Mira’s testing and development system, a Blue Gene/Q called Cetus, has grown to 4 racks to allow users to debug their project code at an even larger scale before moving to Mira.
This upgrade will support new types of HPC workloads. Smaller jobs (128-2048 nodes) will now be allowed to run for up to 12 hours. Longer running jobs (128-1024 nodes) will be allowed to run for up to 7 days, which is suitable for analysis activities since Cetus and Mira share the same file system.
In 2015, IEEE VIS will be held in Chicago for the first time ever. One of my first duties as general chair for VIS 2015 was to help secure the venue — and I’m delighted to announce that we now officially have one: The Palmer House Hilton.
VIS is the premier annual forum for visualization advances. Chicago is a world-class city full of cultural monuments, modern spectacles, parks and promenades. I think it is the perfect spot to host one of the largest and most important annual gatherings of researchers and industry professionals who specialize in the visual analysis of data.
I’m also extremely pleased that I will be working with Maxine Brown, director of the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Maxine has been engaged in the visualization community for decades and has co-chaired some of the most exciting advanced computing demonstrations and events in the world.
This November Maxine and I will attend VIS 2014 in Paris to fully immerse ourselves in as many sessions, presentations, and workshops as possible. Current general chair Jean-Daniel Fekete is overseeing what promises to be the highest attended VIS yet. I’ve had the opportunity to participate in several organizing committee meetings and can see the final program coming together in very exciting ways.
Each year, the DOE’s Advanced Scientific Computing Research program, or ASCR, dedicates roughly 30% of the computing resources at its three supercomputing facilities to projects pursuing DOE mission research. The yearlong ASCR Leadership Computing Challenge (ALCC) awards, which begin July 1, aim to advance clean energy technologies, to better understand climate and environmental systems, and to respond to potential disasters.
ASCR recently awarded 19 new ALCC projects a total of 1.64 billion core-hours at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility, expanding both the scope of scientific simulation research happening at ALCF and the community of researchers that will be capable of using a leadership-class system. Read more about the individual projects here.
Image: Christopher Knight, Argonne National Laboratory
University of Southern California doctoral student Ying Li will join ALCF this fall as the 2014 Margaret Butler Postdoctoral Fellow. Li is the first recipient of the ALCF fellowship that was announced during the spring 2013 Celebration of Thirty Years of Parallel Computing at Argonne, to commemorate a pioneering woman and scientist who programmed the first digital computers at Argonne in the 1950s, helped design subsequent ones, and contributed to simulations of nuclear power reactors.
Li, who graduates this summer with a doctorate in materials science and a master’s degree in computer science, belongs to the new generation of computational scientists. As a member of prominent computational materials science research team led by USC professor Priya Vashishta, Li has already worked on massively parallel computers, including Argonne’s Mira, in several investigations involving reactive force-field molecular dynamics simulations of upwards of one million atoms. To learn more about Ying Li, see ALCF’s recent feature.
On April 22 and May 15, the INCITE program will host short webinars for anyone who’s interested in applying for 2015 INCITE time on Titan, the 27-petaflops Cray XK7 at Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility, or on Mira, the 10-petaflops IBM Blue Gene/Q at Argonne Leadership Computing Facility.
The Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program, now in its tenth year, provides huge core-hour allocations on these two DOE production systems, at no cost to the researcher, to pursue breakthroughs in science and engineering.
During the sessions, INCITE Program Manager Julia White and LCF center representatives will provide tips for submitting a successful INCITE proposal, help you gauge your project’s readiness, describe the review process, and answer your questions. Registration is open.
INCITE 2015 call for proposals opens April 16 and closes June 27, 2014.
A team of scientists has, for the first time, calculated several fundamental properties of the carbon-12 nucleus using one of the world’s fastest supercomputers, setting the stage for more reliable neutrino detector calibrations and better supernovae explosion simulations.
The work, published last summer in Physical Review Letters, involved researchers from Argonne, Los Alamos, and Jefferson national laboratories, Middle Tennessee State University, and Old Dominion University. The team, led by Argonne Senior Physicist Steven Pieper, was one of 16 that were granted early access to Mira last year, and used their core-hour allocation to prepare the Green’s function Monte Carlo (GFMC) code for the new machine’s scale and architecture in order to run the carbon-12 simulations.
In the past 15 years, researchers have developed the GFMC algorithm as a powerful and accurate method for computing properties of light nuclei. Understanding the many-body interactions within the nucleus is critical to a real understanding of the physics of nucleonic matter. Electron scattering experiments in the quasi-elastic regime, where the dominant process is knocking a single nucleon out of the nucleus, are underway at Jefferson Lab for a range of nuclei. Using Mira, the team has included new, complex interactions within the nucleus and predicted the results of a Jefferson Lab experiment, bringing theoretical prediction closer to experimental data in the high-momentum transfer tail. Read more about the work here.
February 28 is the deadline to apply for the ALCF’s new computational science postdoctoral fellowship position, named in honor of the late Argonne mathematician and computer science pioneer Margaret Butler.
From very early on, Margaret viewed computers as a technology with great potential to push the frontiers of science. Over the course of her career, she also worked to establish the careers of many other women in computing. She understood the value of promoting change by creating opportunity. And so it was especially apt that this new fellowship commemorating her contributions to the field would be a unique career opportunity.
This fellowship, which is open to both men and women, is an opportunity for the recipient to work with Argonne scientists in support of scientific discovery in their field of expertise. It’s an opportunity to work in a multidisciplinary environment with world leading experts in computational mathematics and computer science, and to use some of the world’s most powerful computer systems. Mostly, it’s an opportunity for a bright, young researcher to launch a computational science career in pursuit of significant achievements in science.
More information about The Margaret Butler Fellowship in Computational Science can be found online.
For most of us, New Year’s Day marks the start of new opportunities and renewed potential. Fittingly, January 1 also begins a new cycle of INCITE projects, and 2014 is the year that will see the highest number of awards and core hours ever granted by the DOE Leadership Computing program in its 10 year history. Over the next 12 months, 59 teams of researchers will share nearly 6 billion core hours of peer-reviewed parcels of supercomputing time at Argonne and Oak Ridge national laboratories to work on energy and environmental problems with the potential to benefit the world.
INCITE investigations are the largest and hardest problems in science and engineering, often slow and uncertain by their very nature, and are assessed using a wide range of metrics. The advancements that come out of INCITE work are vastly accelerated with each new generation of computing system, and help to gain a deeper understanding of highly complex systems in our physical world. These projects build knowledge through bigger and better simulations, improved algorithms, and novel computational techniques. Demystifying the world in this manner requires copious amounts of preparation and processor hours, and each new year of INCITE awards brings a renewed sense of what’s possible. To track this year’s INCITE discoveries at Argonne, I invite you to visit the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility website.
The discovery last year at CERN of the Higgs boson — a particle that may well be responsible for all the mass in the universe — was momentous to physicists everywhere. The revelation of Higgs is critical to validating a nearly five-decade-old fundamental physics theory, known as the Standard Model, which accounts for all known subatomic particles and their interactions. Scientists, meanwhile, continue their search for answers to weighty unexplained physical phenomena such as the existence of dark matter and what happened to all the antimatter since the Big Bang.
Fermilab theoretical physicist Paul Mackenzie is leading a multiyear project at the ALCF to shed light on the mysterious particles and forces associated with “physics beyond the Standard Model.” According to Mackenzie, the Standard Model has many complex and peculiar features that have led to the nearly universal belief that there is new, as yet undiscovered physics which will explain these features.
Mackenzie heads a national effort to leverage HPC resources to advance quantum chromodynamics (QDC), the study of how quarks and gluons interact. Supercomputers like Mira enable scientists to study quarks and gluons in situations that are not possible in accelerator and cosmic ray experiments, and have the computational power needed to give quark-antiquark pairs their proper, very light masses for the first time — removing one of the largest remaining uncertainties involved in QCD calculations. Read more about Mackenzie’s research at the ALCF here.
The highly competitive technical program of the annual Supercomputing conference shows broad participation from ALCF researchers this year. Several papers coauthored by ALCF researchers were accepted — one of which is also a finalist for the ACM Gordon Bell Prize — and all feature work either performed on or optimized for Argonne’s Mira supercomputer. Other ALCF participation runs the gamut, from posters and workshops to broader engagement and round table sessions.
Fifteen DOE National Laboratories, including Argonne, will be represented in the exhibit hall in one booth (1327) under the theme of “DOE: HPC for a Greener, Smarter, Safer World” and host presentations, electronic posters, 3D simulations, demonstrations and roundtable discussions.
I’ll be there, trying to take in as many sessions as possible and meeting old friends, colleagues and collaborators. If you want to connect, drop me a line at [email protected]
Two papers that I’m involved with are being presented by their main authors. Here are the links:
Integrating Dynamic Pricing of Electricity into Energy Aware Scheduling for HPC Systems
Performance Characterization and Prediction Based Modeling of Collective Two-Phase I/O