General Interest

Flux sees increases in users, jobs, departments

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The Flux high-performance computing cluster saw a 43 percent increase in number of jobs between fiscal 2011 and 2012.

About 1.82 million jobs were run on Flux in fiscal 2012, compared to 1.27 million in 2011.

Flux, provided by ARC, also had a 49 percent increase in users (from 482 to 718) and a 31 percent increase in departments with researchers using the service (from 45 to 59).

“The rising numbers we’ve seen in users, jobs, and departments using Flux reflect the increasingly crucial role that high-performance computing plays in research across fields,” said Ken Powell, Interim Associate Vice President for Research – Cyberinfrastructure.

Most users of Flux come from LSA, the Medical School, and the College of Engineering. Those three academic units, along with OVPR and the Provost, were the original funders of the service.

But a growing number of users come from outside those disciplines as well.

For example, David Bieri, an assistant professor of Urban Planning in the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, and his colleagues had a research question that needed an extraordinary amount of computing power to address: How much do consumers spend on local amenities, as reflected in housing prices and wages? The answer was contained in massive datasets that could not be handled by a standard computer.

“Our work involves huge amounts of microdata from the census and other sources … we had a sample that contained 30 million observations and over 2,000 variables,” Bieri said. “We were quickly outpacing the computational abilities of a laptop or even the most expensive desktop computer.”

Bieri used Flux and the multiprocessor version of Stata, which is included in the cost of an allocation, to analyze the data.

Bieri also relied the support offered by ARC and CoE — from seminars introducing Flux to Web resources to in-person help from CAEN HPC staff member Bennet Fauber. CAEN operates Flux and provides user support.

Bieri’s findings, that spending on local amenities varies greatly across the country, and can be as high as 25 percent of household income in some places, are being reviewed for publication by an applied economics journal.

Report proposes creation of “visualization hubs” on U-M campus

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The U-M Future of Visualization Committee issued a report June 4 calling for creation of two “visualization hubs,” which would serve to make computing visualization services more accessible to the campus research community.

The committee was created by Dan Atkins with the charge of evaluating existing visualization technologies and methods on campus; developing an action plan for addressing deficiencies in visualization needs; establishing a group of visualization leaders; and communicating with the community on visualization topics. It is composed of faculty members and staff from ARC, University Libraries, Dentistry, LSA, the Medical School, ITS, Architecture and Urban Planning, Atmospheric and Oceanic and Space Sciences, and the College of Engineering.

The hubs envisioned by the committee would leverage existing resources and consist of advanced workstations, high bandwidth connectivity, and collaborative learning spaces, with a support model based on that of the UM3D Lab and Flux. The hardware and software would be configured to allow departments or individuals to purchase their own resources in a way that would reduce fragmentation and allow for efficient support, training, and maintenance.

A full copy of the report is available here: Report_VisualizationOnCampus_2013.

Exploring Humanities Cyberinfrastructure Symposium — April 30 and May 1

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In a two-day symposium, April 30 and May 1, humanities scholars and practitioners at the University of Michigan and other universities will discuss how to adapt and adopt cyberinfrastructure – both organizational and technological – for their own research. “Exploring Humanities Cyberinfrastructure” will showcase current research and scholarship and explore the opportunities for digitally-assisted humanities scholarship to flourish at Michigan. Professor Patrick Svensson, director of the HUMlab at Sweden’s Umeå University, is the invited guest speaker.

The symposium includes two public events:

Tuesday, April 30
Hatcher Library Gallery

10 a.m. – Coffee reception

10:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. – Library Lightning Talks

Libraries are emerging as collaboratories for interdisciplinary research and are important partners in fostering digitally-assisted humanities scholarship. In ten Library Lightning Talks, a wide variety of stakeholders in interdisciplinary humanities research and learning will speak on the MLibrary’s academic technology group, digital publishing, spatial and numeric data, Michigan State University’s MATRIX department and more.

Wednesday, May 1
Rackham Assembly Hall, Fourth Floor

9 a.m. – Continental breakfast welcome reception

10 to 11:30 a.m. – Patrik Svensson on The Humanistiscope: Exploring the Situatedness of Humanities Cyberinfrastructure

Patrik Svensson is a professor in the humanities and information technology, and director of HUMlab at Umeå University in Sweden. As the director of HUMlab, Svensson is deeply engaged in facilitating cross-sectional meetings and innovation in the future of the humanities and the university, in reaching out to others, and in the intersection of the humanities, culture and information technology. Svensson’s talk will focus on cyberinfrastructure, research infrastructure, or e-science, within the sphere of humanities.

This free public event is sponsored by the University of Michigan School of Information, Advanced Research Computing at U-M (ARC)/ORCI, the Institute for the Humanities, and MLibrary.

For more information, visit http://www.si.umich.edu/newsandevents/event/exploring-humanities-cyberinfrastructure or email Christopher Leeder at cleeder@umich.edu

INCITE call for proposals is open — April 15 through June 28

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The 2014 Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) call for proposals is open from April 15 through June 28. The program enables 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 U.S. Department of Energy 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-petaflop Cray XK7 “Titan” and the 10-petaflop IBM Blue Gene/Q “Mira” beginning in calendar year (CY) 2014. More than 5 billion core hours will be allocated for CY 2014. Average awards per project 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 3 years.

For more information on the INCITE program and links to the proposal form, see http://www.doeleadershipcomputing.org/. You may address specific questions to the INCITE Manager, Julia White, at incite@doeleadershipcomputing.org.

Request for Information

We invite prospective INCITE proposal authors to respond to a Request for Information to inform INCITE management of expected proposal topics. See http://proposals.doeleadershipcomputing.org/allocations/incite/. You are encouraged to respond if you are contemplating submitting an INCITE proposal. The information requested is not a prerequisite for proposal submittal, nor will it limit any requests you may decide to make in your INCITE proposal.

INCITE Proposal Writing Webinars April 25th and May 14th

To help you prepare an INCITE proposal or learn more about the program, two INCITE Proposal Writing Webinars will be offered on April 25, 2013, at 4 p.m. EDT and on May 14, 2013, at 10 a.m. EDT. The 1.5‑hour webinars will also include discussion on the Director’s Discretionary Program, a way to request early access to port, tune, and scale your codes in preparation for an INCITE application. For more details and early registration for these events, seehttp://www.alcf.anl.gov/workshops/incite-2014-webinars for the April 25th event or http://www.olcf.ornl.gov/training-event/incite-proposal-writing-webinar/ for the May 14th event. See http://www.doeleadershipcomputing.org for additional event information.

Physics Inaugural Lecture by Mark Newman, Wednesday, April 3, 4:10 pm

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“Epidemics, Erdos Numbers, and the Internet: The Physics of Networks”

When:  4:10 pm Wednesday, April 3, 2013

Where:  Rackham Amphitheater (4th Floor)

Who:     Mark Newman, Paul Dirac Collegiate Professor of Physics, UM

About the Paul Dirac Collegiate Professorship in Physics Inaugural Lecture:

“There are networks in almost every part of our lives. Some of them are familiar and obvious: the Internet, the power grid, the road network. Others are less obvious but just as important. The patterns of friendships or acquaintances between people form a social network; the species in an ecosystem join together to form a food web; the workings of the body’s cells are dictated by a metabolic network of chemical reactions. As large-scale data on these networks and others have become available in the last few years, a new science of networks has grown up, drawing on ideas from physics, math, computer science, biology, and other fields to shed light on systems ranging from bacteria to the whole of human society. This lecture will describe some new discoveries regarding networks, how those discoveries were made, and what they can tell us about the way the world works.”

The lecture and reception are open to the public. For questions, contact Anne Hart at annehart@umich.edu or 734-615-6449.

 

4th U-M Data Mining Workshop Call for Speakers

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What: 4th University of Michigan Data Mining Workshop
When: Wednesday, April 24, 2013
Where: Tishman Hall, Bob and Betty Beyster Building on North Campus

The Data Mining Workshop will be an opportunity for researchers from many different departments, doing interesting and unexpected things with data, to get together.

The immediate goal of the workshop planners is to find a set of interesting speakers from across different departments on campus to give 25-minute talks, a small number of extended talks, plus a student poster session.

If you are interested in giving a talk, please fill out this short form. If you have presented in the past but have new results you’d like to discuss, please go ahead and fill out the form. Although most presenters will be affiliated with the University of Michigan, the planners are very interested in hearing from local industry and other universities in the area.

Additional information may be found at: http://www.eecs.umich.edu/dm13/.

The U-M Data Mining Workshop is sponsored by U-M CSE, Yahoo!, and the Office of Research Cyberinfrastructure (ORCI).

DataONE Paid Internships; Application Deadline March 21, 2013

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The Data Observation Network for Earth (DataONE) is an NSF-sponsored project focused on data-sharing and analysis infrastructure for the earth and environmental sciences. DataONE is pleased to announce the availability of summer research internships for undergraduates, graduate students and recent postgraduates.

DataONE internships are offered in multiple areas and are listed below.  Full information can be found on the DataONE website at: www.dataone.org/internships.

The internship runs from May 27 – July 26 and interns will receive a stipend of $5,000. The 2013 projects are:
  • Next Generation Data Environment: Semantically-Enabling the DataONE Metadata Environment
  • Ontology Mappings in the Earth and Environmental Sciences
  • Evaluation of Ontology Coverage for Curation
  • Integrating Data Stories into DataONE Education and Community Engagement Products
  • Data Policies for Public Participation in Scientific Research
  • Bi-level Metadata Registry Development
  • PBase: Provenance as a First-class Citizen in DataONE
  • Build Fundamental Components for Provenance-aware Model Exploration, Evaluation, and Benchmarking Cyber-infrastructure Prototype
  • A Visualization Tool for Provenance in DataONE

The deadline for applications is March 21, 2013.  Applicants must have a valid visa to work in the US and be resident in the US during the internship period.  For full eligibility information see: www.dataone.org/internships.

Additional questions can be addressed to internship@dataone.org.

Brian Sandberg Guest Lecture, Wednesday, March 27

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New Digital Humanities Approaches: Manuscript Imaging and Research Outsourcing in the Florentine Archives Using the BÍA Platform
When: 4:00 pm Wednesday, March 27, 2013
Where: 5670 Haven Hall

As part of the Early Modern and Medieval Studies Lecture Series on digital humanities approaches to scholarship, Brian Sandberg of the Department of History, Medici Archive Project at the Northern Illinois University will discuss “Manuscript Imaging and Research Outsourcing in the Florentine Archives Using the BÍA Platform” on Wednesday, March 27, 2013 in 5670 Haven Hall at 4:00 pm.

About BÍA:
Over the past two years the IT team at the Medici Archive Project (MAP) has been working on developing a new innovative digital platform, with generous support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. At the 2012 Renaissance Society of America conference in Washington DC, MAP unveiled the new platform, called BÍA.
Now in the final stages of development, these are some of the most important elements of BÍA:

  • Preservation of documents with digitized images online
  • Enhanced Research possibilities through outsourcing
  • Involving the world in scholarly discourse

For more information about BÍA, see http://www.medici.org/message/new-bia-platform 

About Brian Sandberg:
Professor Sandberg works on early modern Europe, the history of violence, early modern France, French wars of religion, history of the Mediterranean, Pierre Bourdieu and symbolic violence, the Renaissance, and microhistory. He is author of Warrior Pursuits: Noble Culture and Civil Conflict in Early Modern France.

Sponsored by Medieval and Early Modern Studies and the Medici Archives Project

The Connected Learning Environment, Friday, March 15, 2013

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Have you ever wanted a place where you could teach with flexibility, access to special software, non-traditional resources, and support to make it work? A place you can shape to match your teaching and learning goals? A half-day event is scheduled to begin a campus-wide discussion about connected learning environments, considering ways to create, manage, and investigate the outcomes in these spaces.

Date: Friday, March 15, 2013

Location: Hatcher Graduate Library Gallery (Room 100)

Time: Noon – 4 pm Refreshments provided

Results of a research study investigating one successful interdisciplinary and technology-enabled environment, Design Lab 1 in the Duderstadt Center, will be presented along with several themes emerging from the findings. The emphasis is on pedagogical and programmatic foundations for connected learning environments, that then inform space and technology infrastructure. Quantitative and qualitative research on use and outcomes will be presented. Groups with common interests will be identified and reconvene during Enriching Scholarship to share, discuss, and plan future initiatives and projects.

The full agenda and abstracts of keynote and special topics presentations is available:https://sites.google.com/a/umich.edu/cle/

Please Register: https://sites.google.com/a/umich.edu/cle/agenda/registration
(Registering helps for planning purposes, but you are welcome whether you register or not) Recordings will be available later if you are unable to attend.

The Connected Learning Environment Series is sponsored by MLibrary and by the Collaborative Domain Group, a cross disciplinary team of faculty and administrators across the university.

Lisa Strausfeld – Penny Stamps Lecture on Visualizing Data To be Rescheduled

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Due to flight cancellations, this lecture has been cancelled. Strausfeld’s presentation will be rescheduled for a TBD date in Fall 2013.

Lisa will discuss “Why data visualization? Why now?” — defining the attributes of successful data visualizations and how can they be generalized to other design media.

When: 5:10 PM on Thursday, January 31, 2013
Where: The Michigan Theater, 603 E. Liberty Street, Ann Arbor MI

Bio:
Lisa Strausfeld is currently Global Head of Data Visualization at Bloomberg where she was hired in 2012 to build and lead a new team dedicated to creating consumer-focused interactive data products. From 2002 to 2011 Lisa was a partner at Pentagram specializing in digital information design projects. Lisa was a recipient of The National Design Award for Interaction Design in 2010.

With support from AIGA Detroit – the professional association for design, the School of Information and the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning.

This lecture is free and open to the public.