Monthly Archives: November 2011

Call For Participation: ESCC/Internet2 Joint Techs

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The Call for Participation for the Winter 2012 ESCC/Internet2 Joint Techs, hosted by LONI at the C.B. Pennington Jr. Biomedical Research Center on January 22-26, 2012, is open until December 8, 2011.

Internet2 is planning to transform traditional Joint Techs meetings in the years to come, beginning in January, 2013. We envision holding an annual World Technical Congress, convening thought leaders from around the globe to address critical advanced networking issues and develop community consensus around important new networking initiatives. We will be experimenting with new formats at the two traditional Joint Techs meetings in 2012.

With that in mind, at the Winter 2012 Internet2 / ESCC Joint Techs, all of Tuesday (January 24) is devoted to the primary focus area for the meeting, Enhancing Infrastructure Support for Data Intensive Science. The agenda for that portion of the meeting includes invited speakers and moderated panel discussions on such topics as the need for well-architected network and consistent networking support for science. An outcome from this discussion is a white paper on Best Practices to Support Data Intensive Science on campuses.

The remainder of the meeting will focus, primarily, on Software-Defined Networking and Emerging Technologies (with special empasis on cloud computing). As always, this meeting offers opportunites for face-to-face discussions as well as several in-depth tutorials, side meetings, two co-located meetings (GLIF and NetGurus) and one hands-on workshop. This year’s offerings include a full-day NSF-sponsored tutorial on OpenFlow, a full-day collaborative tutorial on Achieving the Science DMZ, and a 1/2-day hands-on tutorial on practical aspects of colo/telco facility installations sponsored by the GRNOC.

Proposals for plenary talks, working-group and birds-of-a-feather sessions, industry updates, tutorials, and side meetings are open. The submission deadline is December 8, 2011. The agenda for this summer’s meeting filled very quickly, so get your submissions in soon! Full abstracts are required for submission consideration.

Registration for Joint Techs, ESCC, workshops and tutorials is now available — note that rates increase after December 21! Keep checking the ESCC/Internet2 Joint Techs website for updates.

CSE Lecture: Mining Heterogeneous Information Networks – Dec 2

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Distinguished Lecture in Computer Science and Engineering

What:    Lecture – Mining Heterogeneous Information Networks

Who:   Jiawei Han, Bliss Professor of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Date:   Friday, December 2, 2011

Time:   3-4 p.m.

Location:   1690 CSE

Learn more: http://www.eecs.umich.edu/eecs/etc/events/cseshowevent.cgi?2168

Multimedia Artist’s Talk and Exhibit – Dec 2

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Boston artist Randy Garber (randygarber.com) will be in residence in North Quad next week beginning Tuesday to install her show, Made in Translation. She’ll be speaking about her work on Friday, December 2, at an Opening and Artist’s Talk from 6-8 PM in Space 2435.

What:  Artist’s Talk – Made in Translation
Who: Randy Garber
When:  6-8pm on Friday, December 2
Where:  North Quad, Space 2435. Refreshments will be provided.

In recognition of the theme of this year’s HASTAC Conference, Randy’s show will be accompanied by a digital, print-on-demand catalog featuring an essay by two students of the Museum Studies Program. The catalog and promotional postcard are being designed by a student in the School of Art & Design.

http://northquad.umich.edu/news/boston-artist-randy-garber-coming-north-quad

This interdisciplinary, multi-dimensional exhibit explores Translation, investigating perception and how meaning is deciphered. By repeating and re-imagining languages in different sculptural and printed media, the artwork visually suggests the insistent and resistant force of letters, codes and words on how we navigate our complex existence.

Common materials, intaglio prints, player piano scrolls, shadows, computer monitors and tickers evoke the gap between what is seen and what is understood.

The images and marks in both the two and three-dimensional work elicit a sense of order as well as orderly growth gone awry.

Digital Humanities Brown Bag Lecture – Nov 29

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U-M Institute for the Humanities – Brown Bag Lecture Series
Featuring the Digital Humanities

What: “After the Archive: Scholarship in the Digital Era”
Who: Tara McPherson, University of Southern California
When: 12:30 pm, Tuesday, November 29, 2011
Where: 202 S. Thayer, room # 2022

Can scholarship show as well as tell? Can it engage new sensory and emotional registers? Might we present our evidence in livelier formats or embed an analysis within a dataset? How might scholars better utilize the rich variety of digital materials now available? Can we imagine new human and technological infrastructures for scholarly publishing? This talk will engage such questions through an exploration of two recent experiments in scholarly communication.

Free and open to the public

Tara McPherson is associate professor of gender and critical studies at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts and co-director of USC’s Center for Transformative Scholarship. She also serves as the faculty chair for USC’s Provost Initiative in the Arts and Humanities.   Her books and edited collections include Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender and Nostalgia in the Imagined South, Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture, and Digital Youth, Innovation and the Unexpected.  Interactive Frictions, coedited with Marsha Kinder, is forthcoming from the University of California. Her new media research focuses on issues of convergence, gender, and race, as well as upon the development of new tools and paradigms for digital publishing, learning, and authorship.

Watch past Brown Bags online at www.lsa.umich.edu/humanities/medialibrary

Check out the HASTAC Session on Nov 30 at CI Days

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Cyberinfrastructure is not just for science! Learn about HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory) and digital scholarship beyond science and engineering on Wednesday, November 30 at CI Days. This panel features information about the upcoming HASTAC V conference and its history, digital humanities, Open.Michigan, and digital storytelling. Learn more about the panel speakers and what they’ll cover.

NCSA, Cray Partner on Sustained-Petascale Blue Waters Supercomputer

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The University of Illinois’ National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) has finalized a contract with Cray Inc. (Nasdaq: CRAY), to provide the supercomputer for the National Science Foundation’s Blue Waters project.

This new Cray supercomputer will support significant research advances in a broad range of science and engineering domains, meeting the needs of the most compute-intensive, memory- intensive, and data-intensive applications. Blue Waters is expected to deliver sustained performance, on average, of more than one petaflops on a set of benchmark codes that represent those applications and domains.

Read the full press release.

Learn more here about the Blue Waters Project.

Mapping Digital Humanities Today: U-M Institute for the Humanities Brown Bag on 11/15

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U-M Institute for the Humanities
Brown Bag Lecture Series Featuring the Digital Humanities

“Mapping Digital Humanities Today”
Julie Thompson Klein, Wayne State University
Tuesday, November 15, 2011
12:30pm, 202 S. Thayer, room # 2022
www.lsa.umich.edu/humanities
Free and open to the public

Digital humanities is a rapidly growing field at the intersections of computing and disciplines of humanities and arts; the professions of education and of library and information science; and interdisciplinary fields of media, communications, and cultural studies. In this overview, Klein will map the evolution and major discourses of digital humanities. The conventional origin story begins in the late 1940s in computational linguistics. The field expanded significantly with the advent of the Internet, new media, and digital-born objects and materials.

Read a complete description of this event…

EECS 598: Ubiquitous Parallelism – Available Winter 2012

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Instructor: Satish Narayanasamy
Lectures: Tu- Th 3:00p –4:30p.
Location: 1005 DOW
Credit Hours: 3
Prerequisites: Graduate standing, or EECS 482, or EECS 470, or permission of the instructor.

Course Description:

Processors with over hundred cores have already become a reality. However, technologies that can allow mainstream programmers to take advantage of this massive parallelism remains to be a grand challenge in computer science. This course will cover recent advances that seek to address this challenge. We will discuss holistic solutions that cut across the computing stack from languages to processor design. Specific topics include high-productivity languages, transactional memory, deterministic parallel computing, graphics processors and their uses in general purpose computing, MapReduce, multi-core OS, active testing, speculative parallelism, reliability, etc.

The course includes a term project. We may be able to get you access to latest parallel programming tools and systems for your project such as compute resources in a cloud, a many-core system, Thread checker, record-n-replay tool, debugging tools such as CHESS, etc.

See the reading list, syllabus and more information at the course website.

Michigan R Users Group

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We are pleased to announce the formation of the Michigan R Users Group. R is an open-source software environment for statistical computing and graphics, with a growing number of users in academia and industry. The purpose of the Michigan R Users Group is to create an environment for local users to share R knowledge. Both beginners and experienced R users are welcome.

The Users Group will meet roughly once a month. Below is a tentative list of topics for the first several meetings:

  • R in a Nutshell
  • Data Management and Manipulation
  • Creating R Functions
  • Profiling Code
  • Graphics

For information about joining the group or the next meeting, please contact:

Dave Childers dchilde@umich.edu
Kevin Riegle krriegle@umich.edu

On-Demand HPC Offered by Indiana

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Indiana University and Penguin Computing announced a partnership to offer U.S. researchers access to powerful shared computing resources in a secure environment. This type of service — also known as on-demand or cloud computing — lets individuals and organizations share the resources of large computing systems without individually purchasing and maintaining the costly equipment.

One downside of traditional cloud services is that users often do not know where or how shared equipment is kept, which may create security and grant compliance concerns. The new service provided by IU and Penguin mitigates these concerns by providing access to a group of computers owned by Penguin and housed on U.S. soil in IU’s highly secure state-of-the-art data center.

The agreement between IU and Penguin also has the support of a group of founding user-partners, including the University of Virginia; the University of California, Berkeley; and the University of Michigan. Along with IU, these partners will be the initial users of the new service. Thereafter, researchers at U.S. institutions of higher education and federally funded research centers can purchase computing time from Penguin and receive access via high-speed national research networks operated by IU.

What is POD IU?

POD IU is a high-performance computing (HPC) cluster available for use on-demand. Researchers can purchase computing time from Penguin Computing, and receive access via high-speed national research networks operated by Indiana University. With POD IU you pay for the resources that you use (core hours, storage and data disk transfers). Visit this page for technical specifications.

Who can use POD IU?

Anyone can use POD IU provided that you are part of an accredited American or foreign institution of higher education (with a *.edu email address), a federally funded research and development center (FFRDC) or other federal or state government entity in the United States. Your organization will need to be registered with POD IU before you can create an account. Currently registered organizations appear in a dropdown list during registration.

Visit the POD IU site for more information and to get started.