Dan on eScience & Technical Computing @ Microsoft : Conference

Environment and Energy Workshop at Faculty Summit 2009

Dan Fay — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 02:35:32 GMT

For the past two days at the Microsoft Research Faculty Summit, we hare hosted a Environment and Energy Workshop to look at areas where computing and IT can help solve some of these grand challenges. Output from the workshop will be posted on the site in the next few weeks.

Faculty Summit 2009 - Microsoft Research

eScience Workshop 2009 – Call for Papers

Dan Fay — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 20:48:57 GMT

The 2009 eScience Workshop will be held at the Gates Center for Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA, October 15-17, 2009. The call for papers closes on July 31, 2009.

Call for Papers

We invite contributions from all areas of eScience and e-Research including:

Computational support for scientific research in life sciences, biomedical computing, environment, energy, and other scientific grand challenges
Knowledge discovery and merging datasets
Large-scale scientific data analysis, mining, and visualization
High-performance computing applied to solving problems in a variety of scientific disciplines
Dissemination of scientific literature/results and the discovery, curation, and sharing of data
Scientific sensors, data-gathering tools and technologies
Collaboration/workflow tools and technologies
Data-intensive science
Emerging multidisciplinary fields such as Digital Heritage and eEconomy
Research implications of computational thinking
How strategies for semantics and ontology formulation enable scientific discovery

eScience Workshop 2009

The eScience Workshop, to be held October 15-17, 2009, will provide a unique opportunity to share experiences, learn new techniques, and influence the domain of scientific computing. Scientists and researchers will explore the evolution, challenges and potential of computing in scientific research, including how the latest tools, Web services and database technologies are being applied to scientific computing.

Workshop Theme
Facilitating Scientific Discovery through Data-Intensive Computing

Hosting and Location
Co-hosted by Microsoft Research and Carnegie Mellon University, this workshop will take place in the Gates Center for Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA.

eScience Workshop 2009 - Microsoft Research

eScience Unconference

Dan Fay — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 07:33:16 GMT

Just finished up the Unconference event – bridging the Microsoft eScience Workshop and the IEEE e-Science Conference. It was great fun :-)

We ended up with Demos and discussions…and I really appreciate all the folks that participated.

Demos on:

Discussions on:

Clouds and/vs Grids
What is Provenance?
Spatio Temporal Sensitive environment applications.
Why do IT deployments fail in healthcare

eScience 2008 Unconference Signup

Dan Fay — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 02:47:22 GMT

The signup for the Unconference session at the 2008 eScience Conference is available. Unconferences are participant driven events – so attendees get to decide what, who, gets to present. This Unconference bridges the 2008 Microsoft eScience Conference and the 4th IEEE International Conference on e-Science.

The Unconference will be Tuesday, December 9, 2008 7:00 P.M. – 9:00 P.M. at the Conrad Hotel.

Add your name/slot to the list on the unconference wiki….

Demos Only - no slides allowed - only demos

5 min talks- (2 Slides Max)

Open topics - what do you want to talk about

GrayWulf (on SQL Server) wins SC’08 Storage Challenge

Dan Fay — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 09:52:32 GMT

Congratulations to Alex Szalay and his amazing team at JHU for winning the SC’08 Storage Challenge – with the entry GrayWulf:Scalable Clustered Architecture for Data Intensive Computing. GrayWulf – is implemented with SQL Server 2008

Abstract:

Data intensive computing presents a significant challenge for traditional supercomputing architectures that maximize FLOPS since CPU speed has surpassed IO capabilities of HPC systems and BeoWulf clusters. We present the architecture for a three tier commodity component cluster designed for a range of data intensive computations operating on petascale data sets. The design goal is a balanced system in terms of IO performance and memory size, according to Amdahl’s Laws. GrayWulf pays tribute to Jim Gray who stimulated the system and its design. The hardware currently installed at JHU exceeds one petabyte of storage and has 0.5 bytes/sec of I/O and 1 byte of memory for each CPU cycle. The GrayWulf provides almost an order of magnitude better balance than existing systems. Our benchmarks are based on date from the petascale Pan-STARRS project, building the largest sky survey to date. The benchmarks involve sequential searches over hundreds of terabytes.

University of Washington eScience Institute Rollout Event

Dan Fay — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 20:57:00 GMT

Yesterday afternoon I had the pleasure to participate and present at the UW eScience Institute kickoff event. I really enjoyed the event and and the vision laid out by Ed Lazowska. The talks by David Baker, Martin Savage and Andy Connolly really highlighted the need for resources to help in the eScience space. While the effort is still spinning up, it will be a great resource for scientists at UW to utilize in their efficient adoption of computing technologies. I look forward in continuing to work with UW as we’ve been doing with the Dynameomics project and with the Trident Workbench.

University of Washington eScience Institute Rollout Event

Presentations by:

Phyllis Wise, Provost

Ed Lazowska, Computer Science & Engineering
(Interim Director, eScience Institute)

Dan Fay, Microsoft Research

David Baker, Biochemistry

Martin Savage, Physics

Andy Connolly, Astronomy
Rollout Event for the University of Washington eScience Institute

PDC watch remotely – Great News

Dan Fay — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 08:00:22 GMT

This is really good to hear…being able to watch some of the PDC sessions remotely. I’m looking forward to tuning in.

PDC @ Home

With the current global crisis some of us will not be able to attend PDC this year due to different reasons however the PDC organizers decided to make available portion of the content in order to have people like me virtually attending PDC this year. These are the resources that you can use to be part of PDC without be physically there… enjoy it!

Watch the PDC Keynotes LIVE Online
Bookmark www.microsoftpdc.com and watch live:

· 8:30-10:30 AM Pacific Time (UTC -8) Monday, October 27 Keynote 1 – Ray Ozzie, Amitabh Srivastava, Bob Muglia and David Thompson

· 8:30-10:30 AM Pacific Time (UTC -8) Tuesday, October 28
Keynote 2- Ray Ozzie, Steven Sinofsky, Scott Guthrie and David Treadwell

Community and Influencers Blog : PDC @ Home

The 2008 Microsoft eScience Workshop at IUPUI – Registration Open

Dan Fay — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 07:38:08 GMT

The registration site for this year’s Microsoft eScience Workshop at IUPUI is now open and the call for papers deadline has been extended to September 15^th.

The 2008 Microsoft eScience Workshop at IUPUI

December 7-9, 2008, Indianapolis, IN, USA

Important Dates:

Paper submission opens:
July 1, 2008
(http://microsoft.redwhale.com)

Paper submission closes:
Extended to September 15th, 2008 at noon, Pacific Time

The 2008 Microsoft eScience Workshop at IUPUI

Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing Program (SciDAC) tutorials on Friday, July 18th

Dan Fay — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 02:08:35 GMT

Microsoft Research is hosting the DOE 2008 Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing Program (SciDAC) tutorials on Friday, July 18^th. If interested in attending, please register at the SciDAC Tutorials Registration.

SciDAC Tutorial Agenda

July 18 – Microsoft Research, Bldg 99.

9:00 - 9:30

Reception, checkin and orientation

9:30 - 12:00

First session

Visualization and Data Analysis with VisTrails

Introduction to Scientific Workflow Management and the Kepler System

Porting and Scaling Applications on BlueGene/P

Advanced CompuTational Software (ACTS) Collection Tutorial

12:00 - 1:00

Lunch in bldg. 99 Atrium
(attendees in bldg. 117 walk to bldg. 99 next door)

1:00 - 3:30

Second session

Advanced Visualization and Data Analysis with the VisIt Visualization System

ADIOS The ADaptible IO System

An Introduction to the Cray XT4 for Application Scientists

Advanced CompuTational Software (ACTS) Collection Tutorial

Tutorial Abstracts

<></>

Title:

Introduction to Scientific Workflow Management and the Kepler System

Contact:

Ilkay Altintas

Partners:

The Scientific Data Management Center (SDM)

Presenters: Ilkay Altintas, Scott Klasky, Norbert Podhorszki, Mladen Vouk

A scientific workflow combines data and processes into a configurable, structured set of steps that implement semi- automated computational solutions of a scientific problem. Scientific workflow systems provide a framework and often graphical user interfaces to combine different technologies along with efficient methods for using them. This reduces overhead and increases the efficiency of the scientists towards a scientific discovery. SciDAC SDM Center's Scientific Process Automation group develops scientific workflow tools (called Kepler) for automation of scientific data management processes in a reusable, robust, tractable, and recoverable fashion to enhance scientific exploration. This tutorial provides an introduction to scientific workflow construction and management using the Kepler system. It is intended for the SciDAC scientists and students with a computational science background. It will cover principles and foundations of scientific workflows, Kepler environment installation, workflow construction out of the available Kepler library components, and workflow execution management that uses Kepler-based facilities to provide process and data monitoring, provenance information, portal access, and high speed data movement solutions. This tutorial includes hands-on sessions and application examples from different scientific disciplines.

<></> <></>

Title:

ADIOS: The ADaptible IO System

Contact:

Chen Jin

Partners:

The Scientific Data Management Center (SDM) and The Center for Plasma Edge Simulation and Oak Ridge National Lab

Presenters: Chen Jin, Scott Klasky, Steve Hodson: ORNL, Hasan Abbasi, Jay Lofstead, and Matthew Wolf: Georgia Tech, and Manish Parashar Rutgers

The ADaptible IO System (Adios) is a componentization of the IO layer for high performance scientific computations. Currently, we have integrated ADIOS into Fusion, Combustion and other pioneering scientific applications and achieved excellent performance results. ADIOS provides a simple to use, common programming interface for different transport layer methods. The design goals are set to allow the application scientist to program a very easy to use IO system, which can choose between different IO implementations at runtime. This allows IO experts to tune their implementations on different systems without changing the IO implementation. We currently support MPI-IO, collective MPI-IO, POSIX, asynchronous MPI-IO, the Georgia Tech DataTap system based on RDMA, and the Rutgers DART implementation also based on RDMA. ADIOS separates out the metadata and methods, by using an external XML file. This allows users to add annotations outside of their F90/C/C++ codes and to change the implementation outside of their code. ADIOS 1.0 will be released before 12/1/2008 and will provide very fast writes of data. In this tutorial, we will first present an introduction of ADIOS, along with the current supported methods, and file converters. We will then provide a hands-on session which will allow users to work with both a F90 and C code, and change the IO to ADIOS, and change this to use both MPI-IO and Posix IO. We will then show them how to read in the data, and convert the output to HDF5, NetCDF, and ASCII.

<></> <></>

Title:

Porting and Scaling Applications on ALCF’s BlueGene/P

Contact:

Kalyan Kumaran, Argonne Leadership Computing Facility

Partners:

The Argonne Leadership Computing Facility

Presenters: Vitali Morozov and Ray Loy

The Argonne Leadership Computing Facility houses a half a petaflop BlueGene/P supercomputer. A number of petascale applications, from a variety of engineering domains, are run every day on this highly scalable architecture via the Department of Energy's INCITE (Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment) program. Nevertheless, porting and scaling applications onto petascale computers remains a challenging task. This tutorial will focus on the BlueGene/P architecture and present an overview of compilers, libraries, performance tools, debuggers available for porting and scaling applications.

<></> <></>

Title:

Advanced Visualization and Data Analysis with the VisIt Visualization System

Contact:

Hank Childs

Partners:

The Visualization and Analytics Center for Enabling Technology (VACET)

Presenters: Hank Childs and Sean Ahern

Understanding scientific datasets generated at DOE's high-performance computing facilities is becoming increasingly difficult as dataset sizes and complexity grow beyond the scale that is approachable by traditional analysis techniques. VACET is delivering scalable solutions to real-world visualization and analysis problems through the VisIt visualization system. VisIt is a turnkey application for data exploration, visualization, code assessment, and quantitative analysis suitable for use on SciDAC datasets of any size. This tutorial is targeted at all levels of users, from first timers on up to VisIt experts. The tutorial will present the basics of using VisIt on up to advanced visualization techniques.

<></> <></>

Title:

Visualization and Data Analysis with VisTrails

Contact:

Claudio Silva

Partners:

The Visualization and Analytics Center for Enabling Technology (VACET)

Presenters: Claudio Silva and Carlos Scheidegger

The demand for the construction of complex visualizations is growing in many disciplines of science, as scientists are faced with ever increasing volumes of data to analyze. We give an overview of VisTrails, an open-source provenance management system that provides infrastructure for data exploration and visualization. VisTrails transparently records detailed provenance (history) information for exploratory computational tasks, both for the derived data products and for the pipelines used to derive them. Besides enabling the reproducibility of results, this provenance information can be used to simplify the process of data exploration through visualization. We will present several mechanisms and intuitive interfaces provided by VisTrails that allow flexible re-use of pipelines; exploration of large parameter spaces; comparison of visualizations and their respective pipelines; and the creation and refinement of visualizations by analogy.

This tutorial is targeted to users with different levels of expertise, from novice to expert. We will cover a number of specific examples that reflect typical visualization needs of DOE applications.

<></> <></>

Title:

An Introduction to the Cray XT4 for Application Scientists

Contact:

Richard Gerber

Partners:

NERSC and ORNL

Presenters: Richard Gerber and Rebecca Hartman-Baker

This tutorial provides the basics to get up and running on the Cray XT4. Topics covered include compilers, libraries, and job management with a focus on parallel scaling and performance optimization of real world applications. The presenters are HPC consultant staff with hands on experience with the XT4 systems at ORNL and NERSC. This tutorial is targeted at researchers transitioning to the XT4 from serial or other parallel computing environments.

<></> <></>

Title:

Advanced CompuTational Software (ACTS) Collection Tutorial

Contact:

Tony Drummond

Partners:

ACTS and TAU

Presenters: Tony Drummond

This short course will be an introduction to a set of advanced computational software tools to leverage the development of high performance applications. The lectures will focus on the selection, installation and use of scalable and robust software tools. Functionalities implemented in these software tools include; numerical algorithms for the solution of large computational problems, performance monitoring and profiling, and automatic tuning. Participants should expect to learn about techniques used to solve common computational problems and monitor their performance. Participants are encouraged to bring laptop computers and follow live demonstrations through hand-on experiences. The software presented here is freely available and widely used by the computational sciences international community.

SciDAC Tutorials - July 18 at Microsoft Research

Dan Fay — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 21:44:42 GMT

On July 18th, Microsoft Research will be hosting the tutorials for the 2008 SciDAC Conference. SciDAC - Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing is part of DOE's Office of Science research program to "support multidisciplinary SciDAC projects aimed at developing future energy sources, studying global climate change, accelerating research in designing new materials,improving environmental cleanup methods, and understanding physics from the tiniest particles to massive supernovae explosions". It brings together computational scientists, applied mathematicians, and computer scientists from across application domains and from universities and national laboratories across the United States.

Tutorials are open to all, and students and local industry are encouraged to attend - please register to get a spot. The list of tutorial topics are one the webpage.

SciDAC Tutorials

4th IEEE Intl. Conference on e-Science, 2008 and Microsoft eScience Workshop

Dan Fay — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 21:46:43 GMT

This year the 5th Microsoft eScience workshop will be co-located with Intl. Conference on e-Science. The workshop and conference will be Dec 7-12th in Indianapolis at IUPUI. This will be another great workshop and conference.

Links to previous Microsoft eScience workshops

4th IEEE International Conference on e-Science, 2008

The 4th IEEE International Conference on e-Science will be held December 7–12, 2008, in Indianapolis, Indiana, USA. You can learn about the latest e-Science research from international experts, develop your technical skills, and make connections with people in other fields.

Paper Submission Important Dates:

Papers Due: July 20, 2008

Learn more about the conference at escience2008.iu.edu.

4th IEEE International Conference on e-Science, 2008: Indiana University

2008 Microsoft eScience Workshop at IUPUI

December 7-9, 2008

The use of computers creates many challenges as it expands the realm of the possible in scientific research, and many of these challenges are common to researchers in different areas. The insights gained in one area may catalyze change and accelerate discovery in many others.

The goal of this cross-disciplinary workshop is to bring together scientists from different research disciplines to share their research and experiences of how computing is shaping their work and to provide new insights into facilitating scientific discovery. The focus will be on discussion of the computing technologies that enable scalable solutions to scientific grand challenges.

2008 Frontiers of Cancer Nanotechnology Symposium

Dan Fay — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 01:16:19 GMT

Currently heading back from the 2008 Frontiers of Cancer Nanotechnology Symposium setup by GaTech and Emery University - I really enjoying going to this yearly symposium (my 3rd year) and am honored to be able to speak. The symposium brings together researchers (materials, computing, cancer) and clinicians working on ways to improve the fight against cancer. I've learned more about cancer and what can and can't be done and feel privileged...

Before I headed to the airport - I was able to hear Donald Coffey give a really good talk - plain spoken and cutting to the details of the issue. I'm also looking forward to reading the JAMA paper Hyperthermic Biology and Cancer Therapies - A Hypothesis for the "Lance Armstrong Effect"

Supercomputing 07

Dan Fay — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 19:24:34 GMT

Was at Supercomputing last week - overall the event went really well. There was also a few announcements from the HPC team - the big one being the name and beta availability of Windows HPC Server 2008 and the new banners.

Attended part of the Manycore and Multicore Computing: Architectures, Applications And Directions Workshop, which had a packed house - I'm guessing due to both the topic as well as the stellar list of speakers.

In the Microsoft booth at SC - our collaborators from UCSD and Oxford had a optiputer demo featuring a large multi-tile display showing HD Streams of researchers at Oxford using a microscope at UCSD and analyzing the results on a a HPC Cluster at Oxford - all while collaborating using the display.

One highlights of the event - was an international man of mystery giving out awards to the HPC institutes..

Manycore and Multicore Workshop: Architectures, Applications And Directions

Dan Fay — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 03:06:05 GMT

The Manycore and Multicore Workshop has a really good line-up of speakers - should be a good 1 1/2 days...

John Manferdelli, Microsoft Corporation - Supercomputing and Mass Market Desktops
Chuck Moore, AMD Corporation - The Role of Accelerated Computing in the Multi-core Era
Jack Dongarra, Univ. of Tennessee - An Overview of High Performance Computing and Challenges for the Future
Charles Leiserson, MIT - Multithreaded Programming in Cilk
Dan Reed, RENCI/UNC Chapel Hill - Multicore: Let’s Not Focus on the Present
Dave Kirk, NVIDIA Corporation - NVIDIA CUDA Software and GPU Parallel Computing Architecture
Panel on Manycore/Multicore's Programmability Gap
Vivek Sarkar, Rice University - Portable Parallel Programming for Heterogeneous Multicore Computing
Dave Patterson, UC Berkeley - The Parallel Computing Landscape: A Berkeley View 2.0
Stephen Pawlowski, Intel Corporation - Supercomputing for the Masses

Manycore and Multicore Workshop: Architectures, Applications And Directions
Sponsored by Microsoft Corporation
Workshop dates: Sunday, November 11 - Monday, November 12, 2007
Location: SC07 Conference, Reno, Nevada
More information can be found at http://sc07.supercomputing.org/
The era of "Supercomputing applications are what supercomputing does best," which is generally associated with heavyweight, numerically-intensive science computation, is rapidly converging with real-time and consumer applications such as computer gaming and multimedia. These new application genres are achieving a level of sophistication that makes them almost indistinguishable from supercomputing applications, and, consequently, are driving the recent developments in processor architectures. Most of the emphasis over the last few years has been on multi-core architectures, which are used as CPUs (e.g. quad-cores) in the current desktop and laptop systems and also used to develop supercomputing clusters.

Manycore and Multicore Workshop (UNC-CH Computer Science)

Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2008 - March 3-6, 2008

Dan Fay — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 05:59:02 GMT

The Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2008 - March 3-6, 2008 in Seattle. Sign up here

Dan on eScience & Technical Computing @ Microsoft : Conference

Environment and Energy Workshop at Faculty Summit 2009

eScience Workshop 2009 – Call for Papers

eScience Workshop 2009

eScience Unconference

eScience 2008 Unconference Signup

GrayWulf (on SQL Server) wins SC’08 Storage Challenge

University of Washington eScience Institute Rollout Event

University of Washington eScience Institute Rollout Event

Presentations by:

PDC watch remotely – Great News

PDC @ Home

Watch the PDC Keynotes LIVE Online Bookmark www.microsoftpdc.com and watch live:

The 2008 Microsoft eScience Workshop at IUPUI – Registration Open

The 2008 Microsoft eScience Workshop at IUPUI

December 7-9, 2008, Indianapolis, IN, USA

Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing Program (SciDAC) tutorials on Friday, July 18th

SciDAC Tutorials - July 18 at Microsoft Research

4th IEEE Intl. Conference on e-Science, 2008 and Microsoft eScience Workshop

4th IEEE International Conference on e-Science, 2008

Paper Submission Important Dates:

2008 Microsoft eScience Workshop at IUPUI

2008 Frontiers of Cancer Nanotechnology Symposium

Supercomputing 07

Manycore and Multicore Workshop: Architectures, Applications And Directions

Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2008 - March 3-6, 2008

Watch the PDC Keynotes LIVE Online
Bookmark www.microsoftpdc.com and watch live: