Year: 2015

IIT team competes, surges in annual cluster challenge

Post author By Papka, Michael E.
Post date December 15, 2015

An IIT student team placed fourth in an annual 48-hour competition that challenges young computer scientists to tune and run a series of high-performance computing codes, non-stop, on a small cluster they build from their own design. The team of 5 computer science undergrads and one junior from Naperville Central High School competed with 8 other teams from around the world at the Student Cluster Competition at SC’15 in Austin, TX.
This year’s 5-node cluster design was built using Intel components. William Scullin and Ben Allen, both HPC systems administrators at ALCF, and Ioan Raicu, assistant professor of computer science at IIT and a guest researcher in Argonne’s MCS Division, worked closely with the team as coaches and mentors. Argonne and Intel provided technical and financial support. To read more about the competition, click here.

Argonne Leadership Computing Facility Education

Argonne coding campers, class of 2015

Post author By Papka, Michael E.
Post date August 28, 2015

In July, I participated in Argonne’s first summer coding camp, a computer science education opportunity attended by 42 local high school students and organized in partnership with the DuPage County chapter of the Afro-Academic, Cultural, Technological and Scientific Olympics (ACT-SO).

A small team of Argonne computer scientists designed and taught the four-day programming curriculum, which could serve as a future model for teacher training and classroom implementation. It’s the start of good things to come in this important outreach area.

Read the article here.

Argonne Leadership Computing Facility

Cooley: more memory, faster results

Post author By Papka, Michael E.
Post date June 3, 2015

Today at ALCF, a powerful new cluster with terabytes of RAM and GPU memory stands ready to meet our user community’s data analysis needs. Cooley, the follow-on system to Tukey, will support more exploration capabilities, including in-situ analysis and unprecedented volume-rendered visualization. Cooley shares the same software environment, network, and file systems as ALCF’s supercomputer, Mira, enabling direct access to Mira-generated results.
An article about the new system and links to Cooley user documentation can be found here.

Argonne Leadership Computing Facility

Aurora is coming. Step one: Theta

Post author By Papka, Michael E.
Post date April 24, 2015

After much anticipation, the Department of Energy recently announced that industry partners Intel and Cray would be delivering Argonne’s next supercomputer, Aurora. The new system will be a first-of-its-kind product from the market-leading chipmaker and the renowned computer manufacturer, and is expected to be at least 18 times more powerful than the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility’s current system, Mira.

Mira has lots of science to accomplish between now and the time Aurora arrives on the scene in 2018, but the planning phase officially kicked off this week with a call for proposals for Aurora’s pre-production system, Theta.

The Early Science program for Theta is accepting proposals through May 22. Selected projects will get early access to the machine and support from ALCF staff and postdocs. Look for Aurora’s Early Science Program call for proposals next spring.

Uncategorized

Summer training to the extreme

Post author By Papka, Michael E.
Post date March 12, 2015

Applications are now being accepted for two noteworthy summer training programs in Chicago aimed at cultivating future computational scientists. Both opportunities offer intensive, hands-on training on multiple topics, and access to leading experts currently working in the extreme-scale computing space.
BigDataX is a Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) site in Chicago. The program has four mentors at two institutions, IIT and University of Chicago, with a variety of complementing expertise from theory to programming languages to distributed systems. Deadline March 17, 2015.
Argonne Training Program on Extreme-Scale Computing (ATPESC) is Argonne’s intensive two-week summer training program on extreme-scale computing. Doctoral students, postdocs, and computational scientists interested in conducting CS&E research on large-scale computers are encouraged to apply. Deadline April 3, 2015.

Publications Uncategorized

Happy New Year!

Post author By Papka, Michael E.
Post date January 6, 2015

New Frontiers in Leadership Computing, part two of the CiSE Special Issue on Leadership Computing, is out and features four more boundary-pushing examples of research at the high-end of scientific computing: a scalable solver for aerospace industry work, a novel method to model geological flow and transport processes, recent modeling advances in the domain of accelerator science, and a look at optimizations made to two features of a laser-plasma interaction code that enable scaling to a million or more processes.
Guest editing this special issue has been especially gratifying and was made possible by the enthusiasm and support of several individuals, including CiSE Editor-in-Chief George Thiruvathukal, who championed this topic from the start. I’m pleased to announce that Jim Hack and I will continue serving in this capacity in 2015. We will use our column space to explore topics such as training the new generation of HPC users and what’s going to be inside the next-generation of DOE leadership machines. I’m excited to be part of this editorial team and look forward to the coming year.