Scalable Computing Support Center
Scientific and High-Performance Computing News
From Google:
At Google, we are committed to developing new technologies to help our users find and use information. While we do significant in-house research and engineering, we also maintain strong ties with academic institutions worldwide pursuing innovative research in core areas relevant to our mission. As part of that vision, the Google Research Awards program aims to identify and support world-class, full-time faculty pursuing research in areas of mutual interest.
Our next submission deadline is October 15th, 2013. We will post a submission link by October 4th, 2013. Please carefully review all the instructions below, including our FAQs and proposal advice.
From the Virtual School of Computational Science and Engineering – http://vscse.org/ –
The VSCSE Summer School continues to be a popular choice for graduate students, post- doctoral students and professionals from academia, government and industry to gain the skills they need to leverage the power of cutting-edge computational resources.
We’re planning a number of exciting activities for 2013, including two multi-day summer school courses:
- Data Intensive Summer School, July 8 – 10, 2013
- Proven Algorithmic Techniques for Many-Core Processors, July 29 – August 2, 2013
Register now at the XSEDE Portal!
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.
Questions? Email info@vscse.org.
The Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program promotes transformational advances in science and technology for computationally intensive, large-scale research projects through large allocations of computer time and supporting resources at the Argonne and Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (LCF) centers, operated by the US Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science.
INCITE seeks research enterprises for capability computing: production simulations – including ensembles – that use a large fraction of the LCF systems or require the unique LCF architectural infrastructure for high-impact projects that cannot be performed anywhere else.
INCITE is currently soliciting proposals of research for awards of time on the 27-petaflops Cray XK7 “Titan” and the 10-petaflops IBM Blue Gene/Q “Mira” beginning Calendar Year (CY) 2014. More than five billion core-hours will be allocated for CY 2014. Average awards per project for CY 2014 are expected to be on the order of 50 million core-hours for Titan and 100 million core-hours for Mira, but could be as much as several hundred million core hours. Proposals may be for up to three years.
For more information, see:
Starting May 1st, Coursera will be offering a High-Performance Scientific Computing class from Randall J. LeVeque of the University of Washington:
From the course description:
Programming-oriented course on effectively using modern computers to solve scientific computing problems arising in the physical/engineering sciences and other fields. Provides an introduction to efficient serial and parallel computing using Fortran 90, OpenMP, MPI, and Python, and software development tools such as version control, Makefiles, and debugging.
About the Course: Computation and simulation are increasingly important in all aspects of science and engineering. At the same time writing efficient computer programs to take full advantage of current computers is becoming increasingly difficult. Even laptops now have 4 or more processors, but using them all to solve a single problem faster often requires rethinking the algorithm to introduce parallelism, and then programming in a language that can express this parallelism. Writing efficient programs also requires some knowledge of machine arithmetic, computer architecture, and memory hierarchies.
Sorry for the late notice … just got this from our friends at Shodor Foundation:
Training available for students in U.S., Europe, and Japan at International Summer School on HPC Challenges in Computational Sciences
Graduate students and postdoctoral scholars in the UnitedStates, Europe, and Japan are invited to apply for the fourth InternationalSummer School on HPC Challenges in Computational Sciences, to be held June 23-28, 2013, at New York University inNew York City. The summer school is sponsored by the U.S. National Science Foundation’s Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) project, the European Union Seventh Framework Program’s Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE), and RIKEN Advanced Insti–tute for Computational Science (RIKEN AICS).
Leading American, European and Japanese computational scientists and high-performance computing technologists will offer instruction on a variety of topics, including:
· Access to EU, U.S., and Japanese cyberinfrastructures
· HPC challenges by discipline (e.g., bioinformatics, computer science, chemistry, and physics)
· HPC programming proficiencies
· Performance analysis & profiling
· Algorithmic approaches & numerical libraries
· Data-intensive computing
· Scientific visualization
The expense-paid summer school will benefit advanced scholars from European, U.S., and Japanese institutions who use HPC to conduct research.
Further information and to apply for the 2013 summer school, visit https://www.xsede.org/web/summerschool13. Applications are due by March 18.
Contacts:
PRACE:
Hermann Lederer
RZG, Max Planck Society, Germany
Simon Wong
ICHEC, Ireland
RIKEN AICS:
Mitsuhisa Sato
AICS, RIKEN
XSEDE:
Scott Lathrop
NCSA, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, United States
About PRACE: The Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE) is an international non-profit association with its seat in Brussels. The PRACE Research Infrastructure provides a persistent world-class high performance computing service for scientists and researchers from academia and industry in Europe. The Implementation Phase of PRACE receivesfunding from the EU’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreements RI-261557, RI-283493 and RI-312763. For more information, see www.prace-ri.eu.
About RIKEN AICS: RIKEN is one of Japan’s largest research organizations with institutes and centers in locations throughout Japan. The Advanced Institute for Computational Science (AICS) strives to create an international center of excellence dedicated to generating world-leading results through the use of its world-class supercomputer ”K computer.” It serves as the core of the “innovative high-performance computer infrastructure” project promoted by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science andTechnology.
About XSEDE: The Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) is the most advanced, powerful, and robust collection of integrated digital resources and services in the world. It is a single virtual system that scientists can use to interactively share computing resources, data, and expertise. The five-yearproject is supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation. For more information, see www.xsede.org.
Gerardo Hernandez Correa, Application Engineer with MathWorks, with be on campus offering a complementary MatLab seminar:
Parallel and GPU Computing in MATLAB
Date: Thursday, February 7
Time: 9:30 a.m. – 11:30 a.m. (Arrive between 9:15 – 9:30 for registration/sign in.)
Location: Bryan Research Building for Neurobiology, Room 101L (Directions)
Session Description & Registration Available online:
http://www.mathworks.com/company/events/seminars/seminar74681.html
Questions: Contact Tom McHugh at (508) 647-7657 ortom.mchugh@mathworks.com.
There’s a great article on profiling techniques for HPC over at Admin Magazine. The author, Jeff Layton, lays out the differences between profiling and tracing, and then provides links to a wealth of tools: processor tracing tools, system profiling tools, system tracing tools, and even MPI profiling/tracing tools.
“Knowing your application is one of the keys to being able to improve it and, perhaps most importantly, being able to judge which architecture (or architectures) you should think about using. In essence, “knowing yourself” from an application perspective. This ability is very important in the current climate, where non-x86 processors are on the rise and where accelerators are also becoming more commonplace and diverse.”
**** This is a significant policy change for storage space on the DSCR, please read!
**** This may increase the charge-back to your group, or decrease your storage allocation
The Research Computing Advisory Committee recently approved a new proposal for storage quotas on the DSCR, and I’d like to implement the changes by February 1st.
The highlights of the new plan are:
- We will increase the current default quota to 250GB per group (the “free” quota)
- But we will NOT grandfather anyone that may currently have quotas larger than 250GB
This change will only affect ~20 groups out of the 95 groups currently using the DSCR, and we will directly contact those groups that are to be affected.
To check your group’s quota, simply run:
df -h /home/groupname
The second column will show your quota.
If your quota is over 250GB, we will be asking you to consider one of three options:
- You can lease additional “home directory” storage at $1600/TB/year (or $1.60/GB/year). This is fast storage that you can directly run computational jobs from.
- You can lease additional “data” storage at $500/TB/year. This is slower storage that may not be adequate for running jobs – you should copy data from data-disk to your home directory (or /netscratch) prior to running a job.
- Of course, you can also delete or transfer files off of the DSCR, e.g. back to your home department, such that you come back under the 250GB “default” quota.
I would like to have the new plan in place by Feb 1st, so if you know that you are over-quota please respond with either a fund-code (for #1 and #2) or an estimated date when you’ll have copied data off of the DSCR (for #3).
If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to ask me (jbp1 duke.edu, or 919-684-7536).
The Center for Computation & Technology (CCT) hosts a nine week Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) program where students work collaboratively on a wide variety of computational science projects. Each student receives a stipend of $4,500, free housing in university dormitories, and up to $500 in travel expenses to and from Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Nine students will be selected.
Qualifications:
Interested in a major that is within the computational sciences umbrella (leaves out few majors as it includes all sciences, mathematics, engineering, finance, statistics, etc.) with at least a 2.75 GPA, considering a career in research and/or graduate school in your major, being a US citizen or permanent resident, and graduating at least one semester after completion of the REU.
Important Dates:
- March 1, 2013: Application deadline.
- April 1, 2013: Notification of decision.
- June 3, 2013 through August 2, 2013: Program dates.
The research activities of the CCT are organized into five Focus Areas: Core Computing Sciences, Coast to Cosmos, Material World, Cultural Computing, and System Science and Engineering. These are broad, and sometimes overlapping areas where faculty from diverse departments (Mathematics, Computer Science, Physics, Civil Engineering, Oceanography and Coastal Sciences, Petroleum Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Electrical and Computing Engineering, Music, Business, etc.) collaborate in multidisciplinary projects. Our REU students learn how to use some of the nation’s largest supercomputers, may participate in the setup and management of large-scale simulations, and may take on an important role in the analysis and visualization of the simulation results.
For more information and to apply, visit: http://reu.cct.lsu.edu/
Intel Corporation has announced that they are giving away an Ultrabook, two solid state drives and ten $50 gift certificates to the winners of their Intel® MKL success story contest. You can submit your stories of how MKL has contributed to the success of your research, lab, or organization. All you have to do is send an email to intel.mkl@intel.com with your 1500-3000 word success story. The contest is open through 11:59pm Pacific time February 28, 2013.
More information including contest rules, judging criteria and prize details are available at http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/poweredbymklcontest