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Quantum Computing: The Qubit for Programmers

Date and Time: 
2011 Dec 15th @ 3:10pm
Location: 
CG1-1210 South Auditorium
Speaker: 
Tom Cargill

The power of a quantum computer can far exceed that of a classical computer, at least in theory. This power derives from the characteristics of the "qubit," the quantum analog of the classical bit. Typical descriptions of the qubit are built on a detailed mathematical foundation in complex linear vector spaces. I will offer an accurate, but incomplete, description of the qubit in

Speaker Description: 

Tom Cargill has a Ph.D. in Computer Science, form University of Waterloo, Canada
He has worked at the Bell Labs, in Murray Hill, NJ.
He currently is a consultant, in Boulder, CO

Event Category:

Video recorded: 

If you don't have (or don't want to use) the Flash player, you may directly access the video from here: http://video.ucar.edu/mms/sea/t-cargill.mp4

Best Practices in the Community Earth System Model

Date and Time: 
2011 Nov 10th @ 3:10pm
Location: 
ML-132 Main Seminar Rm
Speaker: 
Nancy Norton

This talk will present a survey of best practices used in the development and management of the CESM, a fully coupled global climate model that provides state-of-the-art computer simulations of the Earth's past, present, and future climate states. The speaker will take a hard look at what works and what needs improvement and will encourage participation from the SEA.

Speaker Description: 

Nancy Norton is a Software Engineer in the CESM Software Engineering Group. Her career at NCAR spans several decades and began as a graduate student participating in the former Scientific Computing Division's Fellowship Program in Scientific Computing. After completing her MS in meteorology and MA in mathematics at the Pennsylvania State University, she joined CGD's Oceanography Section, where she provided programming support for individual scientists' research. In the early 1990's, Ms. Norton became the CSM ocean-model software engineering liaison. Presently she is the lead software engineer on the Modeling Ocean Variability and Biogeochemical Cycles (MOBY) project, incorporating the MIT Darwin ecosystem model into CESM.

Event Category:

EOL Experiences with Agile SCRUM

Date and Time: 
2011 Oct 20th @ 3:10pm
Location: 
CG1-1210 South Auditorium
Speaker: 
Sandra Thurn and Greg Stossmeister

This presentation will focus on how the EOL Computing Data and Software services facility (CDS) is using Agile Scrum to achieve project successes amid field campaign deployments and multitasking.

Scrum is often referred to as the “project management” of the Agile development family.  Although the general function of organizing the work, i.e., “managing the project” is there, the approach is very different from traditional project management.  Scrum was created by: Jeff Sutherland, Ken Schwaber, and Mike Beedle. All three helped create and signed the Agile Manifesto in 2001.

Speaker Description: 

Sandra Thurn is a project manager for EOL.  Her responsibilities include managing technical projects, developing project management process guidelines, and fostering a project management culture within EOL. As an electrical engineer, she managed technical projects and software teams in the aerospace industry prior to joining NCAR in 2009. She has bachelor’s degrees in theoretical mathematics and electrical engineering, and master’s degrees in systems engineering and business. She is a Certified ScrumMaster (CSM) and a Project Management Professional (PMP).

Greg Stossmeister heads the Collaborative Tools and Metadata Group in EOL.  His group focuses on data management and field project operations. Greg has a BS in Physics and MS in Meteorology.  His scientific research has been focused on tropical and mesoscale meteorological research.  His software engineering experience areas are scientific analysis, data visualization, and file system management.

Event Category:

Video recorded: 

Do install the Flash Plug-in

Project Cauã: Creating jobs, saving the environment and making computers easier to use

Date and Time: 
2011 Aug 25th @ 3:10pm
Location: 
FL2-1022 Large Auditorium
Speaker: 
Jon "maddog" Hall

For the past forty years* industry has been moving computer support further away from the end user while simultaneously making computers harder to use, building in obsolescence, wasting electricity, and making computers every more of a black box.

Project Cauã will make computers easier to use, reduce the amount of electricity usage, create gratis wireless bubbles over large urban areas, and allow super-computing grids of low cost, create millions of high-tech new jobs world-wide all without costing the taxpayer a single penny**

Speaker Description: 

Jon "maddog" Hall is the Executive Director of Linux International (www.li.org), an association of computer users who wish to support and promote the Linux Operating System.  During his career in commercial computing which started in 1969, Mr. Hall has been a programmer, systems designer, systems administrator, product manager, technical marketing manager, author and educator.

He has worked for such companies as Western Electric Corporation, Aetna Life and Casualty, Bell Laboratories, Digital Equipment Corporation, VA Linux Systems, and SGI.  He currently works as an independent consultant, and is currently involved with bringing environmentally friendly computing to emerging marketplaces through Project Cauã (www.projectcaua.org).

Mr Hall has worked on many systems, both proprietary and open, having concentrated on Unix systems since 1980 and Linux systems since 1994, when he first met Linus Torvalds and correctly recognized the commercial importance of Linux and Free and Open Source Software.

He has taught at Hartford State Technical College (HSTC), Merrimack College and Daniel Webster College.  While at HSTC his students gave him the nickname of "maddog".

Mr. Hall is the author of numerous magazine and newspaper articles, many presentations and one book, "Linux for Dummies".

Mr. Hall has consulted with the governments of China, Malaysia and Brasil as well as the United Nations and many local and state governments on the use of Free and Open Source Software.

Mr. Hall serves on the boards of several companies, and several non-profit organizations.

Mr. Hall has traveled the world speaking on the benefits of Open Source Software having received his BS in Commerce and Engineering from Drexel University, and his MSCS from RPI in Troy, New York.

 

He blogged about the talk he had at NCAR here

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Video recorded: 

Do install the Flash Plug-in

Best Practices Town Hall

Date and Time: 
2011 Jul 28th @ 3:10pm
Location: 
FL2-1001 Small Seminar
Speaker: 
Leonard Sitongia

What are your best practices in software engineering? What do you wish others would use in their development? Shouldn't new staff at NCAR/UCAR be able to quickly learn the best practices in use here?

We all have limited time to investigate new practices, even though it is one of the more enjoyable parts of software engineering. Best Practices can guide us in how we work in the engineering culture in NCAR/UCAR. They give new people a quick start in their work.

Speaker Description: 

see here

Event Category:

Software Engineering and VAPOR

Date and Time: 
2011 Jun 30th @ 3:10pm
Location: 
ML-132 Main Seminar
Speaker: 
Alan Norton

The VAPOR project at NCAR aims to provide interactive 3D visualization and analysis for the earth science community.  One of the greatest obstacles to data analysis and visualization is the recent expansion of computed data sizes, currently toward petabytes, and soon to exabytes.  Reading a full data set from disk can itself take many days.  VAPOR's approach is to make such datasets understandable by accessing the data from a wavelet representation, and then by exploiting the graphics card performance with interactive 3D graphics.  In this framework it is

Speaker Description: 

Currently a software engineer at NCAR and chief architect of VAPOR, Alan received his PhD from Princeton University, then worked at IBM Research and SGI before coming to NCAR in 2004.  His primary technical interests are computer graphics, data visualization and user interface design.

Event Category:

Video recorded: 

Install or activate the Flash Plug-in

Version Control

Date and Time: 
2011 May 26th @ 3:00pm
Location: 
FL2-1001
Speaker: 
Davide DelVento

Version Control.

From copying your files manually to standard, well known centralized version control systems. From classic to distributed version control systems.

This talk will introduce you to the wonders of version control, focusing on subversion (svn), mercurial (hg), bazaar (bzr) and git. Whether you are new to version control, or if you are already doing it, you will probably leave with the desire to go to the next level and do it better, saving your time and avoiding headaches.

Speaker Description: 

Davide has a Ph.D in physics but he has always worked as a Software Engineer since before he got his high school degree. His first serious program was a paint-like program for the Commodore 64 written in Assembler. While still in high school, he wrote a finite difference solver, before knowing calculus (let alone differential equations). He has since worked on a wide range of Software Engineering jobs from low-level phase programming in Assembler for CCDs, to three-tier network and desktop applications in java, to SQL and web interfaces, to DSL programs commanding an instrument orbiting Venus. In 2007 he accepted a position at NCAR in the Consulting Services Group - assisting users of the high-performance computing facilities.

After he started using Version Control, he can't live without it. He also wonders why the ovens don't have it, and he's still trying to get the diffs between that delicious sliced-potato-covered fish he made for unbelieving guests, and that brick he made a month later for himself, following the very same recipe.

Event Category:

Video recorded: 

Do install the Flash Plug-in

Integrating Applications into UCAR Authentication and People DB Services Utilizing REST APIs

Date and Time: 
2011 Apr 28th @ 3:00pm
Location: 
CG1-1212 Center Auditorium
Speaker: 
Bruce Sun

Due to their simplicity and ease of use, RESTful web services have emerged as a promising alternative to SOAP-based web services. In RESTful web services, data is transferred directly over HTTP. Standard HTTP methods such as GET, PUT and DELETE are used to represent the operations. In this presentation, I will introduce a few REST APIs implemented by the WEG for authentication against UCAR auth servers and for interaction with People DB.

Speaker Description: 

Bruce Sun is a Software Engineer III in the Web Engineering Group. He is a certified Java Architect and has been developing Java-based Web applications since 1998. Previous to coming to NCAR, he was a Senior Software Engineer at Ball.

Publications:

A multi-tier architecture for building RESTful Web services.

Build RESTful Web services and dynamic Web applications with the multi-tier architecture.

Build a dynamic organization tree using GWT and RESTful Web services.

Event Category:

Video recorded: 
Here are links to docs for you to explore the WEG's REST APIs and other services in more depth. You can request access to any of our protected services by contacting CISL Help Desk. 
Feel free to email Bruce Sun and Markus Stobbs directly with any feedback or questions.

People DB 2.0, People REST API and LDAP (launching at the end of May, available now for friendly user testing)
https://wiki.ucar.edu/display/weg/People+DB+2.0
https://wiki.ucar.edu/display/weg/People+REST+API+2.0
https://wiki.ucar.edu/display/weg/LDAP

Auth REST API (currently in production, providing Kerberos and OTP authentication)
https://wiki.ucar.edu/display/weg/Auth+REST+API

Open-Source Models to Enhance the Internet User Experience

Date and Time: 
2011 Mar 31st @ 3:00pm
Location: 
FL2-1022 Large Auditorium
Speaker: 
Bruce Long

This talk will be about an open source project to create a radically improved notion of modeling to rewrite how we consumers interact with our digital stuff, our friends, and our World. Using a personal, distributed model to enable rich, generalized interaction with the World lets us pool knowledge, separate our stuff from individual devices, and write safe, private, distributed public resources as an alternative or wrapper to sites like Facebook, eBay, or Google.

Speaker Description: 

After studying computer science Bruce Long obtained a Master's degree in Philosophy. Specifically his interest is in modeling the more complex features of our world such as how parts contribute properties to the whole, how to represent intensional states such as beliefs, desires, plans, and how to then do useful things with the models. Bruce has produced a computer language for modeling complex systems which models the world as a complex state-system in the form of "pieces of information" or "infons" for short.

Event Category:

Unlocking the Secrets of Git

Date and Time: 
2011 Feb 10th @ 3:00pm
Location: 
ML - Main Seminar Room
Speaker: 
Tom Preston-Werner

Git is a tremendously powerful distributed version control system created by Linus Torvalds and in use by millions of projects worldwide. The power of Git arises from its simplicity. Did you know that Git is really just a userland file system with some extra goodies to make it work for version control? This secret life of Git allows us to do some insanely great things. In this talk I'll show you how Git works under the covers and give you a taste of what's possible when you understand the magic within.

Speaker Description: 

Tom Preston-Werner is a cofounder of GitHub, the social coding phenomenon that has captured the imaginations of hackers around the globe. He is also a serial entrepreneur having sold Gravatar to Automattic and run a web/graphic design firm, Cube6 Media, out of San Diego.

Event Category:

Video recorded: 
Unlocking the Secrets of Git video

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