conference-talk

TACC Stats: A Comprehensive and Transparent Resource Usage Monitoring Tool for HPC Systems

Date and Time: 
2015 April 14 @ 1:30pm
Location: 
FL2-1022 Large Auditorium
Speaker: 
Todd Evans

We have developed and deployed the transparent and comprehensive resource usage monitoring and analysis tool TACC Stats at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC). This tool is currently used to aid TACC’s system administrators and HPC consultants in the diagnosis and resolution of application and system issues and to identify jobs with poor performance characteris- tics or inefficient resource usage utilization. TACC Stats automatically collects resource usage data at regular time intervals and computes performance metrics for every job run on an HPC system.

Speaker Description: 

Dr. Todd Evans is an HPC Research Associate at the Texas Advanced Computing Center and Research Scientist Lecturer in the Department of Statistics & Data Science at UT Austin. Dr. Evans received his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2008 and has been staff at UT Austin since 2013. Evans current research interests include the development of tools for transparent job-level monitoring and performance analysis of HPC systems.

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Video recorded: 

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Development of a Python GUI Interface to a YAML Configuration File for Propagation of Largely Identical Database Records between Field Project Entries

Date and Time: 
2015 April 14 @ 8:30am
Location: 
FL2-1022 Large Auditorium
Speaker: 
Soo Rin Park

The EOL Metadata Database and Cyberinfrastructure (EMDAC) is a comprehensive metadata database and integrated cyberinfrastructure which provides a public data portal to all of EOL’s field project data holdings. This paper demonstrates the use of the Python programming language to create a GUI (Graphical User Interface) tool that generates or edits a YAML (YAML Ain’t Markup Language) based metadata configuration file to automate data loading into the EOL metadata and (internal) data tracking system databases through user input and data serialization.

Speaker Description: 

Soo Park is currently pursuing an undergraduate degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering with a minor in Technology, Arts & Media at University of Colorado Boulder, and is expected to graduate May 2016. She has been working as a Software Assistant at NCAR/EOL since June 2014.

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User Environment Tracking and Problem Detection with XALT

Date and Time: 
2015 April 14 @ 11:00am
Location: 
FL2-1022 Large Auditorium
Speaker: 
Robert McLay

XALT is a product to help sites understand individual users’ software needs, then leverages that understanding to help stakeholders conduct business in a more efficient, effective, and systematic way. It builds on work that is already improving the user experience and enhancing support programs for thousands of users on twelve supercomputers across the United States and Europe. XALT instruments individual jobs on high-end computers to generate a picture of the compilers, libraries, and other software that users need to run their jobs successfully.

Speaker Description: 

Doctor Robert McLay received bachelors and masters degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his Ph.D in Engineering Mechanics from The University of Texas at Austin. His research include C++ software development, regression testing, and software tools, all related to large parallel numerical simulation codes. In particular, he has done work in parallel finite-element programs solving incompressible fluid flow and heat transfer.

His interest in software tools and support of HPC programming environments has lead to his development of Lmod, a modern replacement for Environment Modules system. Lmod's major advantages are protect all users from loading incompatible software without hindering experts. This work as lead to an interest in tracking the software usage through the module system.

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Video recorded: 

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Sharing computational results via SeedMe platform

Date and Time: 
2015 April 13 @ 1:30pm
Location: 
FL2-1022 Large Auditorium
Speaker: 
Amit Chourasia

Computational simulations have become an indispensable tool in a wide variety of science and engineering investigations. Nearly all scientific computation and analyses create important transient data and preliminary results. These transient data include information dumped while a job is running, such as coarse output and run statistics. Preliminary results include data output by a running or finished job that needs to be quickly processed to get a view of the job’s success or failure.

Speaker Description: 

Amit Chourasia leads the Visualization Services group at the San Diego Supercomputer Center. His work is focused on leading the research, development and application of software tools and techniques for scientific visualization; for data typically generated by massively large computer simulations in various fields of science and engineering. Key aspect of his work is to find ways to represent data in a visual form that is clear, succint and accurate (a challenging yet very exciting endeavour).

Amit's application and research interests are in area of animation, computer graphics, visualization and visual perception. He received a Master's degree in Computers Graphics Technology from Purdue University, West Lafayette and a Baccalaureate degree in Architecture (Honors) from Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur. Notable accolades for his work include Honorable Mention at International Science & Engineering Visualization Challenge 2010, Outstanding Achievement in Scientific Visualization award at the SciDAC 2011 & 2009 and Best Visualization Display award at TeraGrid 2011 & 2008 conferences. His visualization work has been featured at Siggraph Animation Festival, Siggraph Real Time Demos, documentaries by National Geographic and History Channel and many other news and media outlets.

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Video recorded: 

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Development of a Multi-physics Code with Adaptive Mesh Refinement

Date and Time: 
2015 April 13 @ 3:30pm
Location: 
FL2-1022 Large Auditorium
Speaker: 
William Dai

We have been working on the Roxane project for a few years. The Roxane project covers a variety of physics in standard geometries of one, two, and three dimensions, including hydrodynamics, volume fraction material advection, material mixing, elastic-plastic strength models, magnetohydrodynamics, 3-T radiation diffusion, detonation shock dynamics, high explosive burn models, etc. Although there are other kinds of AMR used in calculations on structured meshes, we use cell-based AMR.

Speaker Description: 

William Dai received his Ph.D. degree in physics in University of Minnesota in 1993. After that he joined Laboratory for Computational Science and Engineering as a research scientist in the University, focusing on numerical methods for hydrodynamics, magnetohydrodynamics, radiation, and diffusion. William joined the Los Alamos National Laboratory in 2001 as a staff member in High Performance Computing Division. In 2002 he became a team leader and project leader responsible for software development and their integration to several multi-physics codes. Currently, William is a scientist in Computer, Computational, and Statistical Sciences Division, and he is one of the key developers of a large-scale multi-physics code, responsible for new physics capabilities, numerical solvers, and modernization of the code on future computer platforms.

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Quality Controlling Wind Power Data for Data Mining Applications

Date and Time: 
2015 April 13 @ 2:30pm
Location: 
FL2-1022 Large Auditorium
Speaker: 
Gerry Wiener

Wind power generation is playing an increasingly important role in worldwide energy production. In order to optimize the utilization of wind power, it is critical to have a good handle on observed winds, the associated power production at wind farms and the power delivered to associated connection nodes. In practice, the power production at various wind farms is subject to wind farm curtailment, high speed wind turbine tripping, production loss due to turbine icing, turbine availability, and so forth.

Speaker Description: 

Dr. Gerry Wiener has been a software engineer at NCAR since 1987. He is currently the engineering deputy of the Weather Systems and Assessment Program at NCAR/RAL under Dr. Sue Ellen Haupt. Gerry has worked on a variety of projects including FAA wind shear/microbursts, FAA turbulence, FAA ceiling and visibility, Hong Kong wind shear and turbulence, wind and solar power forecasting for renewable energy, and road weather.

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Video recorded: 

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A Python QGIS plugin for tweeter analysis during emergencies

Date and Time: 
2015 April 14 @ 9:00am
Location: 
FL2-1022 Large Auditorium
Speaker: 
Guido Cervone and Mark Coletti

During emergencies in urban areas it is paramount to assess damage to properties, people and the environment. Remote sensing has become the de-facto standard in observing the Earth and its environment. Remote sensing generally refers to the use of space- or air-borne sensor technologies, to detect and classify objects on the Earth (from its surface, atmosphere, and oceans) by means of emitted or reflected electro-magnetic signals.

Speaker Description: 

Guido Cervoneis Director of GeoInformatics & Earth Observation Laboratory in the Department of Geography and Institute for CyberScience at the Pennsylvania State University and Associate Professor at the Department of Geography, Institute for CyberScience, GeoVISTA Center The Pennsylvania State University. He is also affiliated faculty in the Research Application Laboratory (RAL) at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR).

His fields of expertise are geoinformatics, machine learning and remote sensing. His research focuses on the development and application of computational algorithms for the analysis of spatio-temporal remote sensing, numerical modeling and social media “Big Data” related to man-made, technological and environmental hazards. He operates a satellite receiving station for NOAA POES satellites. His research us funded by ONR, DOT, NASA, Italian Ministry of Research and Education, Draper Labs, Stormcenter Communication.

Guido Cervone is a member of the advisory committee of the United National Environmental Programme, division of Disasters and Early Warning Assessment. In 2013 he received the “Medaglia di Rappresentanza” from the President of the Italian Republic for his work related to the Fukushima crisis. He received the 2013 ISNAAF award. He co-chaired the 2010 SIGSPATIAL Data Mining for Geoinformatics (DMG-10) workshop. He served as the program co-chair for the 2008 and 2009 IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM) Spatial and Spatio-Temporal Data Mining (SSTDM) workshop.

He authored two edited books, over forty fully refereed articles relative to data mining, remote sensing and environmental hazards. In 2010, he was awarded a US patent for an anomaly detection algorithm. His research on natural hazards was featured on TV news and newspapers, on general interest magazines such as National Geographic, and on international magazines.

As Assistant Director of the Pennsylvania University’s Geoinformatics and Remote Sensing Laboratory, Dr. Mark Coletti is actively performing research in the areas of geoinformatics, machine learning, and evolutionary computation. His principal focus is in big data analytics related to natural hazards, particularly that related to volunteered geographic information, as well as discerning interesting patterns of Medicare use. His research has been funded by the ONR and NSF.

Dr. Coletti is the current Chair of the Penn State Postdoctoral Society, and as such is responsible for organizing career enhancement, personal improvement, and social activities for over 460 postdoctoral scholars. He previously worked at George Mason University where he helped develop an evolutionary computation C++ toolkit; a biologically inspired cognitive model for a DARPA Grand Challenge; a Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization related multiagent simulation; an Office of Naval Research Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative Office sponsored massive multiagent simulation of pastoral and farming behavior in eastern Africa; and a geospatial extension, GeoMason, for the multi-agent simulation toolkit MASON.

Earlier in his career he also worked as a senior software engineer in the Washington, DC, area on projects for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Federal Highway Administration, U. S. Army's Materiel Command, the U. S. Army Topographic Engineering Center, and the United States Geological Survey. These projects included an expert system to correct human sourced sea surface meteorological data, an expert system for validating materiel purchases, a topographic visualization system, a road surface wear calculator, and a toolkit for spatial data format conversion.

He has published over a dozen papers related to evolutionary computation, machine learning, large-scale multiagent simulations, biologically inspired cognitive architectures, and geographic information systems. He has also written a book on GeoMASON that is open source and freely available to the public.

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Video recorded: 

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Out-of-core Computations with Blaze

Date and Time: 
2015 April 14 @ 3:30pm
Location: 
FL2-1022 Large Auditorium
Speaker: 
Matthew Rocklin

NumPy and Pandas provide usable high-level abstractions over low-level efficient algorithms. Unfortunately both NumPy and Pandas are largely limited to single- core in-memory computing. When inconveniently large data forces users beyond this context we re-enter the frontier of novel solutions.

Speaker Description: 

Matthew Rocklin is a computational scientist at Continuum Analytics. He writes open source tools to help scientists interact with large volumes of data.

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Video recorded: 

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Enabling Multi-pipeline Data Transfer in HDFS for Big Data Applications

Date and Time: 
2015 April 14 @ 4:00pm
Location: 
FL2-1022 Large Auditorium
Speaker: 
Liqiang Wang

Authors: Liqiang Wang, Hong Zhang (University of Wyoming), Hai Huang (IBM TJ Watson Research Center)

Speaker Description: 

Dr. Liqiang Wang is currently an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Wyoming. He is currently taking sabbatical leave and working as a visiting research scientists at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. His research focuses on an interdisciplinary area between big-data computing and software analytics. His work applies program analysis techniques to improve correctness and resilience of data-intensive computing as well as optimize its performance and scalability, especially on Cloud, GPU, and multicore platforms. He received an NSF CAREER Award in 2011.

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Parallel I/O - for Reading and Writing Large Files in Parallel

Date and Time: 
2015 April 16 - PM
Location: 
FL2-1022 Large Auditorium
Speaker: 
Ritu Arora and Si Liu

Developing an understanding of efficient parallel I/O and adapting your application accordingly can result in orders of magnitude of performance gains without overloading the parallel file system. This half-day tutorial will provide an overview of the practices and strategies for the efficient utilization of parallel file systems through parallel I/O for achieving high performance. The target audiences are analysts and application developers who do not have prior experience with MPI I/O, HDF5, and T3PIO. However, they should be familiar with C/C++/Fortan programming and basic MPI.

Speaker Description: 

Ritu Arora received her Ph.D. in Computer and Information Science from the University of Alabama at Birmingham. She works as an HPC researcher and consultant at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC). She also teaches in the Department of Statistics and Data Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin. She has made significant contributions in the areas of developing abstractions for parallelizing legacy applications and application-level checkpointing. Currently, Ritu is providing consultancy on automating Big Data workflows on national supercomputing resources. Her areas of interest and expertise are HPC, fault-tolerance, domain-specific languages, workflow automation, and big data management.

Si Liu received his PhD in applied mathematics at University of Colorado at Boulder in 2009. He joined the High Performance Computing Group at the Texas Advanced Computing Center as a Research Associate in 2013. He has been collaborating with UT research groups, the XSEDE community, and many corporations on various projects, including HPC aware tools development, Weather Research and Forecast Model simulation and visualization, and CERN's "A Large Ion Collider Experiment project". His current research interests include parallel computing, I/O performance, test management, benchmark, and optimization. Previously, he worked as a software engineer in the Computational Information Systems Laboratory at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. He made important contributions to establishing the Yellowstone Supercomputing system at the NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center. He received UCAR's special recognition award in 2011 for his contribution to Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

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