March Feature Stories
PECM to Aid Researcher in Study of Complex Fluids
The Performance Engineering and Computational Methods (PECM) group plans to assist University of Illinois researcher Erik Luijten and his colleagues in improving the performance of their novel simulation codes. As a result, the researchers expect their parallel codes to run more efficiently on NCSA machines.
New Cyberinfrastructure Partnership Launches Publication
CTWatch is an online source of news, analysis, and commentary that aims to keep the national science and engineering research communities informed on, and involved in, the latest developments in shared cyberinfrastructure. Developed at the Innovative Computing Laboratory (ICL) at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, under the leadership of ICL Director Jack Dongarra, CTWatch will offer its first quarterly issue on February 18. A companion blog, designed as a community forum for breaking news, provocative ideas, and interactive discussion, is slated for March.
News Stories for March
Medium Resource Allocation Proposal Due April 4, 2005
Proposals requesting 10,000-200,000 service units or 30,001-200,000 SUs on the TeraGrid must be submitted to the Alliance Allocations Board by April 4, 2005. The awards are for a period of one year. PIs will be notified of the success of their proposals by June 30.
HDF Group Develops Data Format for NASA EOS
Since 1993, NASA has used NCSA's Hierarchical Data Format (HDF)a package of software, libraries, and tools for analyzing, visualizing, and converting scientific dataas its standard for EOS data. NCSA's HDF team has developed a version of HDF, called HDF-EOS, that is tailor-made for the data generated by NASA's satellites and instruments. "EOS HDF data has been accessed worldwide by an estimated 1.6 million users, from scientists to farmers to schoolchildren," says Mike Folk, technical program manager of the HDF group at NCSA. "We are excited by the challenge of meeting the needs of such a large and diverse assortment of people. We are especially gratified to be able to do our part to help understand global climate change."
Windows for Supercomputers Likely Out by Fall
Microsoft hopes to have the final version of Windows Server 2003 Compute Cluster Edition—its first cluster version of Windows—ready in time for SC2005. A beta version is expected by summer. The first version will be similar to Linux clusters in many ways, including some cluster software development tools and support for MPI. Successive versions are expected to be .NET development-friendly and will enable management of cycle harvesting.
Online Tutorial Covers Collaborating Over Access Grid
The Access Grid Training Project (AGTP) group at Boston University, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and the Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC) has released a new online WebCT tutorial: "Collaborating over the Access Grid: An Elementary Guide for Non-Technical Users." This is the final AGTP tutorial funded by the National Computational Science Alliance. Since the founding of the AGTP group in 2001 (formerly the AG-in-a-Box Training Core), the group has created 11 online, self-paced tutorials, on topics ranging from troubleshooting Access Grid (AG) sessions to organizing AG events. The new tutorial can be accessed by logging into the AG tutorials homepage (linked above) and following the link to "Tutorials on General AG Topics."
Software Releases
ViTables 1.0 Beta
ViTables 1.0 Beta, a graphical tool for browsing and editing files in both PyTables and HDF5 formats, has been released. Among its capabilities are easy navigation through the data hierarchy, and display of real data and associated metadata, multidimensional data, and tables of up to a billion rows. The developers at Cárabos invite feedback from beta testers.
Globus 4.0 Beta
The Beta release of Globus Toolkit 4.0 is now available for download. This release is a key milestone in the GT4 development cycle, as the public interfaces included in the distribution will not change for 4.0. Highlights of this release include aWSRF port of OGSA-DAI, a mechanism to collect usage statistics, stability and performance improvements, improved cross-platform support, further documentation refinements, improved installer interface, and important bug fixes.
IBM XL C/C++ Advanced Edition for Linux
IBM XL C/C++ Advanced Edition for Linux (a high-performance optimizing compiler) provides high compilation and execution performance, parallel programming APIs, memory management debug routines, and runtime dynamic linking for Linux.
Conferences, Workshops, and Training Events
CFP and Registration: Access Grid Retreat April 26-29
The 5th Access Grid™ (AG) Retreat will be held April 26-29 near San Francisco, CA. The AG Retreats provide an interactive forum for Access Grid community—including developers, node operators, and users—to share recent experiences and research findings, to present ideas for future AG technical directions, and to train and educate AG newcomers. Conference organizers seek papers, panel discussions, and submissions for the AG Application Contest with the chance to win a Microsoft Xbox. Call for participation ends March 18. The registration deadline is April 7.
Early-Bird Registration Deadline for HPCC '05 Conference by March 22
Advance registration is available for the 2005 High-Performance Computing and Communication Conference, "HPC: Exploring the New Frontier," to be held April 12-15 at the Hyatt Regency Newport, Goat Island, RI. Government rates are available for accommodations.
Register for the 6th LCI International Conference on Linux Clusters: The HPC Revolution 2005
Registration is now open for The Linux Clusters: The HPC Revolution 2005 Conference, organized by the Linux Clusters Institute (LCI) and held April 25-28 at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC. Keynote speakers are Thom Dunning of NCSA/UIUC, Kelvin Droegemeier of Oklahoma, and Mark Seager of Livermore. Advance registration closes March 25.
Register Online for ClusterWorld '05
This year's ClusterWorld Conference and Expo will take place near San Francisco, CA, May 16-18. Early-bird registration ends April 16.
Register for CCGrid2005
Registration is now open for The 5th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Cluster Computing and the Grid, which will be held May 9-12 in Cardiff, Wales. Advance registration closes March 21.
CFP: The Third Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing Conference
The 2005 Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing Conference has issued a call for participation seeking submissions for papers, panels, workshops, posters and birds-of-a-feather sessions for the three-day conference. While extended abstract submission for papers and workshops closes today, March 4, the deadline for student poster abstracts, birds-of-a-feather sessions, and Doctoral Consortium applications is May 6, 2005. The conference will take place October 19-22 in Albuquerque, NM; this year's theme is "A Diversity of Scholars, A Tapestry of Discovery."
Register for next Linux Clusters Institute Workshop by May 20
The next LCI Workshop will take place at June 21-24, 2005 at the University of Oklahoma in Norman, Oklahoma. The deadline for registration is May 20. As always, space is limited; register ASAP.
