seminar

GPU Computing: A Gentle Introduction

Date and Time: 
Thursday 2018 July 19th @ 2:30pm
Location: 
ML main seminar
Speaker: 
Alessandro Fanfarillo
General Purpose Graphics Processing Units (GPGPUs) are currently an established and attractive choice in the world of scientific computing, found in many of the fastest supercomputers in the world.
Although the challenges of programming such powerful devices are recurrent in many talks on GPGPUs, the most fundamentals questions about these new devices are often not discussed.
Speaker Description: 

Dr. Alessandro Fanfarillo is a Senior Software Engineer at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. His work is mostly devoted to performance enhancement of parallel weather models, GPGPU computing and software design/refactoring of scientific codes. His research focuses on how to exploit heterogeneous architectures CPU+Accelerators and Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) languages (in particular coarray Fortran) for scientific purposes. He is also the lead developer of OpenCoarrays, the open-source library that implements the coarray support in the GNU Fortran compiler.

Event Category:

Myths and reality of communication/computation overlap in MPI applications

Date and Time: 
2017 October 12 @ 3pm
Location: 
ML main seminar
Speaker: 
Alessandro Fanfarillo

The Message Passing Interface (MPI) library is currently the de-facto standard for writing high performance parallel applications and it will be still largely used on the future exascale machines. On such architectures, overlapping communication with computation will be more than ever important in order to hide as much as possible the expensive data transfer and synchronization costs and scale the applications on billions of cores.

Speaker Description: 

Dr. Alessandro Fanfarillo is a postdoctoral researcher at the NCAR, his research focuses on how to exploit heterogeneous architectures CPU+Accelerators and Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) languages (in particular coarray Fortran) for scientific purposes. He is also the lead developer of OpenCoarrays, the open-source library that implements the coarray support in the GNU Fortran compiler.

Event Category:

Science On A Sphere Explorer (SOSx) - Museums and Schools

Date and Time: 
2017 September 14th @ 3pm
Location: 
ML main seminar
Speaker: 
Jeff Smith

SOSx is written in C# and built using the Unity game engine. While a game engine may seem a strange choice for data visualizations, it is a powerful platform for 3D visualization.  Video games are a multibillion-dollar industry, and are quite simply the most powerful tools for pushing millions of points of data to the user (via GPUs) in real-time. SOSx ingests “big data”, in efficient formats for real-time visualization, and displays and animates that data in ways that are understandable and impactful to the general public.

Speaker Description: 

Jeff Smith is software engineer at NOAA's Earth System Research Laboratory. He has developed many user interfaces, for running weather models, localizing domains, searching/viewing environmental data sets, querying/benchmarking OGC web services for the FAA and NWS, and displaying global icosahedral data over 3D spinning globes.

Event Category:

Bias-Correcting NA-CORDEX: A Case Study in Parallelizing Data Analysis

Date and Time: 
2017 June 29th @ 3pm
Location: 
ML main seminar
Speaker: 
Seth McGinnis

Although many data analysis tasks are highly or even embarrassingly parallel in nature, climate scientists don't typically make much use of parallelism when they're analyzing the output from climate models. I certainly never did, until I was asked to bias-correct a large dataset with a short deadline, and the only way to get it done in time was to do it in parallel.

Speaker Description: 

Seth McGinnis is an Associate Scientist IV in the Institute for Mathematics Applied to Geosciences (IMAGe) at NCAR.  As the Data Manager for the NARCCAP and NA-CORDEX data collections, he makes the output from regional climate models usable by and available to people who need information about climate change in North America.  His research focuses on bias correction, interpolation, and other issues affecting the practical use of model output by non-specialists.

Event Category:

Gophers on a Plane: Flying golang on aircraft for science

Date and Time: 
2017 May 25th at 3pm
Location: 
ML main seminar
Speaker: 
Nick Potts

The NCAR community generally uses only a very tiny subset of the myriads of computer programming languages that currently exist, the bulk of the work being done in FORTRAN, Java, C, C++, R, and Python. This presentation functions as a brief introduction to Go/Golang which has been recently invented by Google; and demonstrates how NCAR/EOL has been utilizing it to rewrite a twenty year old custom instrument data logger into a RESTful HTTP service, highlighting some benefits in using a modern web-aware language.

Speaker Description: 

Nick Potts has been working in EOL since 2008, at the border between hardware and software. He is currently member of the in-situ Sensing Facility.

Event Category:

Video recorded: 

See https://github.com/NCAR/go-example for slides and code examples presented in this talk

Recent Experiences and Future Projects with Big Data with the Community Earth System Model

Date and Time: 
2017 April 25th @ 3pm
Location: 
ML main seminar
Speaker: 
Gary Strand

The Community Earth System Model (CESM) is a state-of-the-art climate model and is NCAR’s flagship climate model. It is used to simulate the Earth’s climate system, from the distant past into the future, and also to investigate the processes underlying the climate system. Its components consist of an atmospheric model, ocean model, sea ice model, land surface model, smaller additional components, that are all interconnected via a “flux coupler”.

Speaker Description: 

Gary Strand is a software engineer in the Climate Change Prediction group of the Climate and Global Dynamics Division of NCAR. He began work at NCAR in 1986 as a student assistant, and has been involved in several generations of climate model development in CGD. He is the primary data manager and data scientist for the latest NCAR climate model, the Community Earth System Model (CESM). He has led the major data management activities and projects for the  CESM since 2003, including CMIP3 and the current CMIP5. He is also one of the key personnel for the Earth System Grid (ESG) project, participating since its inception in 2001. Gary has also created a number of visualizations of CESM output that have been used in many scientific presentations as well as in major broadcast media.

Event Category:

Fault tolerance in Fortran 2015

Date and Time: 
2017 January 26th at 3pm
Location: 
ML main seminar
Speaker: 
Alessandro Fanfarillo

For High Performance Computing applications, scaling across multiple processors is the most viable way to reach Peta and Exascale performance.
For an application that scales on hundreds of thousand of cores a major treat is represented by node failures.
In fact, on a machine equipped with 1,000,000 nodes, each of which failing on average every 100 years, there will be a failure every 53 minutes.

Speaker Description: 

Dr. Alessandro Fanfarillo is a postdoctoral researcher at the NCAR, his research focuses on how to exploit heterogeneous architectures CPU+Accelerators and Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) languages (in particular coarray Fortran) for scientific purposes.
He is also the lead developer of OpenCoarrays, the open-source library that implements the coarray support in the GNU Fortran compiler.

Event Category:

Ten Years Later...

Date and Time: 
2016 March 24th @ 3pm
Location: 
ML main seminar
Speaker: 
Daniel Ziskin

In 1998 I became the data manager of MOPITT, an instrument flying aboard NASA's TERRA satellite. I served in this position from one year prior to launch until 2005. For family reasons I resigned. Ten years later, with the instrument continuing to collect data, the incumbent data manager announced his retirement and I was re-offered the position. I would like to share my "Lessons Learned" from returning to a technical role after a ten year hiatus. What details are important? What should have been documented but wasn't? What types of information got lost in the transition?

Speaker Description: 

Daniel received a PhD in physics from The Johns Hopkins Univ in 1993 on the topic of the role of clouds in climate change. He worked for five years at the Distributed Active Archive Center (DAAC) at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. In 1998 he became the MOPITT Data Manager at NCAR and remained there until 2005. In 2015 he returned to that position. Between those years Daniel was active in several entrepreneurial start-ups and also worked at NOAA's National Geophysical Data Center. He has an IT support company called Escape Goat Data.

Event Category:

Video recorded: 

If you use a non-flash enabled device, you may download the video here

Beyond Makefiles : Autotools and the GNU build system

Date and Time: 
2015 December 10th @ 3pm
Location: 
FL2-1001-Small-Seminar
Speaker: 
Patrick Nichols

The GNU build system consists of several different components. These components enable building a given set of executables and/or libraries in a portable way between different environments and operating systems. This talk will be an introduction to these tools and what advantages and disadvantages this system can offer a developer. In particular, we will focus on autoconf and automake which allows one to discover the state of the system and create custom makefiles for that environment.

Speaker Description: 

Patrick Nichols received his PhD in Physics in 2002 from Texas Tech University. He has since worked as a Postdoctoral Researcher/Fellow at the University of New Orleans, and finally at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. These positions focused on the application of Parallel Distributed Programming to Quantum Chemistry and Condensed Matter. In 2009, Pat joined the High Performance Computing group at PNNL where he worked on the applications of the Global Arrays toolkit to the Smart Electrical Grid, Machine Learning and Cybersecurity. In 2012, Pat moved to Digitalglobe as an HPC programmer to develop software for satellite imaging and geospatial applications. Pat has recently joined the staff at NCAR in the CISL section.

Event Category:

Townhall

Date and Time: 
2015 November 5th @ 3pm
Location: 
ML - main seminar
Speaker: 
Davide Del Vento

The SEA committees are planning the next SEA conference. The tentative date is the whole week of April 4th, 2016. The proposed format is 2 days of talks and 3 days of tutorials. The proposed theme is “Data Science”, soliciting talks along the lines of “What is data science in my subfield”, “How do you design a data science experiment”, and topics ranging from algorithms to data analysis to reproducibility.

Event Category:

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