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Announcement - ALENEX11 papers due 5 October

This spot on Telegraph Hill overlooks the bay in San Francisco, where ALENEX11 will take place. Image courtesy of Wally Gobetz, under Creative Commons 2.0.

The Workshop on Algorithm Engineering and Experiments (ALENEX11) will be held on 22 January 2011 at the Holiday Inn San Francisco Golden Gateway, San Francisco, California, US; papers are due 5 October 2010.
The aim of the ALENEX workshop is to provide a forum for presentation of original research in the implementation and experimental evaluation of algorithms and data structures. We invite submissions that present significant case studies in experimental analysis (such studies may tighten, extend, or otherwise improve current theoretical results) or in the implementation, testing, and evaluation of algorithms for realistic environments and scenarios, including specific applied areas (for example, databases, networks, operations research, computational biology and physics, computational ge

Link of the Week: When computers were human

Image courtesy David Grier

The photo at right may look rather ordinary but in fact this office is much more exciting than it seems. The men and women working away at these desks are in fact a sort of human computer, employed by the Mathematical Tables Project in New York City in the 1930s and ’40s under a Works Progress Administration program to fight the ravages of the Great Depression.The Mathematical Tables Project consisted of 450 ‘human computers’ — many of whom had been close to homelessness during the financial collapse. The large majority of the staff had not even completed high school, yet they were brought together to perform calculations for government and scientists in an era  before the first working general-purpose, electronic computer (generally agreed to be ENIAC, or “Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer”).The Mathematical Tables Office Computing Floor shown in the pho

Announcement - Free HPC event, 30 September

The event will take place in Long Beach, California, pictured above.Image courtesy of Jon Sullivan, under Creative Commons license.

You are invited to attend a free day-long event on high performance computing technology in Long Beach, California, USA on 30 September 2010.
The event, which is sponsored by nVIDIA, Intel, HP, Mellanox Technologies, Adaptive Technologies, and CB Technologies, will take place from 8:30am to 3:00pm.
Agenda:

"CPU Processing" - Intel
"Accelerating HPC with GPU Computing" - Nvidia, Dale Southard
"Paving the Road to Exascale Computing" - Mellanox,
"Managing HPC with intelligent policies/HP Cloud" - Adaptive Computing
"Parallel File Storage Solutions" - DataDirect Networks
"HPC CHARACTERIZATION AND OPTIMIZATION" - Hewlett-Packard Company

 Confirmed Speakers:

HP, Logan Sankaran, System Tuning and Application Optimization for HPC
Nvidia, Dale Southard
Mellanox, Gilad Shainer, Sr. Director of HPC an

Feature - Deciphering the tree of life Image courtesy of Miriam Boon. What’s a bee without its honey, a butterfly without a flower’s nectar? It’s a pretty puzzle posed by the fossil record, which suggests that insects evolved long before flowering plants did. With the rise of genetics, a new window has opened onto evolution – one that could provide a fresh perspective on old problems such as the disparity between insect and angiosperm (flowering plant) evolution. Computational phylogenetics is the development of computational and mathematical techniques that aid in the estimation of evolutionary history, using molecular data such as protein and DNA sequences to construct a “tree of life.” To calibrate their molecular results, evolutionary biologists add the fossil record to the mix, and assume that a new species will evolve at the same rate as its ancestors. “Often they [other researchers] would force the date of angiosperms to correspond

Image of the Week - Supercomputing between the lines

Left: This is just one of many images you’ll find inside the Supercomputing Coloring Book. Image courtesy of NCSA.Right: According to the Supercomputing Coloring Book, researchers use supercomputers to simulate the folding and unfolding of proteins — like this tryptophan cage protein — in an effort to understand how folding errors can cause diseases. Image copyright Carlos Simmerling, 2006.

Supercomputers are far from child’s toys, but that doesn’t mean children can't appreciate them.That's just one of many reasons why the National Center for Supercomputing Applications put together their Supercomputing Coloring Book.“I think it does a few things well,” said Bill Bell, division director of public affairs at NCSA. “It grabs your attention. It communicates that just because the concepts are complicated doesn’t mean they have to be intimidating. And it introduces people to someth

Announcement - Abstracts for Symposium on Authentication Technologies for Research and Education due September 15

The Symposium on Authentication Technologies for Research and Education will continue to accept abstracts through 15 September.
The symposium and the accompanying Roundtable on Cloud and Grid Security Standards will take place Monday 4 October on the campus of Texas Tech University.
The symposium will be focused on working solutions in campus security infrastructures that can contribute to solutions for simple but effective provision of strong authentication in research, educational, government and industrial settings. Submissions are invited from members of the identity management and distributed computing security communities.
Talks will be open to the public. Participants will be given adequate time to explain and expand on their idea or project. The audience will include participants familiar with this problem and knowledgeable about working solutions in concept or in pract

Announcement - Gordon Conference 2010 abstracts due 16 September

The Grand Challenges in Data-Intensive Discovery conference (or Gordon Conference for short) will be held 26-28 October 2010 at the San Diego Supercomputer Center on the campus of UC San Diego.
Science has entered a data-intensive era, driven by a deluge of data being generated by digitally based instruments, sensor networks, and simulation devices. Hence, a growing part of the scientific enterprise is associated with analyzing such data, and such analysis places special demands on computer architectures because the associated calculations have frequent I/O accesses, large memory requirements, and often limited parallelism.
In mid 2011, SDSC will deploy a unique data-intensive high performance computing system called Gordon. Gordon will be a peer-reviewed allocated resource on the National Science Foundation's TeraGrid available to any US researcher. It will have a peak speed of 245 Teraflops and feature very large shared memo

Feature - The forecast before the storm
How supercomputers and hybrid workflows helped beat tornadoes to the chase

A Doppler On Wheels collects data in a tornado during VORTEX2, as PI Nolan Atkins stands nearby collecting photogrammetric data.
Image courtesy of VORTEX2.

Chasing tornadoes won’t get you very far, if your goal is to understand how tornadoes form. To get results, researchers need to get their instruments on the ground before the tornado touches down.
That’s the big catch 22 of VORTEX2 (Verification of the Origins of Rotation in Tornadoes Experiment), according to principal investigator Joshua Wurman. Current techniques predict tornadoes an average of only 13 minutes in advance, a fact that makes it difficult to evacuate or properly prepare for the impending disaster. To improve that lead time, or learn how to predict how destructive a tornado will be, scientists need data recorded as the tornadoes form.
“In order for us to collect good data we had t

Announcement - Cybera Summit 2010 early-bird registration due

Leonard Brody, one of Canada's leading technology forecasters and business strategists, will be headlining Cybera's annual fall event this year: Summit 2010  – Driving Alberta’s Digital Evolution. Early Bird Registration rates are available until 25 August.
This year's two-day program takes place 21-22 September at The Banff Centre and will focus on the projects, technologies and opportunities driving the evolution of digital-based R&D sectors and economies. “Digital” refers to anything that involves data management, pervasive broadband, network-enabled platforms, cloud and advanced computing, or online/web-integrated resources (ie. Web 2.0). These are the tools that are driving new innovations in business and groundbreaking discoveries in research and development.
Through panel sessions, keynote presentations, demos and networking opportunities, participants will explore a variety of topics

Feature - OSG Summer School a success

The summer school in progress. Image courtesy of OSG.

Last month, Open Science Grid hosted its first summer school, and by all reports, it was a hit with both teachers and students.
“The OSG Summer School was a great experience,” said Vishagan Ratnaswamy, who will begin work on his doctorate in aeronautics this fall at Caltech. “I was able to learn more about the script files I was using as well as the systems I was running my simulations on.”
Before attending the summer school at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Ratnaswamy was already an OSG user. But by attending, he said, he learned more about the available computational resources and the many ways in which grid computing can be applied to various types of research.
Ratnaswamy was one of 17 students chosen from a pool of 45 applicants to receive funding to attend the summer school, the TeraGrid ’10 conference, and next year’s OSG All-Hands Meeting. At

Link of the Week - TeraGrid ’10 Proceedings

People mingle as they browse the research projects on display at the TeraGrid ’10 poster session. Image courtesy of Miriam Boon, iSGTW.

Earlier this month, researchers and computer experts gathered in Pittsburgh for TeraGrid ’10, the annual conference organized and sponsored by TeraGrid.
Not everyone could attend, of course, so it’s a good thing that the proceedings are now available online at this week’s link of the week.
The conference included a wide variety of programming, including tracks dedicated to science, technology, science gateways, and EOT (education, outreach and training). A poster session and visualization showcase featured posters and visualizations related to computational biology, molecular dynamics, computational chemistry, signal processing, computer science, computational fluid dynamics, computational multi-body dynamics, computational materials (nano-composites), grid computing

Feature - Education and the future: eLearning

Image courtesy GridTalk

Computers and the web have transformed homes and businesses, and could do the same for education and training. Known as “eLearning,” this can be as simple as accessing a school timetable online, or as complex as running virtual communities for sharing and creating knowledge. eLearning is defined by the European Commission (EC) as ‘the use of new multimedia technologies and the internet to improve the quality of learning by facilitating access to resources and services, as well as remote exchanges and collaboration.’ The EC sees eLearning as an integral part of education and calls for member states to include eLearning in national policies; its Lifelong Learning Program, running from 2007-2013, includes it in schools, higher education, vocational training, and adult education.Where do grids fit in?
Grid technologies help researchers worldwide collaborate, analyze data and carry out research.