July Feature Stories
Looking Into the Vortex
David Semeraro, senior research scientist at NCSA's Visualization and Virtual Environments Division, has been using feature-extraction techniques that were developed for engineering fluid dynamics to find features in tornadic thunderstorm simulations.
NCSA's Platinum, Titan to Retire July 19—Request Transfer by July 5
Users with allocations remaining on Platinum and Titan will need to migrate their codes to NCSA's other machines by July 19. A transfer request must be made by July 5 to guarantee that the transfer will be made before the two machines are shut down. See linked article for more information.
News Stories for July
Proposals for AAB and NRAC-Level Allocations Due July 6
Both proposals to the Alliance Allocations Board, requesting medium-sized awards appropriate for most users with mature computational projects, and the National Resource Allocations Committee, requesting over 200,000 SUs for projects that are computationally intensive or interdisciplinary in scope, are due July 6, 2004. The AAB will meet September 7-8, and the NRAC will meet September 8-9; PIs will be notified by September 30 for a start date of October 1.
Tungsten, Mercury on TOP500 List, 23rd Edition
With a peak performance of 15.3 teraflops, NCSA's Tungsten continues to hold steady at #5 in the top 10 fastest computers in the world, behind computers at Livermore and Los Alamos National Laboratories and an IBM BlueGene/L system prototype at RPI. The Earth Simulator, at the Earth Simulator Center in Yokohama, is still in first place at a benchmark performance of 35.86 teraflops. The Mercury system at NCSA, which is part of the TeraGrid, made its debut at #15 on the list with a peak performance of 10.25 teraflops.
AGTk 2.2: Simplifying Shared Application Development
Reprinted from the Summer 2004 edition of AG Focus Newsletter, this article by Tom Uram at Argonne National Laboratory describes a convenience class included in the Access Grid Toolkit 2.2 release that bundles together much of what is needed to develop shared applications and provides an example of a shared application called SharedGnuplot.
Proceedings of the 2004 Access Grid Retreat Now Online
Presentations from the 2004 Access Grid Retreat, which took place June 9-11 in Toronto, Canada, are now available on the Access Grid website. Just a few of the topics addressed include developing shared applications, video rendering, advanced/remote display management, and specific applications such as NLANR/DAST's Multicast Beacon.
Take the HDF User Survey
Take a very brief survey at the NCSA HDF website to help determine how many people are currently using each of the different versions of HDF.
Summer 2004 AG Focus Newsletter Out
The new issue includes tips on simplifying shared application development for AGTk2.2.
LinuxWorld Product Excellence Awards Calls for Entries—Deadline July 12
Exhibitors at the upcoming LinuxWorld Conference & Expo are eligible to enter their new products/services in the LinuxWorld Product Excellence Awards Program. The product/service entered will be evaluated by a group of respected industry experts. The program is managed in conjunction with LinuxWorld Magazine. The deadline for submission is July 12.
Software Releases
Flexible Parallel HDF5 Alpha1 Release
The Alpha1 release of Flexible Parallel HDF5 (FPHDF5) is now available. It is a prototype implementation with limited features. Its purpose is to test the general concept and programming interface of the Flexible Parallel HDF5 API.
Conferences, Workshops, and Training Events
Register for IAT/WIC/ACM 2004 by July 5 (presenter deadline)
If you're presenting at the joint 2004 IEEE Computer Society International Conference on Intelligent Agent Technology/Web Intelligence Conference, you must register online by July 5. Other participants must register by September 13. The joint conference will be held September 20-24, 2004, in Beijing, China.
Submit to WACE 2004 by July 15
The 2004 Workshop on Advanced Collaborative Environments, sponsored jointly by ANL's Futures Laboratory, the ANL/UC Computation Institute, and INRIA, will be held September 24 in Sophia Antipolis, France. The workshop will address research, technological, and social issues of developing persistent collaboration infrastructure to address the needs of emerging scientific communities. Abstracts may be submitted until July 15; final manuscripts are due August 15.
Registration for SC2004 Begins July 22
Registration for SC2004 will open July 22. SC2004 will be held in Pittsburgh, PA, November 6-12, 2004. Participants are encouraged to register early to take advantage of reduced rates.
Register for ScicomP10 by July 23
The tenth meeting of the IBM System Scientific Computing User Group (ScicomP) will be held Aug. 9-13 in Austin, Texas. ScicomP10 is being held in conjunction with the summer meeting of SP-XXL, a similar group with systems-oriented interests in large-scale scientific technical computing on IBM hardware. The combined meetings are being hosted by the Texas Advanced Computing Center of The University of Texas at Austin.
Register for SIGCOMM by August 2
ACM SIGCOMM 2004, held August 30-September 3 in Portland, Oregon, is the annual conference of the Special Interest Group on Data Communication (SIGCOMM), a vital special interest group of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). The deadline for hotel and early-bird conference registration is August 2.
Register for the Next Linux Cluster Institute by August 13
The next Linux Cluster Institute will be held September 27-October 1, 2004, at the Center for High Performance Computing at the University of New Mexico. Linux Cluster Institute workshops are intensive, hands-on sessions for computational scientists, engineers, and cluster system administrators. Those interested are advised to register early for workshops due to the limited number of available seats. Participants are encouraged to bring their own applications/problems with them for the workshop.
Register for Terascale Code Development Workshop by August 16
An introductory workshop on developing terascale applications will be held September 13-14 at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center in Pittsburgh, PA. The workshop is open to all researchers who would like to develop optimized codes for massive parallelism. The registration deadline is August 16.
Register for Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing by August 25
Registration is now open for the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing Conference, to be held October 6-9 in Chicago, Illinois. This year's theme, "Making History," emphasizes the importance of cooperation and collaboration with women of different generations. It also highlights the impact that women have made and will continue to make on technology. Register by August 25th to receive the early registration rates.
