Several workshops are being held around the country this summer, aimed at educators who want to introduce or expand the use of computational resources in their classrooms. Faculty who are teaching at the college level, especially from Minority-Serving Institutions, are encouraged to apply. Applications from secondary school teachers in appropriate disciplines will be accepted on a space-available basis.

A limited number of travel scholarships are available to interested faculty. The scholarships will provide partial or full reimbursement of travel costs to and from the workshops and/or local housing costs. Preference will be given to faculty from institutions that are formally engaged with the education program of XSEDE — Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment — and those institutions that can provide some matching travel funds. Recipients are expected to be present for the full workshop.

Those interested in a travel scholarship should register for the desired workshop, and then create an account and complete the scholarship application.

As part of its education program, XSEDE is co-sponsoring these workshops with the National Computational Science Institute to provide professional development for faculty interested in integrating computational science education into their classes and curriculum. XSEDE also is working with institutions interested in creating formal undergraduate and graduate degree, certificate, and concentration programs in computational science.

Workshop list, including details and application links:
computationalscience.org/workshops2012

ABOUT NCSI:
The National Computational Science Institute provides workshops covering a wide range of subjects relating to computational science. These workshops are for educators at all levels, giving them ideas and resources to use in their classrooms.
NCSI: computationalscience.org

ABOUT XSEDE:
XSEDE, the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment, is the most advanced, powerful, and robust collection of integrated digital resources and services in the world. It is a single virtual system that scientists and researchers can use to interactively share computing resources, data, and expertise. XSEDE integrates the resources and services, makes them easier to use, and helps more people use them. The five-year, $121 million project is supported by the National Science Foundation, and it replaces and expands on the NSF TeraGrid project.

The ideal candidate should have a strong background in parallel computing and large data processing.

The work will be related to parallel algorithms and workflow design to enable climate/environmental data analysis of TB range netCDF datasets at least 100 times faster than state-of-the-practice methods, and software development to enable communication between the backend processing on high-end computers and the frontend, which is a GIS on desktop.

For more information, contact envdataanalysis@gmail.com.

GTC advances awareness of high performance computing, and connects the scientists, engineers, researchers, and developers who use GPUs to tackle enormous computational challenges.

GTC 2012 will feature the latest breakthroughs and the most amazing content in GPU-enabled computing. Spanning 4 full days of world-class education delivered by some of the greatest minds in GPU computing, GTC will showcase the dramatic impact that parallel computing is having on scientific research and commercial applications.

***NOTE: All keynote times listed on the website are in the Pacific Time Zone.***

Tuesday, May 15 Opening Keynote

Jen-Hsun Huang (Co-Founder, President and CEO, NVIDIA)

Hear about what’s next in computing and graphics, and preview disruptive technologies and exciting demonstrations from across industries. Jen-Hsun co-founded NVIDIA in 1993 and has served since its inception as president, chief executive officer and a member of the board of directors.

Wednesday, May 16 Keynote:  From Democratic Consensus to Cannibalistic Hordes: GPU Computing Reveals the Principles of Collective Behavior

Iain Couzin (Professor, Princeton University Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology )

Prof. Iain D. Couzin will demonstrate how GPU computing has been pivotal in the study of collective behavior, helping reveal how collective action emerges in a wide range of groups from plague locusts to human crowds, and the critical role that uninformed, or weakly-opinionated, individuals play in democratic consensus decision-making.

Thursday, May 17 Keynote:  Not Your Grandfather’s Moon Landing

Do not miss this keynote featuring Part-Time Scientists Robert Boehme and Wes Faler! Boehme and Faler are part of a team of international scientists and engineers who want to send a rover to the moon before the end of the year 2013. In this presentation, they will discuss their goals, recent accomplishments and milestones, and how GPUs have help in unexpected ways.

The VSCSE helps students use emerging petascale computing resources to address real problems in a wide range of science and engineering disciplines.

The summer schools for 2012 are:

• Programming Heterogeneous Parallel Computing Systems (July 10-13 2012) [GPGPU]
• Science Cloud Summer School (July 30 – Aug 3 2012)
• Proven Algorithmic Techniques for Many-Core Processors (Aug 13-17 2012)

These schools will be delivered to sites nationwide using high-definition videoconferencing technologies, allowing students to participate from convenient locations across the country where they will be able to:

• work with a cohort of fellow computational scientists,
• have access to local experts, and
• interact in real time with school instructors.

Registration for each school is $100.

For more information, go to: www.vscse.org/summerschool/2012/ or contact:
Scott Lathrop (lathrop@illinois.edu)
Blue Waters Technical Program Manager for Education XSEDE
Director of Education and Outreach
217-714-2517

Register now at: hub.vscse.org/

Host Sites:

Programming Heterogeneous Parallel Computing Systems (July 10-13 2012)

• U Illinois Urbana-Champaign/National Center for Supercomputing Applications
• Harvard U, Cambridge MA
• Louisiana State U, Center for Computation & Technology, Baton Rouge LA
• Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, Pittsburgh PA
• Princeton U, Princeton Inst for Computational Science & Engineering, NJ
• Rutgers U, Piscataway NJ
• U California Los Angeles
• U Michigan, Ann Arbor
• U Oklahoma, Norman
• U South Carolina, Columbia
• U Tennessee Knoxville
• U Utah, Salt Lake City UT

Science Cloud Summer School (July 30 – Aug 3 2012)

• Indiana U, Bloomington
• Louisiana State U, Center for Computation & Technology, Baton Rouge
• Michigan State U, Institute for Cyber Enabled Research, East Lansing
• Pennsylvania State U, State College
• Princeton U, Princeton NJ
• Rutgers U, Piscataway NJ
• U California Los Angeles
• U Michigan, Ann Arbor
• U Wisconsin Milwaukee

Proven Algorithmic Techniques for Many-core Processors (Aug 13-17 2012)

• U Illinois Urbana-Champaign, National Center for Supercomputing Applications
• Harvard U, Cambridge MA
• Michigan State U, Institute for Cyber Enabled Research, East Lansing
• Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, Pittsburgh PA
• Pennsylvania State U, State College
• Rutgers U, Piscataway NJ
• U California Los Angeles
• U Oklahoma, Norman
• U South Carolina, Columbia
• U Tennessee Knoxville
• U Utah, Salt Lake City
• Vanderbilt U, Nashville TN

WHAT IS A PERL DUMP?  It’s called a ‘dump’ because it’s an effort to dump everything you might need to know about Perl into your head in 3 x 2 hour sessions. There is no book, just some handouts. There is no homework, but just a fast paced exposure of the sometimes difficult things that make Perl so useful for preparing and managing data.

While not easy for most grad students, almost everyone eventually finds Perl to be a very useful tool in preparing data for their analysis or  for managing the data created.  This is **not** a class in how to program. If one has a modicum of experience in any programming language (C or C++ are common), then the person probably knows enough to get something from a Perl Dump.  The class can handle almost any number of people – the more the merrier. If you’ve already had a Perl Dump, but think you need a refresher,  please come. If needed, Terry will give another Perl Dump sometime later in the semester.

Please feel free to forward this offer around. It is not restricted to BioStat  students. Most folks in the Bio* fields have found Perl a useful tool to know.

Location: Room 2813 – Med Sci II

Time 9:00am-11:00am or 1:30pm – 3:30pm

Please RSVP and indicate which session you will attend.

Agenda:

1. Introduction of Rory McNeil, Axiope Software
2. Overview of Electronic Notebook efforts on Campus
3. Interactive Demonstration of the next generation of eCAT
4. Question and Answer session

Through the Windows Azure Educator Grants, faculty can request five-month Windows Azure Passes for themselves and their students. Faculty can apply for these grants through the Educators Page on WindowsAzure.com/Education. For details on the resources provided please visit the Windows Azure Educator’s page.

If faculty members have requirements which are not met by the resources above, they can contact AzureU@microsoft.com for necessary adjustments. This includes the ability for faculty to request time extensions on their specific accounts (prior to account expiration) for an additional five months.

For further information, please email the Windows Azure Education team at AzureU@microsoft.com.

CSCAR also provides free statistical consulting to all U-M faculty, staff, and graduate students with the design, planning, analysis, and presentation of research studies.

Visit the CSCAR web page for current offerings and for additional information.

Center for Statistical Consultation and Research (CSCAR)
3550 Rackham Building West
Ann Arbor, MI 48109

For more information, appointments and workshop registration, call (734)764-7828 or visit umich.edu/~cscar

Here’s an opportunity for Flux cluster users and potential users to learn more about the Flux computing cluster, creating and submitting jobs, understanding the available tools, and avoiding common pitfalls.  This will be a hands-on experience, in which you will log in to the cluster and work with jobs.  Basic Linux command-line skills are a pre-requisite, as the Flux cluster is implemented on Linux.

Dan Atkins uses his iPad to take a picture of Joe Hellerstein addressing the audience in Chesebrough Auditorium.

What does it mean to do science in the cloud, and where is it going? These questions were the topic of a public lecture delivered by Google’s manager for computational science, Joe Hellerstein. During his visit to Ann Arbor on April 26, Hellerstein addressed a crowd of 100 faculty, staff and students, providing a high-level overview of current Google cloud services and hinting at directions Google may take in the realm of computational science. Due to a blanket non-disclosure agreement with the university, Hellerstein limited his comments in the general forum, but offered to meet privately with researchers interested in hearing more details.

Prior to the lecture, Hellerstein took part in pre-scheduled meetings with select U-M researchers who are currently positioned to make immediate use of cloud tools in possible pilot collaborations.

In his talk, Hellerstein discussed how the science community can leverage Google’s experience over the last 10 years with massive data sets and building scalable infrastructure. “The starting point [of Google cloud services] may be more cycles, or cheaper cycles. But what it leads to rapidly is a fundamental change in the way we do discovery. We have an opportunity for sharing, reproducibility, and collaboration that we don’t have today with our normal mechanisms,” said Hellerstein. He went on to provide case studies of how scientists at Google are using cloud tools, and he shared his thoughts on possible opportunities that could stem from using the cloud for scientific discovery.

More than 100 faculty, staff and students gathered to learn more about Google's cloud tools for computational science.

The slides and audio from Hellerstein’s public lecture are available here.