Entries filed under “HPC Education and Training”

Pointers to screencasts, tutorials, books, and events that can help get you up to speed on the technologies and techniques of HPC.

Bill Gropp Named Siebel Chair

By Ralph | Published February 13, 2013

Computer Science Professor Bill Gropp has been appointed the Thomas M. Siebel Chair in Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, one of only two such chairs in the United States. The chair is the result of a $2 million gift from the Thomas and Stacey Siebel Foundation.

Gropp, along with collaborators at Argonne National Laboratory, pioneered the design of the Message Passing Interface (MPI). This standard—and its software implementation, also developed by Gropp and company—is essential to the parallel processing at the heart of supercomputing today.

There’s no better place than the University of Illinois to advance the revolution in computational science. You need people who understand computing, math, and the particular problem area you’re studying—whether its drugs interacting with our body or black holes interacting with each other. Illinois’ College of Engineering brings those people together, and they’re really ready to collaborate,” said Gropp. I’m lucky to be here, and it’s an honor to be Illinois’ first Thomas M. Siebel Chair in Computer Science.”

Read the Full Story.

Also posted in HPC, HPC People | Leave a comment

MicroPod Kickstarter Campaign Aims to Bring Parallel Computing to the People

By Rich Brueckner | Published February 12, 2013

A new Kickstarter project is looking to build a parallel computer that you can afford to use at home. With the MicroPod, you will be able to “stand up” a parallel computer using inexpensive commodity hardware, or even use the images as VMs to run a completely virtual development environment.

Completing this project will dramatically expand the number of people who have access to basic parallel computing systems, which in turn will expand the number of people who know how to program and operate these systems. That, in turn, will allow more super computers to be built. This is important. The rate of scientific progress world wide is largely limited by the number and speed of super computers that scientists can access. All of the “big science” problems these days have to be modeled and analyzed by such machines, and there just aren’t enough to go around.

This is a very worthwhile cause and we at insideHPC are hoping you can help them out. Read the Full Story.

Also posted in HPC, HPC Hardware, inside Startups, Video | Leave a comment

Purdue Obtains Five-year Funding for University Science Gateway

By Staff | Published February 10, 2013

Researchers at Purdue University in Indiana, US, have received a five-year, $14.5 million National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to expand the university’s widely used online science and engineering gateway, nanoHUB.org.

The Purdue-led Cyber Platform, a part of the Network for Computational Nanotechnology, will assist researchers across the globe by developing a virtual society that shares simulation software, data and other innovative content to provide engineers and scientists with the fundamental knowledge required to advance nanoscience into nanotechnology.

Thousands of times a day the leading researchers come to Purdue through the globally unique tool of nanoHUB,’ said the university’s president Mitch Daniels when announcing the grant. ‘The new NSF investment is an affirmation of the brilliance of nanoHUB’s Purdue creators and of its worldwide scientific significance.”

Annually, nearly 250,000 users in 172 countries participate in nanoHUB, an online meeting place for simulation, research, collaboration, teaching, learning and publishing. The nanoHUB provides a library of 267 simulation tools, free from the limitations of running software locally, used in the scientific computing cloud by more than 12,000 people every year.

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

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International Summer School on HPC Challenges in Computational Sciences

By Ralph | Published February 5, 2013

This week the European PRACE consortium announced that graduate students and postdoctoral scholars in the United States, Europe, and Japan can now apply for the fourth International Summer School on HPC Challenges in Computational Sciences, to be held June 23-28, 2013, in New York City. The summer school is sponsored by the U.S. National Science Foundation’s Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) project, the European Union Seventh Framework Program’s Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe Implementation Phase project (PRACE-2IP), and RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science (RIKEN AICS).

Leading American, European and Japanese computational scientists and high-performance computing technologists will offer instruction on a variety of topics, including: performance analysis & profiling, aalgorithmic approaches & numerical libraries, data-intensive computing, and scientific visualization

Interested students should apply by March 18. Meals, housing, and travel expenses will be paid for the selected participants.


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Virtual Site Visit: HPC at RWTH Aachen University

By Ralph | Published January 30, 2013

In this video, Georg Schramm and Dieter an Mey describe supercomputing facilities at RWTH Aachen University in Germany. They also discuss the advantages of the Intel Cluster Ready program.

Also posted in HPC, Video | Leave a comment

UI Labs to Promote Research, Startups, and Supercomputing

By Ralph | Published January 24, 2013

Over at the Chicago Sun-Times, Sandra Guy writes that the University of Illinois is pursuing plans to create a research, development and supercomputing center in Chicago where tech startups, manufacturers and big corporations can solve problems in energy, transportation, advanced manufacturing, food production and healthcare technology.

A research “hub” would be set up for 250 faculty fellows within the next three years, according to an outline of the project obtained by the Sun-Times. More than 1,000 undergraduate and graduate students would get training and entrepreneurial opportunities at the UI Labs in the next five years.

Now in the fundraising stage, the goal is to raise $20 million for the first year of operations for the UI Labs. Read the Full Story.


Also posted in HPC | 1 Comment

Why the U.S. Must Invest in What’s Next

By Ralph | Published January 21, 2013

Over at the Washington Post, Shirley Ann Jackson from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute writes that the United States is at an interesting inflexion point where Big Data, HPC, and Web science could drive our economy for generations–but only if we continue fund the science.

But looming, deep federal cuts in scientific research and development funding could do significant damage. These cuts stand to dramatically slow the pace of economic growth in the U.S., undermine our national security, hinder our competitiveness, and reverse any recent gains we have made in developing the human capital — the young scientists and engineers – so essential for innovation.

Read the Full Story.

Also posted in HPC, National and Legislative Action | Leave a comment

Applications Open for PRACE Summer of HPC

By Ralph | Published January 21, 2013

The European PRACE consortium will begin accepting applications on Jan. 25 for its 2013 Summer of HPC Program for undergraduate and postgraduate students.

Summer of HPC is a PRACE programme that offers summer placements at HPC centres across Europe to late stage undergraduates and early stage postgraduate students. Up to twenty top applicants from across Europe will be selected to participate. Participants will spend two months working on projects related to PRACE technical or industrial work and produce a visualisation or video of their results. The programme will run from 1July to 30 August 2013, with a kick-off training week in Edinburgh attended by all participants. Flights, accommodation and a stipend will be provided to all successful applicants; all participants need to bring is an interest in computing and some enthusiasm! Prizes will be awarded for the best participants.”

Applications are welcome from all disciplines and previous experience in HPC is not required.

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Video: Beginning Intel Xeon Phi Coprocessor Workshop

By Rich Brueckner | Published January 11, 2013

In this video with the unfortunate thumbnail, Taylor Kidd from Intel presents an introduction to the hardware architecture of the Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor.

This module covers the intent of the workshop, the type viewer the workshop is aimed at, a brief look at the hardware architecture of the Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor, the SW stack, and programming models. Briefly looks that the roadmap forward for the Intel Knights products. It discusses the software development platform, documentation, and use of Intel Premier Support. It sets expectations on the capabilities and usage models that are appropriate for the Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor . And lastly, looks at brief example of the advantages of the 512-bit vector engine.

If you found this video helpful, Kidd has recorded a whole series of Beginning and Advanced Intel Xeon Phi workshops on MPI, Optimization, Vectorization, and more.

Also posted in Co-processors, HPC, HPC Hardware, Video | 1 Comment

Joint Computing Institute to Tackle Big Data in the Northwest

By Rich Brueckner | Published January 9, 2013

This week PNNL announced that the lab is launching the new Northwest Institute for Advanced Computing in cooperation with the University of Washington. Researchers associated with the institute will work to ensure the next generation of computers and the methods used to run them can address challenges ranging from climate change to energy management.

Computing has transformed science, engineering and society in remarkable ways,” said Doug Ray, associate director of PNNL’s Fundamental & Computational Sciences Directorate. “But as huge amounts of new data are generated daily by scientific instruments and household electronics, new technologies and approaches are needed to give that information more meaning. Researchers at the Northwest Institute for Advanced Computing will tackle ‘big data’ and help improve the quality of life for many U.S. citizens.”

Located on UW’s campus, the institute will be a center of collaboration where UW and PNNL researchers jointly explore advanced computer system designs, accelerate data-driven scientific discovery and improve computational modeling and simulation. Scientists and engineers at the institute will also train future researchers in modern computational approaches. Read the Full Story.

Also posted in Collaborations, HPC, inside-BigData | Leave a comment

Intel Offering Free C++ Parallel Programming Tools for Students

By Ralph | Published January 3, 2013

Intel’s James Reinders writes that the company is now offering a set of free Intel C++ parallel programming tools (and discounts on Fortran tools) for students.

These are serious tools to achieving high performance results with C++ programming through optimization, analysis and support for the latest standards. These are interesting in advanced course work, or any time parallel programming is being done.

Read the Full Story.


Also posted in HPC, HPC Software | Leave a comment

Video: The Growing Need for HPC Virtualization

By Rich Brueckner | Published January 1, 2013

In this video, Professor Thomas J. Hacker from Purdue University lectures on virtualization clusters in high-performance computing. Additional segments on this subject are also available on YouTube.

Also posted in Cloud HPC, HPC, Video, Virtualization | Leave a comment

Slidecast: Silicon Mechanics Research Cluster Grant Program

By Rich Brueckner | Published December 12, 2012

In this slidecast, Art Mann from Silicon Mechanics describes the company’s Research Cluster Grant program.

We are pleased to again announce our sponsorship of a unique grant opportunity: A complete High-Performance Compute Cluster using the latest AMD Opteron processors and NVIDIA GPUs. Silicon Mechanics, a leading manufacturer of rackmount servers, storage systems, and high-performance computing solutions, is dedicated to building relationships and collaborating with professors and researchers at universities and other research institutions. This grant program is open to all US and Canadian qualified post-secondary institutions, university-affiliated research institutions, non-profit research institutions, and researchers at federal labs with university affiliations. Submissions will be reviewed for merit and related impacts.

Submit your entry today.

Download the MP3 * Subscribe on iTunes * If Dropbox is blocked, download audio from Google Drive.


Also posted in GPUs, HPC, HPC Hardware | 1 Comment

University of Texas Team Wins SC12 Student Cluster Challenge

By Ralph | Published November 30, 2012

This year at SC12, University of Texas at Austin won the Student Cluster Competition, beating teams around the world, including the USA, Europe, Canada, China, Costa Rica, Germany, Russia and Taiwan.

None of us expected to win, but we didn’t expect to lose either…we were thrilled,” said Craig Yeh, a third year Computer Science major at The University of Texas at Austin. “The win validated all of the work we did since May leading up to the competition. I highly recommend this experience to other students at The University of Texas.”

The winning student team members include Andrew Wiley, Reid Douglas McKenzie, Michael Teng, Anant Rathi, Craig Yeh, and Julian Michael. The team and TACC partnered with Dell, Nvidia, and Intel to design and build a hybrid, power-saving system that integrated GPUs, Intel processors, and a new-generation Dell chassis. The company sponsors provide the hardware and travel funds, while the TACC mentors worked side by side with the students to teach them the fundamentals of cluster construction, systems administration, and program optimization. Chevron and Mellanox also served as sponsors of this year’s team.

It’s a real-world situation,” said John Lockman, the team’s lead mentor and a member of TACC’s High Performance Computing group. “For example, a data center in industry might need to expand, but can’t due to financial or space constraints, so they have a limited amount of power and a scientific workload that they have to accomplish in a reasonable amount of time.”

Read the Full Story.


Also posted in Events, HPC, SC12 | Leave a comment

Karalis Music Project Wins HPC Advisory Council University Award

By Ralph | Published November 29, 2012

This week the HPC Advisory Council announced that Antonis Karalis has received the prestigious HPC Advisory Council University Award 2012 for advanced research in the subject area of music in high-performance computing. As part of Council’s main mission of community and education outreach, the University Award program is intended to enhance students’ computing knowledge-base.

The council award program was designed to enrich world-wide university research activities by utilizing and maximizing the high-performance computing capabilities and the council’s expertise,” said Cydney Stevens, HPC Advisory Council Research Steering Committee Director. “We congratulate Mr. Karalis and encourage others to submit their research proposals for the 2013 award.”

Read the Full Story.

Also posted in Computing Research | Leave a comment

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