In the News
XSEDE12 conference set for July in Chicago
XSEDE12, the first conference of the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment, will be held July 16-19, 2012, at the InterContinental hotel in downtown Chicago. Much as XSEDE replaces and extends TeraGrid as the largest NSF-funded provider of advanced cyberinfrastructure services for the U.S. open research community, XSEDE12 builds on the successful series of TeraGrid conferences. XSEDE Principal Investigator John Towns said, "This conference series has evolved into an important meeting focused on the needs of the community supported by XSEDE, and it will cover a breadth of scientific, technical, and social aspects of cyberinfrastructure." To read further, please visit https://www.xsede.org/xsede12-conference-announced.
NSF Celebrates Computer Science Education Week with CS Bits & Bytes
In celebration of CS Education Week, the National Science Foundation is rolling out CS Bits & Bytes, a one-page biweekly newsletter highlighting innovative computer science research today. We will continue publication through the end of the 2011/2012 academic year. The NSF CS Bits & Bytes series is aimed at high school teachers and students and will emphasize how computer science permeates and improves our lives and supports progress in many other disciplines. CS Bits & Bytes issues will also include profiles of the individuals who do this exciting work. It is our hope that educators and parents will use CS Bits & Bytes to inspire students to engage in the multi-faceted world of computer science, to become not just users but creators of technology, and to develop the skills to bend computation to their own ends, no matter their interests. Our first newsletter talks about the benefits of Human Computation and tells the story of Luis von Ahn.
Here is a short excerpt from the first issue:
Did you know?! When you sign up for an email account or buy tickets to a concert online, you may be helping to digitize books from libraries across the world? In fact, people just like you helped to digitize 20 years of The New York Times in less than three months.
You help out whenever you are asked by a website to decode more than one sequence of squiggly, distorted characters. To see the entire newsletter and to register to receive this biweekly newsletter, please visit http://www.nsf.gov/cise/csbytes.
Workshops, Talks and Seminars
Parallel Programming on Large Shared Memory Machines
December 5-6, 2011 – Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
This workshop will feature programming techniques to take advantage of large shared memory machines. Participants will use PSC's Blacklight, the largest shared memory machine in the world. For more information, please visit http://psc.edu/training/ParallelProgramming/.
XSEDE Partner News
Kraken set to deliver 2 billionth CPU hour, sustains 96 percent utilization
Kraken, the world's fastest academic supercomputer, is adding some impressive credentials to its resume. Not only will the Cray XT5 deliver its 2 billionth CPU hour to open science during the week of the SC11 conference, the computer also sustained an astonishing utilization of 96 percent for the month of October, running with no downtime for 36 days consecutively. Funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and managed by the University of Tennessee's National Institute for Computational Sciences (NICS), Kraken is located at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Kraken is one of the integrated digital resources of the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE), successor to NSF's TeraGrid project. To read further, please visit https://www.xsede.org/kraken-set-to-deliver-2-billionth-cpu-hour
Ranger supercomputer's lifespan extended one year as part of NSF XD initiative
The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) today announced that operational funding for the Ranger supercomputer, which was expected to end on Feb. 4, 2012, will be extended through Feb. 4, 2013. This extension will allow Ranger to continue supporting world-class science until the next large HPC system, Stampede, is deployed as part of the National Science Foundation's (NSF) eXtreme Digital (XD) program. Approaching its fourth anniversary, Ranger remains one of the top computing platforms in the world, ranked as #17 on the Top500 list. The system has completed more than two million jobs with 97 percent uptime. To read further, please visit http://www.tacc.utexas.edu/news/press-releases/2011/ranger-extended.
After 25 years, sustainability is a growing science that's here to stay, research from Los Alamos, IU shows
Sustainability has not only become a science in the past 25 years, but it is one that continues to be fast-growing with widespread international collaboration, broad disciplinary composition and wide geographic distribution, according to new research from Los Alamos National Laboratory and Indiana University. The findings, published last month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences as the "Evolution and structure of sustainability science," were assembled from a review of 20,000 academic papers written by 37,000 distinct authors representing 174 countries and over 2,200 cities. Authors of the paper, Los Alamos research scientist Luís M. A. Bettencourt, and Jasleen Kaur, a Ph.D. student in Indiana University Bloomington's School of Informatics and Computing, also identified the most productive cities for sustainability publications and estimated the field's growth rate, with the number of distinct authors doubling every 8.3 years. The study covered research generated from 1974 through 2010. To read further, please visit http://newsinfo.iu.edu/news/page/normal/20436.html.
Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center Wins High-Performance Computing Award
HPCwire, a leading electronic-news outlet for high-performance computing and communication (HPC), awarded a 2011 Reader’s Choice Award to the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) for Best Use of HPC in an Edge HPC application. The award recognizes PSC for its work with Blacklight, PSC’s SGI® Altix® UV1000 system, the world’s largest shared-memory system, a resource of XSEDE, the National Science Foundation cyberinfrastructure program. Because of Blacklight’s large amount of shared memory, scientists have been able to access up to 16 terabytes at a time, a feature that has enabled ground-breaking work in several fields, including fields of computer science — natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) — that haven’t traditionally made substantial use of HPC. To read further, please visit http://psc.edu/publicinfo/news/2011/112111_HPCAward.php.
Faculty Opportunities
Industry/University Cooperative Research Centers Program (I/UCRC)
Letter of Intent Deadline – February 2, 2012
Final Proposal Deadline – March 8, 2012
The Industry/University Cooperative Research Centers (I/UCRC) program develops long-term partnerships among industry, academe, and government. The centers are catalyzed by a small investment from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and are primarily supported by industry center members, with NSF taking a supporting role in the development and evolution of the center. Each center is established to conduct research that is of interest to both the industry members and the center faculty. An I/UCRC contributes to the Nation's research infrastructure base and enhances the intellectual capacity of the engineering and science workforce through the integration of research and education. As appropriate, an I/UCRC uses international collaborations to advance these goals within the global context. For more information, please visit http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2012/nsf12516/nsf12516.htm?WT.mc_id=USNSF_25&WT.mc_ev=click.
Student Engagement
Undergraduate Research Scholarship Application Now Open
Application Deadline – February 6, 2012
The California Space Grant Consortium (CaSGC) is pleased to announce its 2011-2012 Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program (UROP) for students in their junior or senior year. Up to twenty $1,500 scholarships will be awarded to California college and university students studying STEM topics. Interested students must be US citizens and must be attending a California Space Grant affiliates institution of higher learning. For a list of affiliates, please visit http://casgc.ucsd.edu/?page_id=27. For the full announcement and application instructions, please visit http://casgc.ucsd.edu/blog/wp-content/uploads/UROP-2011-2012-Announcement.pdf. To access the online application, please visit https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/UROP_Application_2011-2012. For questions, feel free to contact Tehseen Lazzouni at tlazzouni@ucsd.edu.
