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Improve your HPC skills through the Blue Waters Webinars

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The National Center for Supercomputing Applications’ (NCSA) popular Blue Waters Webinar series kicks off its 2018 offerings on Wednesday, January 24. The free NCSA Blue Waters Webinars are designed to increase high performance computing (HPC) knowledge and skills among the research community.

All webinars are broadcast on YouTube and recorded for viewing anytime. Registered participants will receive the link to the live broadcast and will be able to ask questions during the presentation using NCSA’s Blue Waters Slack channel. All webinars are held on Wednesdays and begin at 10 AM Central Time. Most webinars generally run one hour.

Upcoming webinars include:

  • January 24 – NumFOCUS: An approach to sustaining major scientific software projects by Andy Terrel, President of NumFOCUS
    • A discussion about NumFOCUS, a non-profit focused on open-source scientific computing.
  • January 31 – Blue Waters Overview by Blue Waters Project Office
    • Members of the Blue Waters staff will provide an overview of the Blue Watersresources and services, and guidelines for submitting requests for allocations.
  • February 7 – Machine Learning by Aaron Saxton, NCSA
    • The webinar will provide a walk through the pipeline of image feature detection on the Blue Waters supercomputer.
  • February 14 – Software Sustainability by Daniel S. Katz, NCSA
    • A discussion of the work of six WSSSPE workshops that have brought together communities to focus on software sustainability in high performance computing.
  • February 28 – Analysis and Visualization with yt by Matt Turk, NCSA
    • A presentation of the yt data analysis and visualization software from a high-level, with hands-on examples of how to extract information from datasets.

Additional webinars will continue to be added throughout the year. Suggestions for topics and offers to present content are welcome. Please send your suggestions to bw-eot@ncsa.illinois.edu.

Additional details about the NCSA Blue Waters Webinars and a registration form are available at https://bluewaters.ncsa.illinois.edu/webinars.

About Blue Waters

Blue Waters is one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world. Located at the University of Illinois, it can complete more than 1 quadrillion calculations per second on a sustained basis and more than 13 times that at peak speed. The peak speed is almost 3 million times faster than the average laptop.  Blue Waters is supported by the National Science Foundation and the University of Illinois; the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) manages the Blue Waters project and provides expertise to help scientists and engineers take full advantage of the system for their research.

The Blue Waters sustained-petascale computing project is supported by the National Science Foundation (awards OCI-0725070, ACI-0725070 and ACI-1238993) and the state of Illinois.

About NCSA

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign provides supercomputing and advanced digital resources for the nation’s science enterprise. At NCSA, University of Illinois faculty, staff, students, and collaborators from around the globe use advanced digital resources to address research grand challenges for the benefit of science and society. NCSA has been advancing one third of the Fortune 50 for more than 30 years by bringing industry, researchers, and students together to solve grand challenges at rapid speed and scale.

Tao part of team to develop latest benchmark suite

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Dr. Jian Tao, a Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station (TEES) research scientist with affiliation to the Texas A&M High Performance Research Computing (HPRC) group, received a cash award and a free benchmark license for application code and datasets accepted under a benchmark search program sponsored by the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC). The new SPEC CPU2017 benchmark suite replaces SPEC CPU2006, launched 11 years ago.

SPEC is a nonprofit corporation formed to establish, maintain and endorse standardized benchmarks and tools to evaluate performance and energy efficiency for the newest generation of computing systems. Its membership comprises of more than 120 leading computer hardware and software vendors, educational institutions, research organizations and government agencies worldwide.

The original article can be found at TEES news.

Hitchhiker’s Guide to High Performance Computing Seminar

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From Microstructure to the Performance: A Computational Framework to Study the Response of Materials

Speaker: Vahid Attari
Location: Emerging Technologies Building (ETB) 3027
Time: Thursday, October 26, 2017 12:15 PM – 1:30 PM (CDT)

Abstract: The micropackaging technology in 3-Dimensional Integrated Circuits (3DIC) utilizes a three-level combined microbump and interconnection joint architecture. These micropackages are formed of thousands of interconnections, and hence confront significant design and materials related reliability concerns during service performance of these systems.
This seminar presents an integrated computational framework, incorporated by means of multiphase field approach together with electromigration model, vacancy evolution model, density functional theory, and dilute solution thermodynamic formalism to study the microstructure changes in Cu/Sn/Cu sandwich interconnection systems.
In the first stage, nucleation and growth of intermetallics during formation of the joint are investigated using the multi-phase field method. In the second stage, the performance of the joint under direct current fields for two of the obtained microstructural states are evaluated. It is shown that the intermetallic layer in the anode side grows faster while the intermetallic layer in the cathode side shrinks by increasing the current density. In the third stage, the equilibrium intrinsic point defect concentrations, solute site preferences in the crystal structure of the intermetallics, and the transient evolution of the point defects are investigated.

Brief Bio: Vahid Attari is a PhD candidate at the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, working for the computational materials science laboratory, under supervision of Dr. Raymundo Arroyave. He received his B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in Mechanical Engineering from Iran and Turkey, respectively. He first joined the research cohort at the Texas A&M University as a visiting research scholar during his master studies. His research is focused on phase field modeling, moving boundary problems, phase transformation, thermal, and electrical modeling of microstructural phenomena in materials. His research interests span mesoscopic study and modeling of behavior of the materials during transient phenomena. He has published one journal paper, one patent and presented his researches in International conferences such as ESOMAT, TMS and MS&T.

Website: http://arroyavelab.tamu.edu/people/vahid-attari/

CALL FOR MATERIALS FOR THE SUPERCOMPUTING CONFERENCE (SC17)

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We would like to showcase your HPRC supported computational research at the TAMU HPRC booth during the Supercomputing Conference (SC17) in Denver, Colorado, on Nov 13-16, 2017.

This will be a great opportunity to promote your research to a large audience. SC is the premier conference for high performance computing for academia and industry and attracts engineers and computational scientists from all over the world. In addition, many representatives from funding agencies such as NSF, DOE, and NIH also attend SC. We encourage you to participate in this conference.

Exhibitors include leading companies, national and international research labs, and many top research universities. For reference, there were 349 exhibitors and 11,000+ registered attendees at SC16.

We will use posters and 2 42+” TV displays as medium for showcasing your works. You can contribute in the form of posters, slides/videos, or both.

Submission deadline: Monday, October 2nd, 2017
For submitting slides or videos, wide screen format (16:9) and up to 10 slides are preferred. Please include author/title as a footnote in the slides and caption in the video.
If you would like to submit your work to be presented in poster format:
Submit only an electronic copy of your work to HPRC and we will print all posters.
If the poster file size is less than 5 MB, please email your posters to help@hprc.tamu.edu
For file sizes larger than 5 MB, please upload your file to filex.tamu.edu or place files in your scratch directory on Ada/Terra and then email us the location of your poster files.
Size of poster: 32 inches (wide) x 48 inches (tall)
File format: PDF (preferred) or PowerPoint; please contact us if other format is used
Please use highest image resolution whenever possible
Most conference attendees work in high performance computing fields and/or utilize computing clusters for their research. For the interest of the audience, please include which HPRC cluster you used, software used and typical job size (#cores, memory, and run time).
We will do our best to present your research if we can.

Please contact us at help@hprc.tamu.edu if you have questions.

HPRC

Scaling to Petascale Institute

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https://bluewaters.ncsa.illinois.edu/petascale-summer-institute

Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF), the Blue Waters project at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF), and the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) are organizing a free, week-long institute. The goal is to prepare participants to scale simulations and data analytics programs to petascale-class computing systems in support of computational and data-enabled discovery for all fields of study.

Organizers are working to engage a large national audience. This will be accomplished by streaming the sessions to a number of collaborating organizations using full-duplex audio/video connections. Sessions will be also webcast on YouTube live, although with a lower level of support for the participants.

Participants must register to attend one of the host sites or to watch the sessions on YouTube.

Recordings of the presentations will be made publicly available after the institute is completed.

The HeroX Fortran Storytelling Competition

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After launching the High Performance Fast Computing Challenge, it came to our attention that the mere mention of the Fortran programming language really resonated with the challenge community! A lot of you started out with Fortran, back when it was still one of the go-to programming languages for calculation-intensive applications like weather prediction, fluid dynamics, and even computational chemistry.

Even though NASA had to reconsider their approach for improving the access-restricted software in the High Performance Fast Computing Challenge, we thought we could still have some fun with this and crowdsource the best stories about our innovators and Fortran. For the sake of history, appreciating our community’s expertise, and just hearing a good story, this challenge will offer a total of up to $1750 split amongst the top three “Fortran” reminiscers!
How to Get Involved

What we’re asking is simple: just turn on your phone camera and start talking!
We’d suggest you structure your 1 to 3 minute video to include:

  • An introduction to yourself and your participation in the “The HeroX Fortran Storytelling Competition”
  • Introduce your background with Fortran:
    • When did you first learn it, and what was the application?
    • How are you using it now? (if at all)
    • How is it a different experience than it was in the beginning?
  • Encourage voters to vote for your video

Prize

The HeroX Fortran Storytelling Competition offers a total prize pool of up to $1,750.  The prizes will be awarded as follows:

  • First Place – $1,000
  • Second Place – $500
  • Third Place – $250

Additionally, winners will be featured in a HeroX blog post and across our social media channels.

How do I win?

To be eligible for an award, your entry must:

  • Include a link to a YouTube or Vimeo video of yourself that is no longer than 3 minutes long.
  • Be in the top 3 at the end of crowd voting!

Voting Scorecard

When voting for your favorite video keep the following guidelines in mind:

Section Description Overall Weight
Unique Story Lot’s of people learned Fortran in a computer science class in college, how is your story different? 25
Original approach Creativity and your unique perspective/approach. 25
Tone A strong, captivating and/or funny voice with lots of personality will get full points. 25
Effort A commitment to quality on behalf of the competitor, such as high production value. 25

Rules

Participation Eligibility:

The challenge is open to all adults (18 years and older, or age of majority), private teams, public teams, and collegiate teams. Teams may originate from any country. Submissions must be made in English. All challenge-related communication will be in English.

To be eligible to compete, you must comply with all the terms of the challenge as defined in the Challenge-Specific Agreement.  Submissions that contain inappropriate or offensive material will be disqualified.

 

Registration and Submissions:

Submissions must be made online (only), via upload to the HeroX.com website, on or before 5:00 pm EDT on June 28, 2017. All submissions will be public on the challenge page once submitted. No late submissions will be accepted.

 

Intellectual Property Rights:

It is not anticipated that participation in this competition will require the sharing of any intellectual property. As detailed in the Challenge-Specific Agreement – Competitors will retain all intellectual property rights to their technology. HeroX may use submissions in future promotional materials.

 

Selection of Winners:

Selected submissions will be made publicly visible for the voting stage. Prizes will be awarded to the submitters who have the top 3 vote totals at the close of the voting period.  All votes are subject to review. Any competitor using unfair methods to solicit votes will be automatically disqualified from the challenge. In the case of a tie, the winner(s) will be selected based on selection by HeroX Judges.

 

Additional Information

  • By participating in the Challenge, each competitor agrees to submit only their original idea. Any indication of “copying” amongst competitors is grounds for disqualification.
  • All applications will go through a process of due diligence; any application found to be misrepresentative, plagiarized, or sharing an idea that is not their own will be automatically disqualified.
  • All ineligible applicants will be automatically removed from the competition with no recourse or reimbursement.
  • No purchase or payment of any kind is necessary to enter or win the competition.
  • Void wherever restricted or prohibited by law.
View legal agreement

Parallel Programming Foundations Institute at TACC – July 31-August 4, 2017

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Parallel Programming Foundations Institute at TACC – July 31-August 4, 2017

From: Jason Allison
This 5-day workshop will provide participants with an introduction to developing parallel applications for modern HPC systems. Participants will learn about profiling and optimizing applications, concepts for domain and data decomposition, developing shared-memory parallel applications using OpenMP and distributed-memory parallel applications using MPI, creating hybrid OpenMP/MPI applications for modern manycore architectures, and debugging parallel applications. Hands-on exercises done on the new Stampede2 supercomputer at TACC will help participants to better understand lecture concepts using concrete examples on modern hardware.

 Price for students, faculty, and academic researchers is $400.

 Registration details and full agenda can be found at:
https://www.tacc.utexas.edu/education/institutes/parallel-programming-foundations

Gateways 2017 Conference Call for Participation

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Call for Participation: Gateways 2017 (October 23-25, at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor) is now accepting submissions of papers, demos, tutorials, and panels (2-4 pages) on the topic of science or engineering gateways, which are integrated, user-friendly interfaces to scientific computing, data, and other domain-specific resources to support research and education.

Submissions may focus on design, use, impact, development processes, sustainability, best practices, or any other aspect that you think fellow gateway creators or users will find interesting to learn. We also welcome educational topics directed toward the next generation of gateway creators.

The primary submission DEADLINE IS JUNE 5, 2017, and a poster session deadline (open to all) will be September 8. Read more details in the Call for Participation: http://sciencegateways.org/gateways2017/call.

Now accepting proposals for the ALCF Data Science Program

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ALCF Data Science Program

The Argonne Leadership Computing Facility Data Science Program (ADSP) is now accepting proposals for projects hoping to gain insight into very large datasets produced by experimental, simulation, or observational methods. From now to June 15 2017, ADSP’s open call provides an opportunity for researchers to make transformational advances in data science and software technology through allocations of computer time and supporting resources at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF), a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science User Facility.

Call for Proposals

The call for proposals opens April 24, 2017, and ends on June 15, 2017, 5:00 PM CST. Please see the proposal instructions for more information.

The ADSP, now in its second year, targets “big data” science problems that require the scale and performance of leadership computing resources, such as ALCF’s two petascale supercomputers: Mira, an IBM Blue Gene/Q, and Theta, an Intel/Cray system that came online earlier this year. ADSP projects are two-year awards. PIs will be required to fill out a renewal application for each allocation period of the award.

[Proposal Instructions]

Program Overview

ADSP projects will focus on employing leadership-class systems and infrastructure to explore, prove, and improve a wide range of data science techniques. These techniques include uncertainty quantification, statistics, machine learning, deep learning, databases, pattern recognition, image processing, graph analytics, data mining, real-time data analysis, and complex and interactive workflows. The winning proposals will be awarded time on ALCF resources and will receive support and training from dedicated ALCF staff. Applications undergo a review process to evaluate potential impact, data scale readiness, diversity of science domains and algorithms, and other criteria. This year, there will be an emphasis on identifying projects that can use the architectural features of Theta in particular, as future ADSP projects will eventually transition to Aurora, ALCF’s 200-petaflops Intel/Cray system expected to arrive late next year.

Computing Platforms

ADSP project teams will have access to ALCF computing resources, including Theta, the 9.65-petaflops Cray XC40 system using Intel Xeon Phi 2nd Generation processors, Mira, as well as visualization and analytics clusters, and storage systems.

ADSP Resouces

  • Staff and Postdoc Support: The chosen ADSP projects will receive part-time support from ALCF staff. In addition, the ALCF will hire two postdocs to work directly with the ADSP projects.
  • Training and Hardware Access: ALCF will offer targeted training for the ADSP projects. Depending on the requirements of the projects, this training is likely to include a detailed introduction to the hardware and software stack, access to early hardware, deep dives on specific hardware features, and customized tutorials.
  • Computing and Storage Resources: ADSP projects will be awarded compute time and storage space on Theta. The initial compute time awards are expected to range from 50 million core-hours to 150 million core-hours. Awards for the second year will be based on the proposal and consultation with the project. Storage requirements may be up to 100 terabytes, and any additional project needs could be accommodated in consultation with the ALCF.

Reporting Requirements

ADSP project teams are expected to provide quarterly progress reports, participate in update calls, collaborate with ALCF staff, help prepare highlights of notable accomplishments and results, and provide a written report at the end of the project.