Feature Story for April
Managing Workflow with NAMD-G
A collaboration between UIUC biophysics researchers and NCSA developers results in improved management of workflow that enables scientific success.
News Stories for April
Medium Resource Allocation Proposal Submissions Close April 14
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 14, 2006. The awards are for a period of one year. PIs will be notified of the success of their proposals by July 1.
SC06 Submissions Website Open Through April 17
SC06, to be held November 11-17 in Tampa Florida, is now accepting submissions for the conference Technical Program sponsored by ACM and IEEE. This year's theme, inspired by an observation by Albert Einstein, is "Powerful Beyond Imagination." April 17 is also the deadline for the Gordon Bell Prize, the HPC Analytics Challenge, and the ACM Student Research Competition. Submission forms and instructions are available at the SC06 website.
NCSA, SDSC Add Compute Systems to TeraGrid
Users requesting high-performance computing resources from NSF now have seamless access to all computational resources at both NCSA and SDSC. When combined with systems in Texas, Indiana, Tennessee, and Pittsburgh, these additions bring the TeraGrid's total computational performance to a peak of 102 trillion calculations per second.
Nominations Sought For Anita Borg Institute Women of Vision Awards
The Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology seeks nominations for the Anita Borg Awards for Social Impact and Technical Leadership. The awards were established to recognize outstanding leaders who embrace Anita's lasting vision to change the world for women and for technology. Recipients of the 2006 awards will each receive a $10,000 award and will be honored at the 2006 Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing Conference Awards Banquet to be held in San Diego, California October 5. Nominations should be submitted by April 15; see website for more details and the nomination form.
First TeraGrid Conference To Be Held June 12-15 in Indianapolis
A TeraGrid Conference will be held for the first time June 12-15 in Indianapolis, Indiana. TeraGrid '06: Advancing Scientific Discovery will be targeted at scientists, researchers, faculty, post-docs, graduate and undergraduate students, high school teachers and students, representatives from federal agencies, representatives from businesses involved in grid computing, and TeraGrid resource providers. National Science Foundation Director Arden Bement will be the conference keynote speaker, with Kelvin Droegemeier, director of the Center for Analysis and Prediction of Storms at the University of Oklahoma, also giving an invited keynote speech. See the website for more details.
Entries for TeraGrid '06 Student Contests Due April 28
Two contests sponsored by TeraGrid '06 are soliciting entries from students. The Impact of Cyberinfrastructure on Your World invites high school students from across the country to showcase their skills and knowledge by describing their perspective on the impact cyberinfrastructure will have on their world. A Research Poster Competition, aimed at undergraduates and graduate students, invites them to submit posters showcasing their research and creativity in research and education areas consistent with the conference theme. Prizes include iPods, all-expense-paid trips to SC06 in Tampa, Florida, and money for research-related expenses. The submission deadline for both contests is April 28. See the TeraGrid '06 website for more details and submission guidelines.
Software Releases
MyProxy 3.5
Included are several changes in the way MyProxy handles certificates and credentials. A build problem with older versions of the Globus Toolkit has also been fixed.
UberFTP 1.19
Version 1.19 includes a new recursive feature available with the rm, lrm, chmod, lchmod, get and put commands. This release also fixes a hanging bug associated with pattern matching that has been found when using rmdir and mput.
GSI-enabled Open-SSH version 3.7
The new version includes HPN-SSH, a patch that can increase speed by 10-fold by implementing run-time buffer sizing to eliminate flow control bottlenecks for scp/sftp transfers on high-latency bandwidth links. Also new is the option to disable encryption of scp transfers for improved performance.
GridShib version 0.4.0
Gridshib 0.4.0 adds the following new features: enabled query PIP to use metadata for AA configuration, metadata tool for translating metadata into trusted certificate files, metadata parsing functionality, new versions of jars supporting OpenSAML, bug fixes, and new documentation.
Conferences, Workshops, and Training Events
TeraGrid Director To Speak at NCSA April 10
TeraGrid Director Charlie Catlett will give the next talk in the Cyberinfrastructure Seminar Series from 1 to 2:30 p.m. (CDT) on Tuesday, April 10 in the auditorium of the NCSA Building, 1205 W. Clark, St., U., and via the Access Grid. Catlett will present information on the resources and services available to support the needs of research and education communities.
RSSI'06 Submissions Due April 15
The National Center for Supercomputing Applications, the Ohio Supercomputer Center, and the University of Manchester are co-sponsoring the second Reconfigurable Systems Summer Institute (RSSI), to be held July 12-13 at NCSA's facility on the Urbana-Champaign campus of the University of Illlinois. The first RSSI, held in 2005, focused on industry's view of development environments, compilers, libraries, and tools for high-performance reconfigurable computing (HPRC). This year, RSSI'06 will shift the focus to the HPRC user and programmer's point of view of these areas and will include algorithms and applications. The HPRC user community is invited to participate in RSSI'06 and to share experiences, insights, and research results related to this emerging technology. HPRC industry representatives also are invited to participate. Abstracts for presentations or posters that describe innovations in the past year, application benchmarks, future research and development, and suggestions for academic collaboration are welcome. Suggested topics and other guidelines and submission criteria are available at the website. Abstracts must be submitted for review by April 15. Participants will receive notification of acceptance by May 15, with completed presentations and posters due by July 1.
NCSA Director's Seminar Series: Dynamic Applications on Grids, April 18
Ed Seidel will speak on Dynamic Applications on Grids as part of the NCSA Director's Seminar Series on April 18 from 1:00-2:30 PM in 1122 NCSA. Seidel is Director of the Center for Computation and Technology at Louisiana State University and the Floating Point Systems Professor in LSU's Departments of Physics and Astronomy and Computer Science.
Workshop on Research for Petascale Computing Technologies for Science and Engineering April 20
Held April 20 from 8:30-5:00 in the NCSA Building Auditorium in Urbana, IL, this workshop on Research for Petascale Computing Technologies for Science and Engineering will explore the issues surrounding petascale computing with presentations by Marc Snir (head of the UIUC Department of Computer Science), Wen-mei Hwu (professor of electrical and computer engineering), Rob Pennington (leader of NCSA's Innovative Systems Laboratory), Chandrika Kamath (an expert in data-intensive computing from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory), Phillip Colella (an expert in applied mathematics from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory), and Robert Harrison (an expert in scientific applications from Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the University of Tennessee at Knoxville). The meeting will conclude with a panel discussion and with questions/comments from the participants. Register at the page linked above.
Applications for 3rd International School on Grid Computing Due May 1
The Summer School will take place July 9-21 in Ischia (Naples), Italy and will consist of lectures and discussion with leading authorities in advanced grid technology, applications of e-Science and distributed systems research. These will be complemented by laboratory sessions, tutorials and group work. While the formal application deadline is May 1, selections for more than half the slots at the school will be made on April 21. The application form and more details are available at the website.
Founding NCSA Director To Speak May 4 at NCSA
The next speaker in the NCSA 20th Anniversary Distinguished Lecture Series will be Larry Smarr, the center's founding director. Currently director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, Smarr will speak at 7 p.m. on May 4 in the NCSA Auditorium (1205 W. Clark St., U.) on "High-Performance Collaboration: The Jump to Light Speed."
Submission for HiPC Open Through May 5
The submission website for the 13th Annual International Conference on High Performance Computing (HiPC 2006) is now open. Authors are invited to submit original unpublished manuscripts that demonstrate current research in all areas of high-performance computing, which will also be published as proceedings by Springer-Verlag. HiPC 2006 will take place December 18-21 in Bangalore, India. The deadline for submissions is May 5.
Make TeraGrid '06 Hotel Reservations by May 11
TeraGrid '06 will be held June 12-13 in Indianapolis, IN. The deadline for hotel reservations is May 11; advance conference registration ends May 26.
Register for June CUNY Linux Clusters Workshop by May 19
The next Linux Clusters Institute Workshop will take place June 27-30 at the City University of New York Graduate Center in New York City. As always, space is limited, so apply early.
Register Online for ISC2006 by May 27
Advance online registration for the 2006 International Supercomputer Conference, to be held June 27-30 in Dresden, Germany, is now open. Please note that registration fees are reduced for those who register before May 27.
Registration Open for 2006 NCSI Summer Workshops; New Fees Instituted
Online registration is now available for the 2006 slate of summer workshops offered by The National Computational Science Institute. Workshop topics will focus on computational science education in a variety of fields, as well as interdisciplinary computational science education. Workshops will run if 12 people register prior to the specified notification date. Registration will remain open until the workshop is full or until 21 days prior to the workshop, which ever occurs first. See the website for the full list of workshops and important deadlines. Because of planned NSF funding decreases, this year participants will be asked to pay a registration fee of $150.
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