Supercomputers, data collections, new tools, digital services, increased productivity for thousands of scientists around the world. Sound exciting? Apply to become an XSEDE Scholar today!

XSEDE Scholars will:

Attend the SC11 (supercomputing) conference in Seattle, November 12-16, 2011, through travel grants.
Meet other XSEDE Scholars in special sessions at SC11.
Participate in at least four activities with other Scholars during the year (e.g., technical training, content-based and mentoring webinars).
Network with leaders in the XSEDE research community.
Learn about research, internships, and career opportunities.

The XSEDE Scholars Program is directed by Richard Tapia and managed by Alice Fisher, Rice University.

Apply now - Underrepresented minority undergraduate or graduate students interested in the computational sciences are encouraged to apply for the year-long program.

Find out more about XSEDE: https://www.xsede.org

Questions about the XSEDE Scholars? Contact Alice Fisher: afisher@rice.edu

Apply online at: http://bit.ly/xsede_2011

APPLICATION DEADLINE: Friday, September 30, 2011

NVIDIA Grad Fellowship - Now Accepting Applications

NVIDIA Grad Fellowship is Open! We are now accepting applications for the 2012-2013 Academic Year! We just launched our 11th Annual Graduate Fellowship Program, which advances the frontiers of science by awarding grants and providing technical support to graduate students who are doing outstanding GPU-based research.

Up to 10 Ph.D. students from around the world will be selected to receive grants of $25,000 each for research that advances parallel computing. In addition to receiving funding for their research, award recipients will also have access to NVIDIA technology and programming talent. These grants and technical support will be awarded in the 2012 academic year.

Since its inception in 2002, the NVIDIA Graduate Fellowship Program has awarded 95 Ph.D. graduate students with grants that have helped accelerate their research efforts. More importantly, this funding has helped some students achieve major breakthroughs in their research -- breakthroughs that may not have been possible without additional funding.

The NVIDIA Graduate Fellowship Program is open to applicants worldwide. The deadline for submitting applications is Dec. 8, 2011. Eligible graduate students will have already completed their first year of Ph.D. level studies in the areas of computer science, computer engineering, system architecture, electrical engineering or a related area. In addition, applicants will have current membership on an active research team.

Link: http://news.nvidia.com:8080/t/169504/36411493/7631/0/

Please share with your departments, students and friends.

For more information on eligibility and how to apply, visit http://news.nvidia.com:8080/t/169504/36411493/7631/0/ or email fellowship@nvidia.com.

XSEDE Project Brings Advanced Cyberinfrastructure, Digital Services, and Expertise to Nation's Scientists and Engineers

A partnership of 17 institutions today announced the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE). XSEDE will be the most advanced, powerful, and robust collection of integrated advanced digital resources and services in the world.

Scientists and engineers use these resources and services - things like supercomputers, collections of data, and new tools - to propel scientific discovery and improve our lives. They are a crucial part of research in fields like earthquake engineering, materials science, medicine, epidemiology, genomics, astronomy, and biology.

For more information, visit www.xsede.org.

Student Programmers Wanted

We are looking for 1-2 student programmers to help develop a set of web services integrated with an existing storage backend (e.g. http://swift.openstack.org/) to manage scientific simulation data sets. This will be an one-year project as a part of a recent campus initiative (cyber.oit.ucla.edu).

The ideal candidates:

are UCLA students
feel comfortable working under Linux (e.g. CentOS, Fedora)
are familiar with Apache web server
know Bash, Python and Javascript (knowing MySQL, PHP and Java is a plus)
have concepts of RESTful web service
can work in a team environment
can clearly document work performed
are willing to quickly acquire needed knowledge as the project progresses

If interested, please email your CV to atshpc@ucla.edu

Dowson2 at 148 spot in top500 list of supercomputers

UCLA's Dawson2 cluster has taken the Number 148 spot in the Top 500 SuperComputer sites (www.top500.org) list. Named after former UCLA Physics Professor John Dawson and the founder of the UCLA Simulation of Plasmas Group , the Dawson2 is the most powerful system at the University of California (excluding the DOE centers and National labs).

The Dawson2 GPU cluster comprises 96 of Hewlett-Packard's ProLiant SL390 G7 systems, each of which has dual socket Intel Xeon X5650 processors, 3 Nvidia M2070 Graphics processors, and 48 GB of main memory, giving peak performance of 1.67 double precision Trillion Floating Point operations per second (TFLOPS). The cluster uses QDR Infiniband networking and 160 Terabytes of high performance common disk space from Panasas for communication and storage respectively.

The Dawson2 achieved a peak performance of 68.1 TFLOPS and is the 12th most powerful system based on accelerated devices. It is the 9th most powerful system using NVIDIA GPUs.

UCLA's Institute for Digital Research and Education built the Dawson2, with a $1.78 million National Science Foundation award to the UCLA Simulation of Plasmas group, which is led by the current IDRE Director Prof. Warren Mori. Prof. Mori has a joint appointment in the Physics and Astronomy and Electrical Engineering Departments. The group is using the cluster to work on problems in fields such as plasma-based acceleration, inertial fusion energy, space plasmas, and high energy density science. The cluster will also help prepare UCLA researchers across campus to use the next generation of massively parallel computers.

The previous version of Dawson held the 162 spot in June 2005, before going off of the list in November 2006.

The TOP500 list publishes a ranked list of general purpose systems that are in common use for high end applications based on their performance on the LINPACK Benchmark .

Teragrid allocation requests open

The TeraGrid is now accepting Research Allocation Requests for the allocation period, Oct. 1, 2011 to Sept. 30, 2012. The submission period is from June 15 until July 15. Please review the new TG systems and important policy changes (see below) before you submit your allocation request through the TG User Portal.

* Allocation Request Submission Deadline: July 15, 2011 midnight local time

The TeraGrid will host a teleconference to provide step-by-step instructions and answers to your questions on how to write and submit a successful proposal.

* Allocation Request Guidelines Telecon: June 20, 2:00-3:30 CDT (central)
* Allocation Request Guidelines Telecon: June 23, 2:00-3:30 CDT (central)

San Diego Supercomputer Center gets ready for "Gordon" with a summer institute, August 8-11. Apply by June 24!

Gordon will be the first high-performance supercomputer to use large amounts of flash-based SSD (solid state drive) memory. Flash memory is more common in smaller devices such as mobile phones and laptop computers, but unique for supercomputers, which generally use slower spinning-disk technology. With 250 trillion bytes of flash memory and 64 I/O nodes, Gordon will be capable of handling massive databases while providing up to 100 times faster speeds when compared to hard drive disk systems for some queries.

We are encouraging applications from researchers engaged in data-intensive science and data mining across a diverse range of disciplines, including those who may not previously have considered leveraging supercomputing resources, said SDSC Director Michael Norman. This includes researchers in astronomy, geosciences, and genomics, as well as economics and linguistics, just to name a few. Those with applications that serve a wide research community, such as through the use of a science gateway, are also encouraged to apply.

Data-intensive computational science that will benefit from Gordon's unique configuration includes network analyses for new drug discovery, and converting observed measurements into information about a physical object or system in oceanography, atmospheric science, and oil exploration. The system's large shared-memory system is also able to research modestly scalable codes in quantum chemistry, structural engineering, and computer-aided design/computer-aided manufacturing (CAD/CAM) applications.

For details: http://www.sdsc.edu/News%20Items/PR060711_gordonsi.html

Student Submissions Sought for TeraGrid 2011

Deadline for Submissions: June 3, 2011
Travel support is available!

High school, undergraduate, and graduate students are invited to participate in the 2011 TeraGrid conference, TeraGrid 2011: Extreme Digital Discovery (www.teragrid.org/tg11/), which will be held July 18-21 in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Student Poster Contest: How do you use computational science to solve science, engineering or mathematics problems? Let us know by submitting a poster that demonstrates your models, simulations, or visualizations. Awards will recognize the best poster in each of three categories: high school, undergraduate and graduate.

Student Research Papers: You can be one of three students acknowledged as a “TeraGrid Emerging Scientist.” How? If you are an undergraduate or graduate student and are working on a research project that uses TeraGrid or Open Science Grid resources, we encourage you to submit a paper that describes your research. Submit your paper to the Student Paper Track for review.

Travel support will provide: domestic airfare, hotel accommodations (two students per room) and conference registration.
Deadline for student submissions: June 3, 2011.
Submit: go to http://www.teragrid.org/tg11/submissions.
Questions?: Contact Laura McGinnis at lfm@psc.edu.

Announcement of fifth SciDAC Tutorials:

On July 15th, the fifth SciDAC Tutorials Day will be held at the Brown Palace in Denver. Held on the day following the main SciDAC meeting, Tutorials Day provides open and free tutorials on a wide range of subjects in scientific computing. The focus is on bringing the benefits of DOE's investments in SciDAC to new researchers in academia and industry. This is a great venue to learn how to parallelize your current computational efforts or to improve your computation by implementing the latest computing algorithms and methods.

Registrationi is free. A limited number of travel stipends are available for students needing assistance in their travel to the tutorials. For more information on travel assistance, parking, or other logistic issues contact David Skinner or Andrew Uselton.

UCLA is part of TeraGrid Campus Champion Program:

The TeraGrid Campus Champion, your local source of knowledge about national high performance computing opportunities and resources, can assist you in the following ways:

Provide you with information about high performance computing resources to researchers and educators, including resources available from the TeraGrid
Assist you to quickly get access to allocations of high performance computing resources
Facilitate awareness and training workshops for you about the use of high performance computing resou5rces and services
Provide you with contacts within the high performance computing community for quick problem resolution
Provide you with timely information on new resources, services, and offerings

To learn more about available high performance computing opportunities, contact UCLA's TeraGrid Campus Champion.