News Stories for October
CIP and TeraGrid Medium Resource Allocation Requests Due October 21
Requests for CIP computing resources of 10,001-200,000 service units or TeraGrid resources of 30,001-200,000 service units are due October 21. Awards will be announced January 1.
Kappes to Lead NCSA Training and Outreach
Sandie Kappes has been chosen to head NCSA's Training and Outreach Division within the Persistent Infrastructure Directorate. Kappes, who has been the interim division leader for the past several months, will lead NCSA's efforts to develop and deliver training to NCSA's user community. Kappes serves as the NCSA lead for the Cyberinfrastructure Partnership (CIP) training effort, working with the San Diego Supercomputer Center to provide joint training activities. Kappes, who has been with NCSA since 1997, focusing on online training and web application development, initiated and has been responsible for leading NCSA's online training efforts using the WebCT training environment; she also developed and currently maintains the NCSA and TeraGrid software repository application for delivering third-party software information to users of NCSA and TeraGrid systems.
Photran Helps Fortran Programmers Plug Into Eclipse
Members of the Department of Computer Science at UIUC are interested in finding users and testers for Photran, a plug-in Eclipse IDE tool that provides support for development of codes written in Fortran, including those of some NCSA research scientists. Currently, Photran provides CVS repository management, Fortran code editing with syntax highlighting, powerful search-and-replace facilities, and code outlining. It is available for Linux, Windows, Solaris, and Mac OS X (v. 10.3). However, Photran developers are working to extend Photran's capabilities to include refactoring, a code editing process used for improving code structure by modifying specific variables and routines without introducing bugs into the code's overall behavior.
Sakai to Power Supercomputing Conference's Online Education Program
SC05's multidisciplinary Education Program, whose theme this year is "Engaging and Empowering Educators: High Performance Classroom," will this year have an online dimension, courtesy of the Sakai Collaboration and Learning Environment (CLE). Originally a collaboration between the University of Michigan, Indiana University, Stanford University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Sakai Collaboration and Learning Environment is an open source software environment that enables open-source course management and online collaboration research support tools for higher-education instutions. Expected to continue through June 2006, the Online Education Program will host content on a variety of topics ranging from Introduction to Computational Science to advanced concepts such as submitting jobs to TeraGrid like environments. Participants will use Sakai's collaboration tools to foster community building.
SDSC Seeks Community Technical Review for Collaboration Notebook
The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) announced today that it is inviting developers across a variety of scientific domains to preview the new Collaboration Notebook application. The Microsoft-funded application is intended to enable researchers and knowledge workers to access, manage, store and share scientific and other data from a variety of Internet-based sources on their personal computer. The Notebook application provides a framework to create advanced interfaces to Internet and Intranet data sources and services, including SOAP-based web services. SOAP is an XML-based, W3C standard mechanism to facilitate machine-to-machine communication. A one-day workshop in early 2006 at SDSC will show interested users how to create a smart client application using the Notebook.
Software Releases
Network Performance Advisor 2.1
New features include a GUI redesigned to accommodate the PDHA, directional testing, and improved error reporting, as well as a GUI client for the Performance Data Historical Archiver. This release also supports the GGF Network Measurement Working Group request schema v1; nm-wg v2 is in the works. Advisor developers "hope users will attempt to integrate their own network diagnostic tools in order to provide us with feedback regarding our Performance Data Collector (PDC) design."
Conferences, Workshops, and Training Events
Center for Advanced Study Lecture: "Dynamic Network Analysis Applied to Counterterrorism"
The next seminar in the Center for Advanced Study Age of Networks series will feature Kathleen Carley, a professor at the Institute for Software Research International in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. Carley's talk, "Dynamic Network Analysis Applied to Counterterrorism," will be at 4 p.m. on Monday, Oct. 24 in 1404 Siebel Center. A reception will be held after the talk in the second floor atrium.
RAW 2006 Call for Papers
The 13th Reconfigurable Architectures Workshop (RAW 2006) will be held April 25-26, 2006 in Rhodes, Greece. RAW 2006 is associated with the 20th Annual International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS 2006) and is sponsored by the IEEE Computers Society's Technical Committee on Parallel Processing. RAW 2006 is one of the major meetings for researchers to present ideas, results, and on-going research on both theoretical and practical advances in Reconfigurable Computing. The deadline for submissions is October 25; see website for details and online submission procedures.
HiCOMB 2006 Call for Papers
The Fifth IEEE International Workshop on High Performance Computational Biology will take place April 25, 2006 in Rhodes, Greece, also in conjunction with IPDPS 2006. The goal of this workshop is to provide a forum for discussion of latest research in developing high-performance computing solutions to problems arising from molecular biology. The deadline for submissions is November 15; see website for details.
Grid Application Planning and Implementation Workshop - Early Registration Open
A SURA Cyberinfrastructure Workshop on grid application planning and implementation will be held December 6-8, 2005 at the Texas Advanced Computing Center at the University of Texas at Austin. The workshop is focused on faculty, researchers, developers, funding agencies, and planners from universities, research institutions, and funding agencies interested in the deployment and use of grids and grid applications. The deadline for early registration at a discounted rate is November 22.
HiPC 2005 Registration Now Open
Advance registration is now open for the 2005 International Conference on High Performance Computing, to be held December 18-21 in Goa, India. The deadline is November 7.
PAPP 2006 - Call for Papers
The Third International Workshop on Practical Aspects of High-level Parallel Programming (PAPP 2006), a part of The International Conference on Computational Science, will take place May 28-31, 2006, at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom. A call for papers has been issued, and submissions are due by Dec. 2. The PAPP workshop focuses on practical aspects of high-level parallel programming: design, implementation, and optimization of high-level programming languages and tools applications in all fields of computational science, benchmarks, and experiments. Research on high-level grid programming is particularly relevant.
