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Eight Teams from Four Continents Selected for SC13 Student Cluster Competition

Ralph — Thu, 30 May 2013 17:14:04 +0000

Eight student teams from universities in the United States, Germany, China and Australia have been selected to compete in the Standard Track of the Student Cluster Competition to be held at the SC13 conference, Nov. 17-22, 2013, in Denver, Colorado. This real-time, 48-hour non-stop challenge will feature teams of undergraduate and/or high school students building, tuning and racing HPC clusters of their own design on the SC13 exhibit floor.

Cluster computing has arrived and is now an important part of the computing science curriculum at leading universities,” said Brent Gorda, General Manager of the High Performance Data Division at Intel and originator of the competition. “The participants are the future rock stars of HPC. By showcasing the work of these students, we are seeding the computing community with new talent.”

This year’s teams include the first-ever team from Australia, which will be traveling nearly 9,000 miles from Perth for the competition. The following institutions will field teams:

Boston University (USA)
IVEC, a joint venture between CSIRO, Curtin University, Edith Cowan University, Murdoch University and the University of Western Australia (Australia)
National University of Defense Technology (China)
The University of Colorado, Boulder (USA)
The University of the Pacific (USA)
The University of Tennessee, Knoxville (USA)
The University of Texas, Austin (USA)
Friedrich-Alexander University of Erlangen-Nuremberg (Germany)

The Student Cluster Competition is part of SC13 HPC Interconnections, which provides programs for everyone interested in building a stronger HPC community, including students, educators, researchers, international attendees and underrepresented groups.

Read the Full Story.

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Video: Dr. Michio Kaku on the Importance of Supercomputing for Scientific Discovery

Rich Brueckner — Tue, 21 May 2013 15:15:58 +0000

In this video, famed physicist, Dr. Michio Kaku discusses the impact of high performance computing on scientific discovery as part of the SC Conference Video Series.

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Nominees Sought for SC13 Awards

Staff — Fri, 17 May 2013 14:28:14 +0000

SC13, the international conference for high-performance computing, networking, storage and analysis, is accepting nominations for three distinguished awards that will be presented at the conference in November.

The IEEE Seymour Cray Computer Science and Engineering Award, the IEEE Sidney Fernbach Memorial Award and the ACM-IEEE Ken Kennedy Award will be announced at SC13, to be held from 17 to 22 November at the Colorado Convention Center, US. Nominations should be made via the SC13 website.

Established in 1997, the IEEE Computer Society Seymour Cray Computer Engineering Award recognises innovative contributions to high-performance computing systems that best exemplify the creative spirit demonstrated by Seymour Cray. Previous winners have been recognised for design, engineering and intellectual leadership in creating innovative and successful HPC systems.

The IEEE Computer Society Sidney Fernbach Award was established in 1992 in honour of Sidney Fernbach, one of the pioneers in the development and application of high-performance computers for solving large computational problems. Nominations that recognise creation of widely-used and innovative software packages, application software and tools are especially solicited. The Fernbach award winner receives a certificate and $2,000.

The ACM/IEEE Ken Kennedy Award, established in 2009, is presented for outstanding contributions to programmability or productivity in computing, together with significant community service or mentoring contributions. The award was established in memory of Ken Kennedy, the founder of Rice University’s nationally ranked computer science program and one of the world’s foremost experts on high-performance computing. Awardees receive a certificate and a $5,000 honorarium.

This story appears here as part of a cross-publishing agreement with Scientific Computing World.

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George Michael Fellowship Helps HPC Community Thrive

Staff — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 20:55:55 +0000

For doctoral candidates in supercomputing, the George Michael Memorial HPC Fellowship offers a rapid plug-in to the global network of leading high performance computing organizations, from research institutions to industry.

Past recipients report that the fellowship ticket to the annual supercomputing conference (SC) can be a career affirming and life changing experience.

Coupled with the opportunity to display my research at a well-attended conference, the Fellowship has had a tremendous impact on my work future,” said Ryan Gabrys, a 2012 fellow. “The George Michael Fellowship has provided me with more freedom to pursue the areas of research I find the most exciting.”

A doctoral student at UCLA, Gabrys’ HPC specialty is coding for HPC storage systems.

Fellowship candidates are exceptional PhD students whose research focus is on high-performance computing (HPC) applications, networking, storage, or large-scale data analysis using the most powerful computers currently available.
Recipients of the George Michael Memorial HPC Fellowship receive a $5,000 honorarium, travel and registration for SC13, and recognition at the SC13 Awards Ceremony. Past recipients report that the fellowship ticket to the supercomputing conference (SC) can be a career affirming and life changing experience.

The deadline of May 1 to apply for the 2013 fellowship is rapidly approaching. To apply or for more information, see the SC13 website.

Xinyu Que, a 2011 fellow, notes that the fellowship helps students make the most of what can be an “overwhelming” experience at SC. “It provides opportunities to meet other George Michael fellows and make new connections. The profound technical talks helped me better understand research topics and trends.

Not only did I have a chance to present and demonstrate my doctoral research to well-known, senior researchers, but I also learned about future challenges and opportunities in my research areas. It was very stimulating,” said Que, who at the time was a doctoral candidate in Parallel Architecture and System Laboratory in the Department of Computer Science & Software Engineering at Auburn University.
Abhinav Bhatele, a 2009 fellow from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, found the fellowship an effective vehicle for spreading the word about his research. “The fellowship award has been instrumental in disseminating my research and dissertation work on ‘topology aware task mapping’ within the field of HPC,” said Bhatele, who is now a researcher in the Computation Department at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. “It also has helped me to connect with others in the field and I have become good friends with other George Michael fellows.”

For Ignacio Laguna Peralta, another 2011 fellow, the fellowship offered the opportunity to get feedback from experts in his field – failure diagnosis and localization in HPC applications.

I received constructive criticism of my work, which I used to improve it. Also, I was able to interact with other students and researchers in my field and to gain valuable professional connections,” said Laguna Peralta, who received his PhD. from Purdue in 2012. “Other benefits of the fellowship include the opportunity to visit and present research to a variety of organizations. This helps in finding collaborators in labs or companies outside your University and in making connections for a future job.”

The fellowship introduced Mark Hoemmen to the Supercomputing Conference (SC) and opened his eyes to the breadth and vitality of the HPC community. Hoemmen, a specialist in architecture-aware iterative linear solvers, currently works at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico.

Had I not received the Fellowship, I might not have attended the conference until later in my career, and I might have missed out on seeing how grand and dynamic the field of HPC is,” said Hoemmen, a 2008 fellow from UC Berkeley. “It struck me how much interest industry has in the conference, not just as vendors of HPC technology, but also as consumers. This helped me better understand industry’s interest in HPC, which has served me well in my current responsibility as a central developer of a popular open-source scientific software product.”

Sponsored by the ACM and the IEEE-CS, the George Michael fellowship seeks to address the critical issue of training the next generation of high performance computing scientists and engineers.

The late George Michael, a computational physicist at Lawrence Livermore, was a founder of the annual supercomputing conference (SC), which is now in its 25th year. Michael, who died in 2008, is remembered for his ability to bring together diverse talent from academia, industry and national labs to advance HPC.

To qualify, applicants must be enrolled in a full-time PhD program at an accredited college or university and are expected to have completed at least one year of study in their doctoral program. Women, minorities, and all who contribute to workforce diversity are encouraged to apply.

For more information or to apply, visit the SC13 site. Submissions opened in early March and will close on May 1.

Please send any questions to: hpc-fellowship-questions@info.supercomputing.org

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Video: SC13 Seeks Your Ground-Breaking Innovations in the Emerging Technologies Track

Rich Brueckner — Fri, 29 Mar 2013 14:19:39 +0000

In this video, Torsten Hoefler from ETH Zurich describes the new SC13 Emerging Technologies Track.

The SC13 Emerging Technologies Track is a new element of the Technical Program at SC13. It is aimed at providing a showcase on the SC13 show floor for novel projects at a national or international scale. It is different from other aspects of the technical program, such as contributed presentations and posters, in that it will provide a forum for discussing large-scale, long-term efforts in high performance computing, networking, storage, and analysis, rather than a recent research result that such a project might have achieved. Emerging Technologies will provide space in a booth at an attractive central location of the SC13 show floor. The booth will facilitate displays, presentations, and spontaneous discussions among participants and visitors.

If you have ground-breaking technologies in the works, the SC13 conference would love to provide you an opportunity to showcase it to the world leaders in supercomputing. Read the Full Story and get your submissions in today!

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ACM Athena Lecturer Katherine Yelick to Present at SC13

Ralph — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 22:03:22 +0000

This week SC13 announced that Katherine Yelick of LBNL will address the conference as the 2013-2014 Athena Lecturer. The award honors outstanding women researchers who have made fundamental contributions to computer science.

The Athena Lecturer award is a leading award in the computing community, and is a well-deserved honor that recognizes Dr. Yelick’s rich legacy of accomplishments in the field,” said William D. Gropp, the Thomas M. Siebel Chair in Computer Science at the University of Illinois and General Chair of SC13. “Kathy’s research has led to fundamental improvements in the ways in which we think about parallelism in complex applications and express it at large scale.”

Yelick’s was recognized for an extensive body of work including the co-creation of Unified Parallel C (UPC) and core contributions to the theory and practice of performance analysis, modeling, and optimization for the field of high performance computing.

For 25 years the SC conference series has served as the focal point of innovation in the HPC community,” said Satoshi Matsuoka, professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology and chair of the SC13 Technical Program. “We are proud that Dr. Yelick has chosen this conference for her lecture, and feel it is entirely in keeping with the SC tradition of excellence and leadership in our field. Kathy’s successful research career and her deep commitment to developing the next generation of computing professionals exemplify the core values of this conference.”

Read the Full Story.

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Will the DOE and DOD be DOA at SC13?

Staff — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 10:30:19 +0000

Over at The Exascale Report, Doug Black writes that SC13 will not be same conference we’ve come to know without the folks from the DOD and DOE.

The technical presentations and demonstrations depicting the work and accomplishments of the DOD and DOE researchers, typically seen at the SC conferences, were sorely missed at SC12. What can we expect for SC13?

In a recent random poll, (OK, it was in December, 2012) one of the questions we asked was:

What was missing from SC12?
What would make SC13 better?

The top five responses were:

A reliable wireless connection

The DOE booth

The DOD HPC Mod booth

Some control over the noise coming from the exhibits

Cream-filled donuts

Seriously. Well, some of the booths were really noisy, and the wireless Internet seemed to be down more than it was up. And I guess I can’t really argue when it comes to cream-filled donuts. But let’s speak to the other two items.

At SC12, many DOE scientists and engineers wandered the exhibit hall with no place to roost. It was strange not seeing that powerful physical DOE booth presence. The ease of collaboration and networking was clearly missing and was noted by many, including a large number of international attendees.

We’ve heard from numerous sources that DOE will have a combined booth at SC13 featuring the work from all the DOE labs.

This has not been confirmed. SC13 General Chair, Bill Gropp, had this to say. “SC13 is looking forward to another great year – our exhibit hall is filling out, submissions are coming into the technical program, and we expect strong participation from our community, including government researchers such as those at the US Department of Energy.”

As for the DOD HPC Mod booth, no one has high expectations that things will change. Currently the DOD is operating under a severe travel restriction. When SC13 rolls around, it will be a new fiscal year for the government – so things could change. Most likely we’ll see attendee representation, but it’s highly unlikely we’ll be treated to the cool technology innovation on display we’ve seen in past years. This truly is a shame.

The HPC Modernization Program is a great example of the rubber hitting the road – where HPC is being used to save lives and protect and defend the country. The DOD HPC Modernization Program epitomizes U.S. competitiveness. I always found their demos and discussions educational, entertaining, and inspiring.

I know I speak for many thousands within the community when I say the entire global HPC community benefits when the DOD scientists, engineers and researchers participate in the SC conferences.

Download the PDF or Subscribe to The Exascale Report.

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SC13 Issues Call for Papers

Ralph — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 15:00:15 +0000

The SC13 conference has issued their Call For Papers. The conference will take place in Denver November 17 – 22.

The Technical Papers Program at SC is the leading venue for presenting the highest-quality original research, from the foundations of HPC to its emerging frontiers. The conference committee solicits submissions of excellent scientific merit that introduce new ideas to the field and stimulate future trends on topics such as applications, systems, parallel algorithms, and performance modeling. SC also welcomes submissions that make significant contributions to the “state of the practice” by providing compelling insights on best practices for provisioning, using, and enhancing high-performance computing systems, services, and facilities.

Technical Paper Topic Areas include: Algorithms, Applications, Architectures and Networks, Clouds and Grids, Performance Analysis and Tools, Programming Systems, Storage, Visualization, and Analytics, System Software, and State of the Practice.

Abstracts are due April 5, 2013, so get yours in today. Download the Call for Papers (PDF).

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SC13 Seeking Proposals for New Emerging Technologies Track

Rich Brueckner — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 18:40:33 +0000

The SC13 conference is seeking proposals for the Emerging Technologies Track, which is a new element of their Technical Program. Aimed at providing an exhibit showcase for novel projects at a national or international scale, the Emerging Technologies Track differs from other aspects of the technical program in that it will provide a forum for discussing large-scale, long-term efforts in HPC, networking, storage, and analysis.

Emerging Technologies welcomes exhibitions of real hardware prototypes and demonstrations of software as well as project presentations in poster form, animated displays, and scheduled presentations or discussions. Successful projects will display future technologies with the potential to influence computing and society as a whole.

Submissions are due July 31, 2013. Read the Full Story.

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Get a Room! Housing Registration Opens for SC13 in Denver

Rich Brueckner — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 19:22:00 +0000

The SC13 Conference Housing Site is now accepting reservations for hotel rooms in Denver for Supercomputing week. The conference takes place Nov. 17-22.

For those of you who went to SC12 in Salt Lake City last year, you are in for a little sticker shock. Cheap hotel rooms are really hard to come by in downtown Denver, and you can expect to pay over $200 a night after taxes unless you get on the stick really fast. Register now.

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Student Cluster Teams: Start Your Engines for SC13

Rich Brueckner — Thu, 28 Feb 2013 20:32:49 +0000

Team submissions are now being accepted for the SC13 edition of the Student Cluster Competition, a spirited event featuring young supercomputing talent from around the world competing to build and operate powerful cluster computers. As the world’s largest gathering of HPC professionals, the SC13 conference will be held Nov. 17-22, 2013, in Denver.

The energy and dedication that the student teams bring to the Student Cluster Competition is inspiring, especially as they work around the clock to overcome obstacles and get their systems up and running,” said Student Cluster Competition Chair Dustin Leverman of Oak Ridge National Laboratory. “Though they are competing against one another, the teams also share a camaraderie as they race to the end.”

In this video, Dan Olds from Gabriel Consulting brings us the resultes from the SC12 Student Cluster Competition.

The deadline for team submissions is Friday, April 12, 2013. Read the Full Story.

In related news, you can now follow all three of the major worldwide Student Cluster Competitions at their new home site.

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The Road to SC13: Animated Supercomputing Timeline

Rich Brueckner — Sun, 18 Nov 2012 13:22:09 +0000

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhnCKpUlk_k

Our Video Sunday feature continues with this animated timeline showing the history of computing industry since the first IEEE/ACM Supercomputing Conference. The SC13 conference in Denver will mark the 25th anniversary of the conference.

As a critique, I think that while this is a visually stunning presentation, the inclusion of trivial non-HPC milestones like 2008′s “The Hulu website is released to the pubic” is incredibly lame considering the context. Less would have been more this time, guys. If you have to reach that far, why just not add: “Stimpy hits the History Eraser Button” from 1991?

Editor’s Note: While the original video was posted on YouTube as a silent movie (probably due to music licensing problems) this version features a public domain performance of Hebrides Overture Fingal’s Cave by Jakob Ludwig Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy. You can find it and other classical downloads at the MUSOPEN project, a Kickstarter-funded non-profit focused on improving access and exposure to music by creating free resources and educational materials.

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