Monthly Archives: April 2011

U-M faculty member Qiaozhu Mei one of 13 funded by Microsoft/NSF collaborative cloud computing agreement

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The National Science Foundation (NSF) announced on April 20th the awardees who will be funded through the collaborative cloud computing agreement that Microsoft Corp. and NSF announced in February 2010. Qiaozhu Mei of the School of Information and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, College of Engineering, is one of 13 awardees.

The agreement will offer the award recipients free access to advanced cloud computing resources that enable faster, less expensive processing across geographically distributed data centers.

Read the full story and list of awardees.

GPGPUs available on Flux

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If you are interested in using GPGPUs (general-purpose computing on graphics processing units) in your simulation-based science, Flux has a small, trial installation of GPUs available for your use.

This installation is eight NVIDIA M2050 GPUs (http://www.nvidia.com/docs/IO/43395/NV_DS_Tesla_M2050_M2070_Apr10_LowRes.pdf) attached in an external PCIe chassis (a Dell C410x); there are two GPUs attached per node, for a total of 4 nodes with attached GPUs.

Because this is a trial installation, there is no GPU-specific rate for use of the GPUs, but you do need a minimal Flux allocation to use the CPU cores that will launch the GPU job.  For more information on Flux allocations, please see: http://cac.engin.umich.edu/resources/systems/flux/

For more information on using the GPUs on Flux, please see: http://cac.engin.umich.edu/resources/software/cuda.html

For more information on using CUDA (the NVIDIA GPU development environment) on Flux, please see: http://cac.engin.umich.edu/resources/systems/nyxV2/cuda.html

As always, please direct any questions to flux-support@umich.edu

New Google Grant Program: 1 Billion Core-Hours of Computational Capacity for Researchers

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Google has announced a new academic research grant program: Google Exacycle for Visiting Faculty. Through this program, they will award up to 10 qualified researchers with at least 100 million core-hours each, for a total of 1 billion core-hours. The program is focused on large-scale, CPU-bound batch computations in research areas such as biomedicine, energy, finance, entertainment, and agriculture, amongst others. For example, projects developing large-scale genomic search and alignment, massively scaled Monte Carlo simulations, and sky survey image analysis could be an ideal fit.

Exacycle for Visiting Faculty expands upon Google’s current efforts through University Relations to stimulate advances in science and engineering research, and awardees will participate through the Visiting Faculty Program.

Google invites full-time faculty members from universities worldwide to apply. All grantees, including those outside of the U.S., will work on-site at specific Google offices in the U.S. or abroad. The exact Google office location will be determined at the time of project selection.
Proposals will be accepted starting April 7, 2011. The application deadline is 11:59 p.m. PST May 31, 2011. Applicants are encouraged to send in their proposals early as awards will be granted starting in June.
More information and details on how to apply for a Google Exacycle for Visiting Faculty grant can be found on the Google Exacycle for Visiting Faculty website.

April 22, 2011 – University of Michigan Workshop on Data, Text, Web, and Social Network Mining

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General registration is now open for the Second University of Michigan Workshop on Data, Text, Web, and Social Network Mining, to be held on April 22.  The workshop last year was a big success, drawing a large number of researchers from across campus and beyond.

The workshop will be held in the Computer Science and Engineering Division of the EECS Department, at 2260 Hayward Street on North Campus.

You can register at the website here: http://eecs.umich.edu/dm11/

Registration is free and includes lunch on the day of the workshop, thanks to Yahoo!’s generous sponsorship.  Researchers from Michigan, other universities, and industry are all welcome.  However, space is limited, so please be sure to register as soon as you can.

There will be technical presentations from researchers in engineering, natural sciences, and social sciences.  Unlike last year, there will be a few short tutorials that will cover popular tools for data, network, and text mining research. There will also be a keynote lecture from Sharad Goel, from Yahoo! Research’s Microeconomics and Social Systems group.

Workshop Organizers: Mike Cafarella, Dragomir Radev, Vahed Qazvinian

Digging into Data Challenge 2011

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Eight international research funders jointly announce their participation in round two of the Digging into Data Challenge, a grant competition designed to spur cutting edge research in the humanities and social sciences.

The Digging into Data Challenge asks researchers these provocative questions:

  • How can we use advanced computation to change the nature of our research methods?
  • That is, now that the objects of study for researchers in the humanities and social sciences, including books, survey data, economic data, newspapers, music, and other scholarly and scientific resources are being digitized at a huge scale, how does this change the very nature of our research?
  • How might advanced computation and data analysis techniques help researchers use these materials to ask new questions about and gain new insights into our world?

Due to the overwhelming popularity of round one, the Digging into Data Challenge is pleased to announce that four additional funders have joined for round two, enabling this competition to have a world-wide reach into many different scholarly and scientific domains. The eight sponsoring funding bodies include the

  • Arts & Humanities Research Council (United Kingdom),
  • Economic & Social Research Council (United Kingdom),
  • Institute of Museum and Library Services (United States),
  • Joint Information Systems Committee (United Kingdom),
  • National Endowment for the Humanities (United States),
  • National Science Foundation (United States),
  • Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (Netherlands), and
  • Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (Canada).

Final applications will be due June 16, 2011. Further information about the competition and the application process can be found at www.diggingintodata.org.

TeraGrid 2011: Call for Submissions

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The TeraGrid 2011 conference “Extreme Digital Discovery” is accepting paper and abstract submissions through April 15th. Tutorial proposals are due May 6th. You do not need to be affiliated with the TeraGrid to submit or to attend.

The TeraGrid 2011 conference will showcase the capabilities, achievements, and impact of the TeraGrid in research and education. The conference will also mark the beginning of the National Science Foundation’s eXtreme Digital Resources for Science and Engineering program and will give scientists and engineers information on the resources and services to be provided through this successor to the TeraGrid.

The call for submissions is here: https://www.teragrid.org/web/news/tg11_call_submissions. Conference proceedings will be published by ACM.

The conference will be held July 17-21, 2011, at the Marriott Downtown Hotel, Salt Lake City, Utah.

www.teragrid.org/tg11/

Amazon HPC Free Trial and UM Community Support

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Amazon Web Services has created a video tutorial that is a hands-on guide to building a 64-core cluster. The tutorial will introduce Amazon EC2, demonstrate how to create and launch cluster instances, and then demonstrate how to build an 8-node cluster and run a molecular dynamics simulation. Free trial comes via a $20.00 free credit you can apply to your Amazon Web Services account. $20.00 will cover the cost of the trial.

If you are interested in this offer and would like to be part of a user group discussion–or are at least willing to answer feedback questions about your experience–please contact Traci Ruthkoski.

Sign up: http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/build-a-cluster-in-under-10/