. To read further, please visit http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Application-Development/North-American-Software-Developers-Getting-Younger-Study-327474/.

Mexican Jumping Beans May Influence Robot Design

The locomotion of the Mexican jumping bean could provide clues for designing future micro-robots with low intelligence and power needs. Georgia Institute of Technology engineers studied the motion of Mexican jumping beans and developed an algorithm based on their rolling, jumping, and flipping behavior. They then used the algorithm to program robots to move in a controlled direction. "Mexican jumping beans have many interesting abilities that are useful for robotics," says Georgia Tech's David Hu. He notes that they move within an armored shell but are able to sense their surroundings to find shadows and hide, and that they are almost spherical but have a notch that enables them to move uphill and across small obstacles. "All these abilities might be implemented in a much smaller robot," Hu says. To read further, please visit, http://phys.org/news/2012-06-mexican-beans-robot-video.html.

How Many Computers to Identify a Cat? 16,000


Google researchers have created one of the largest neural networks for machine learning, consisting of 16,000 computer processors and more than one billion connections. The researchers fed the system 10 million digital images from YouTube for processing, and it performed much better than previous efforts by doubling its accuracy in recognizing objects from a list of 20,000 distinct items. The researchers also note the network taught itself to recognize cats. The software-based neural network closely mirrors theories developed by biologists that suggest individual neurons are trained inside the brain to detect significant objects. "The idea is that instead of having teams of researchers trying to find out how to find edges, you instead throw a ton of data at the algorithm and you let the data speak and have the software automatically learn from the data," says Google and Stanford University researcher Andrew Y. Ng. To read further, please visit http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/26/technology/in-a-big-network-of-computers-evidence-of-machine-learning.html?_r=1.