Hear from NSF's Aaron Dubrow as He Lists 10 Ways Advanced Computing Catalyzes Science

Visualization of 3-D Cerebellar Cortex model generated by researchers Angus Silver and Padraig Gleeson from University College London. The NeuroScience Gateway was used for simulations. Credit: Angus Silver and Padraig Gleeson, University College London

When researchers need to compare complex new genomes; or map new regions of the Arctic in high-resolution detail; or detect signs of dark matter; or make sense of massive amounts of fMRI data, they turn to the high-performance computing and data analysis systems supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF).

High-performance computing (HPC) enables discoveries in practically every field of science - not just those typically associated with supercomputers like chemistry and physics - but also in the social sciences, life sciences and humanities.

By combining superfast and secure networks, cutting-edge parallel computing and analytics software, and advanced scientific instruments and critical datasets across the U.S., NSF's cyber-ecosystem lets researchers investigate questions that can't otherwise be explored.

NSF has supported advanced computing since its beginning and is constantly expanding access to these resources to help tens of thousands of researchers each year - from high school students to Nobel Prize winners -- at institutions large and small, regardless of geographic locality, expand the frontiers of science and engineering.

Click here for 10 examples of research -- enabled by advanced computing resources -- from across all of science.

Excerpted with permission from Aaron Dubrow, the National Science Foundation

SC15 Invited Talk Spotlight: Reproducibility in High Performance Computing

The number of lines of code published in ACM Transactions on Mathematical Software, 1960–2012, on a log scale. The proportion of articles that published code remained roughly constant at about a third, with standard error of about 0.12, and the journal consistently published around thirty-five articles each year. Source: click here and click here.

Ensuring reliability and reproducibility in computational research raises unique challenges in the

supercomputing context. Specialized architectures, extensive and customized software, and complex workflows all raise barriers to transparency, while established concepts such as Validation, Verification, and Uncertainty Quantification point ways forward.

Invited speaker Victoria Stodden co-edited this book.

The topic has attracted national attention: President Obama's July 29, 2015 Executive Order "Creating a National Strategic Computing Initiative" includes accessibility and workflow capture as objectives; an XSEDE14 workshop released a report "Standing Together for Reproducibility in Large-Scale Computing"; on May 5, 2015 ACM Transactions in Mathematical Software released a "Replicated Computational Results Initiative"; and this conference is host to a new workshop "Numerical Reproducibility at Exascale", to name but a few examples. In this context I will outline a research agenda to establish reproducibility and reliability as a cornerstone of scientific computing.



Speaker Background:

Dr. Victoria Stodden

Dr. Victoria Stodden is an associate professor in the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, with a faculty appointment at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. She completed both her PhD in statistics and her law degree at Stanford University.

Her research centers on the multifaceted problem of enabling reproducibility in computational science. This includes studying adequacy and robustness in replicated results, designing and implementing validation systems, developing standards of openness for data and code sharing, and resolving legal and policy barriers to disseminating reproducible research.

She is the co-chair the Advisory Committee for the National Science Foundation's Division of Advanced CyberInfrastructure, and is a member of the NSF CISE directorate's Advisory Committee.


  

Five Women in IT Selected to Participate in SCinet and Attend SC15

The 2014 SCinet team at last year's conference in New Orleans.

A collaboration between the University Corporations for Atmospheric Research (UCAR), the Department of Energy’s Energy Sciences Network (ESnet) and the Keystone Initiative for Network Based Education and Research (KINBER) are pleased to announce that five women IT professionals have been selected to receive  funding to actively participate in SCinet and attend the 2015 Supercomputing Conference (SC) in November 2015 in Austin, TX.

The collaboration called “Women in IT Networking at SC (WINS)” developed the program in an effort to expand the diversity of the SCinet volunteer staff and provide professional development opportunities to highly qualified women in the field of networking. The funding is provided by the National Science Foundation (NSF) as a supplemental award to the Rocky Mountain Cyberinfrastructure Mentoring and Outreach Alliance (RMCMOA) grant under the CC*IIE program.

Created each year for SC, SCinet brings to life a very high-capacity network -- exceeding one Terabit of capacity -- that supports the revolutionary HPC applications and experiments that are the hallmark of the SC conference. Volunteers from academia, government and industry work together to design and deliver SCinet. Planning begins more than a year in advance of each SC conference and culminates in a high-intensity installation in the days leading up to the conference.

The WINS collaboration received 19 highly qualified applicants from a diverse set of organizations across the US.  The candidates applications were reviewed by  an expert panel of research and education community leaders, including: Wendy Huntoon (led), Greg Bell (ESnet), John Hernandez (UCAR), Jennifer Schopf (IU), and Linda Winkler (ANL).

The awardees have been notified and have accepted this exceptional opportunity.  The candidates will be paired with a SCinet team and mentor.  The awardees are:

•    Sana Bellamine, CENIC, Measurement Team
•    Debbie Fligor, University of Illinois, Routing Team
•    Amy Liebowitz, University of Michigan,  Commodity Team
•    Megan Sorensen, Idaho State University, Wireless Team
•    Kyongseon (Kathy) West, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Network Security Team

The WINS collaboration, comprised of Marla Meehl (UCAR), Mary Hester (ESnet), Wendy Huntoon (KINBER), Lauren Rotman (ESnet), and Jason Zurawski (ESnet), looks forward to meeting and working with the awardees.  This effort focuses on fostering gender diversity in the research and education (R&E) community’s network and computer systems engineer occupations. If successful, the team hopes to work with SC and NSF to continue and expand this program next year.