XSEDE Happenings

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.

 

XSEDE12 Student and Mentor Events – Don’t Miss Them!

Two XSEDE12 events open to OSG, Student Engagement and XSEDE Scholar Program student participants and mentors are just around the corner. Each group will come together for a kickoff dinner on Sunday, July 15 in the Camelot Room on the 8th Floor of the Intercontinental Hotel. The event from 6:00pm-8:00pm will feature a buffet dinner in an informal atmosphere. On Wednesday, July 18 from noon-1:oopm, these two groups will again come together for our Meet Interesting People lunch. Students have signed up to sit with a specific mentor to share ideas and learn from their selected computer scientist. If you are a student and have not yet signed up, it’s not too late! Please email amson@ucsd.edu to reserve your space.

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 9^th 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 21^st 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. 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, including submission guidelines and topics, please visit http://www.ci.uchicago.edu/escience2012/

XSEDE Training at a Glance

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.

PSC Hosts XSEDE New User Training
July 27, 2012 – online Hosted by PSC, this 90-minute webinar provides a general overview and reference information for first-time users of XSED...
For more information, please visit http://psc.edu/index.php/component/jevents/icalrepeat.detail/2012/07/27/40/53|55/xsede-new-user-training.

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.

PSC Proven Algorithmic Techniques for Many-core Processors
August 13-17, 2012 – Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
For more information, please visit

https://hub.vscse.org to register and choose PSC

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

TACC and Rutgers Supercomputers Aiding Husband-and-Wife Team to Improve Breast Cancer Exams

Researchers from the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology are using Ranger at the Texas Advanced Computing Center to run simulations of a new breast cancer detection method. Their innovative work of the husband and wife team exploits the difference in stiffness between regular and cancerous tissue, and the team is working to speed up and improve the new method before pursuing clinical testing. The hope is that this new test will become an inexpensive, painless way to aid early detection as part of routine exams. Image: A typical result from the stiffness-mapping algorithm for a simulated breast tumor. The predicted tumor location is shown in red, while the green shows the true location. Computed using TACC's Ranger supercomputer. To read further, please visit http://www.tacc.utexas.edu/news/feature-stories/2012/breast-cancer-exams.

Biomolecular Research Program Extended at Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center

The National Resource for Biomedical Supercomputing (NRBSC) at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) just completed soliciting proposals for another round of research with Anton, a special-purpose supercomputer designed by D. E. Shaw Research (DESRES) that has enabled researchers to achieve exceptional results in the simulation of biomolecules.  Anton allows researchers to execute ultra-fast “molecular dynamics” (MD) simulations of proteins and nucleic acids, such as DNA and RNA, over much longer time periods than have previously been accessible to computational study. Insights into biomolecular structure and function facilitated by the use of Anton could potentially lead to the development of new and better therapeutic drugs and other improvements in disease treatment. To read further, please visit http://psc.edu/index.php/newscenter/71-2012press/703-biomolecular-research-program-extended-at-psc.

Educator Curriculum, Opportunities and Information

Special Connected Educator Month Webinars for States & District
Tuesday, July 17, 3-4 PM ET
Wednesday, June 25,  2-3 PM ET

The US Department of Education has declared August Connected Educator Month, aimed at broadening and deepening educator participation in online communities and networks while providing opportunities for education leaders to work together to move the field forward. CEM will be celebrated with four-plus weeks of online events and activities, including forums, webinars, guided tours, open houses, contests, badges, and more. More than 50 major national education organizations, communities, and companies have committed to participate. There will be special informational and planning webinars for interested school districts offered next week and the week after. This is a terrific opportunity to think about how your district can promote this effort during your “back-to-school” professional development for your teachers/administrators. For access instructions and other information about these webinars, please contact Marshal Conley at mconley@air.org.  

LittleFe/SC12 HPC Educators Program Buildout Announcement
Application Deadline – August 15, 2012

Apply for a FREE LittleFe mini-cluster for your College or University to use for teaching parallel programming, cluster computing and/or computational and data-enabled science & engineering to your students and colleagues! Applications are due August 15, 2012 at 20:00 US-ET, apply on-line at http://littlefe.net The 2012 buildout event will be hosted as part of the SuperComputing Conference’s SC12 HPC Educators Program. Interested teams will apply to both the SC12 HPC Educators Program and the LittleFe buildout program.

NSDL Needs Your Professional Input – A Call to Secondary School Mathematics Teachers
Survey Deadline – July 29, 2012

At the request of the National Science Foundation, a survey is being conducted on how secondary math teachers access, use, and communicate about digital resources that are aligned to the Common Core Standards. If you are willing to participate in a 15-20 minute survey to provide your perspectives on the topic, please click on the web URL below after you read the rest of this message. Completing the survey entitles you to enter a drawing for an iPad. To get started: http://tinyurl.com/czzttme. If you have any questions, please contact Lauren Garcia at lgarcia@metiri.com .

Student Engagement Opportunities and Information

Virtual School of Computational Science and Engineering
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.

Faculty Opportunities

Call for proposals for early adopters competition
NSF/IEEE-TCPP Curriculum Initiative on
Parallel and Distributed Computing -- Core Topics for Undergraduates
Proposal Submission Deadline: July 10, 2012
Notification: July 30, 2012

Thanks to NSF funding, we will have a Fall-12 early adopter status competition. As with Spring-11, Fall-11, and Spring-12 competitions, the early adopters would be:

(i) instructors of core courses, such as CS1, CS2, Systems, and Data Structures and Algorithms,

(ii) instructors of elective/advanced courses, such as those on parallel and distributed computing, networking, architecture, algorithm, programming language, and software engineering,

(iii) department chairs and members of department curriculum committees, who are responsible for core CS/CE courses.

A department-wide multi-course multi-semester adoption effort in the core level courses is encouraged. Submit your proposal laying out plans for integrating and evaluating some of the proposed topics into your core/elective undergraduate CS/CE courses. For more information and complete details, please visit https://www.easychair.org/account/signin.cgi?conf=fall12earlyadopter.

Last But Not Least – Computational News of Interest

Man or Machine?


In an interview, artificial intelligence pioneer and inventor Ray Kurzweil discusses advances in artificial intelligence and what it means to be human. Kurzweil notes the human brain has 300 million pattern recognizers in the neocortex. "We are learning how these modules work, how they wire themselves," he says. "The technique that we have evolved in the field of artificial intelligence is mathematically equivalent to what the brain is doing." There are very few differences between higher-level forms of reasoning and machine calculations, according to Kurzweil. "The success of something like Watson is a testament that we are making real progress in getting computers to do similar things to what the brain is doing," he says. Every year, Kurzweil runs a Turing test on his computers and has seen steady improvement. "My prediction all along has been that computers will be able to deal with a full range of human intelligence by 2029," he says. To read further, please visit http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304782404577490533504354976.html.

A Robot Takes Stock to Aid Consumers

Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) researchers have developed Andyvision, a robot that scans a retailer's shelves to create a real-time interactive map of the store, which customers can browse using an in-store screen. Andyvision also conducts a detailed inventory check, identifying each item and alerting employees if an item is low or has been misplaced. The robot utilizes a combination of image-processing and machine-learning algorithms, a database of two- and three-dimensional images showing the store's stock, and a map of the store's layout. CMU professor Priya Narasimhan says that although none of the technologies are revolutionary, it is the combination of different types of algorithms running on a low-power system that makes the system unique. To read further, please visit http://www.technologyreview.com/news/428374/a-robot-takes-stock/.

Future-Predicting System Cuts App Loading Time


The loading time of applications could be reduced by having a system predict when users want to use apps, according to researchers at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. The predictive-caching approach involves guessing which software routines are most likely to be needed for the next stage of a computerized process. As a result, the right app would be ready when the user needs it, without booting from scratch. The system makes use of a smartphone's location and motion sensors to learn when the user typically runs an app. For example, the software would check the time a person walks to a commuter train station each day and opens a train-times app to see if trains are running on schedule. The software would sense the user is walking and preload the app, with the current train information retrieved by the time the user arrives at the street corner where the user typically opens the app. In tests, the software reduced six seconds from the average 20-second boot-up time for apps on Windows phones, but used 2 percent of the battery per day. To read further, please visit http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21428703.800-futurepredicting-system-cuts-app-loading-time.html.