Monthly Archives: January 2010

Call for Papers, etc.: Canada’s High Performance Computing Symposium

Posted on by
Reply

Call for Papers, Posters, Workshops

HPCS (High Performance Computing Symposium) is Canada’s foremost HPC conference – a multidisciplinary conference where computational researchers from all disciplines in industry and academia, computer scientists, and vendors exchange new tools, techniques and interesting results in and for HPC computational research. The HPCS2010 conference will take place on June 5-8, with workshops on the two days proceeding the symposium.

We are seeking abstracts for posters and oral presentations in the following areas, particularly as relating to our main theme, “Data Intensive Computing/Data Intensive Science”:

- Novel techniques for application of HPC to any discipline
- New algorithms for computational research in any discipline
- Development of novel computational research tools
- Computer architectures/Grid computing
- Tools for Performance Modeling or Tuning
- Visualization

Submissions for oral presentations are due April 19; submissions should be of the form of extended abstracts (~500-1000 words) with a problem description, methods, conclusions (possibly preliminary), key references, and optionally figures. Submissions will be reviewed by the scientific committee, and notifications of acceptance will go out by May 3. The proceedings will be published in a peer-reviewed publication after the conference, with a deadline for final versions of papers approximately a month after the conference.

Submissions for poster presentations are also due on April 19. These will follow the same procedure as those for papers. Top posters in various categories will have the option to publish in the proceedings. We strongly encourage graduate student submissions for both poster and oral sessions.

There are also spaces available for half-, one-, or two-day workshops to be held on the weekend before the conference (Jun 5-6). Already scheduled is a two-day workshop on parallel programming in MPI and OpenMP, aimed at graduate students and postdocs. Workshop proposals are due Feb 16.

For more information, please see our webpage at  http://www.hpcs2010.org ; questions can be addressed to info@hpcs2010.org.

Looking forward to seeing you in Toronto!

U-M to add FLUX cluster

Posted on by
Reply

The Office of Research Cyberinfrastructure (ORCI) is joining forces with Information and Technology Services (ITS) to install and administer an expanded high-performance cluster at U-M. The new cluster, called FLUX 1, will be operated for University-wide use under a service agreement with the Center for Advanced Computing (CAC) of  the College of Engineering. FLUX 1 will have about 1000 cores in a configuration that is expected to serve a broad spectrum of  campus needs and will extend the NYX cluster currently available through the CAC. FLUX will be expanded as demand and opportunity grows. An usage allocation policy is still under development by the Executive Steering Committee of the Office of Research Cyberinfrastructure. The preliminary specifications of the system are being reviewed by a systems architecture committee (with representatives from units across campus) and will be posted on this ORCI blog for informational purposes.

The plan for deploying the FLUX cluster is to obtain and set up the core processors that will manage scheduling over the next couple of months while purchasing decisions are made about the bulk of the nodes. This will allow a prompt roll-out of the main system capacity.

Currently, the U-M ORCI is awaiting a response about a proposal to NSF which will allow an even greater expansion of the FLUX system. This Major Research Instrumentation Program Recovery and Reinvestment (MRI-R²) solicitation would be funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA, a.k.a. stimulus money).

FLUX is an initial service being provide as part of the UM CIRRUS Project (Computing and Information Resources for Research as a Utility Service). Other services, provided by both internal and external service providers, are envisioned for the future.

Interested in petascale computing? Check out Blue Waters.

Posted on by
Reply

Blue Waters will be the the world’s most powerful supercomputer for open scientific research and will be the first system of its kind to sustain one petaflop performance on a range of science and engineering applications. The project is now actively soliciting researchers to participate in the next and final round of allocations prior to the machine coming online in 2011. In order to receive an award of time on Blue Waters through the National Science Foundation allocation process, teams must receive a pre-allocation through the current Petascale Computing Resource Allocations (PRAC) process. The next round of PRAC proposals are due March 17, 2010, and information about the solicitation is available on the NSF website.

Bill Kramer, the deputy project director and co-principal investigator, will be visiting the UM campus in January or February 2010, and if you are interested in meeting with him during his visit please contact us, Professor Sharon Glotzer (sglotzer@umich.edu) who is serving as the UM liaison to the Blue Waters project, or Dr. Katherine Lawrence (kathla@umich.edu) in the Office of Research Cyberinfrastructure. The Blue Waters project has an extensive education and outreach program to help people understand how to make use of this facility, and it also has a facility to help people craft proposals. The architecture supports both computer- and data-intensive applications. We encourage those interested in applying to review the 18 projects that have already been reviewed and approved for allocations.

BREAKING NEWS: Feb. 1 webinar to provide overview, proposal writing tips for access to NSF’s sustained petascale Blue Waters supercomputer.

On Feb. 1, NCSA will host a two-hour webinar to provide details about the Blue Waters system, an overview of the PRAC program, and tips on writing successful PRAC proposals. Participants will have the opportunity to ask questions.
Presenters will include Daniel S. Katz, University of Chicago, and Blue Waters staff.

The webinar will begin at 12 noon EST (11 a.m. CST) on Feb. 1. To participate, go to  https://eval.webex.com/eval/onstage/g.php?d=929809225&t=a and use the event password “prac.” No advance registration is required.
For more information on Blue Waters and the PRAC program, see:
http://www.ncsa.illinois.edu/BlueWaters/
http://www.ncsa.illinois.edu/BlueWaters/prac.html

“CI Days at Michigan” in the works

Posted on by
Reply

The University has received funding to support the planning and execution of “CI Days at Michigan,” to be hosted in early Fall 2010. The funding from the National Science Foundation, administered through a grant to Internet2, provides money to cover the cost of bringing outside visitors to speak at the event, as well as refreshments and staff support. The CI Days Consortium will support U-M in planning, delivering, and assessing the event, which should also help broaden the higher education community’s understanding of CI needs, best practices, and challenges.

The specific goals of the Michigan event include:

  • Expanding awareness and use of new CI services on campus
  • Increasing awareness and use of national resources (such as the TeraGrid and Blue Waters)
  • Serving as the starting point for an ongoing program of presentations on the topic of CI
  • Helping members of the UM community share their research, identify opportunities for collaboration, learn about resources available for their own projects, and build a culture around computationally based research
  • Attracting users with less experience in order to gain a better idea of how to support and educate new users of CI

The structure of the CI Days will include hands-on tutorials, presentations, panels, and mix-and-mingle events. In the evening prior to this full-day event, we will host a reception for all participants, including poster presentations by faculty and students across campus. The main day of the event will consist of two parallel tracks. One would be for “newbies” and the other would be topics of interest to those with more experience. Materials from the event will be made available online, and webcasts of presentations will also available to the public.

Other grant recipients include: Colorado State University, University of Kentucky, North Carolina State University, University of Notre Dame, the Pennsylvania State University, Purdue University, and University of Wisconsin-Madison. In the press release by Internet2, Dr. Jennifer M. Schopf, Program Director for the National Science Foundation’s Office of Cyberinfrastructure states, “CI Days assemble key campus stakeholders including faculty and other researchers, IT and library experts, administrators and students to exchange ideas, articulate needs, and explore best practices in this fast-changing domain. It is our hope that CI days will broaden the higher education community’s understanding of CI opportunities and challenges as well as accelerate institutional planning and investment in Cyberinfrastructure.”

The CI Days program will be carried out under the general direction of the Executive Steering Committee of the Office of Research Cyberinfrastructure with Bill Wrobleski (ItS)  and Katherine Lawrence (ORCI) serving as the General Chairs of the event.