Archive of SciDAC News and Notes

SciDAC in the News (press releases and media mentions)

May 2008

The Open Science Grid(OSG) Consortium: Collaborative Science over the Grid



The Open Science Grid (OSG) is one of several SciDAC-2 projects that are at the forefront of the continuing United States investments in Grids. OSG itself is leading in the provision of a community based, high-throughput nationally distributed infrastructure for a broad sweep of scientific research. Today OSG provides access to computational resources at more than sixty sites across the US – including NERSC, Brookhaven National Laboratory and Fermilab, more than six campus-wide university infrastructures, and many large and small university sites across the country.

OSG relies on today's state of the art networks for science, and advanced experimental research networks to support high throughput data distribution and computing for the experiments at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, existing DOE Office of Science physics experiments, bioinformatics, chemistry, climate research, computer science and other domains. The infrastructure today is accepting more than thirty percent of the data and providing more than twenty-five percent of the analysis throughput for the LHC.

Through the Virtual Data Toolkit, OSG supplies an integrated suite of software technologies used on the Grid based on the core Condor and Globus technologies created by the “fathers” of the Grid at Universities in the US, and augmented by tools and utilities from many places including Europe.

OSG is supported by the Department of Energy’s Office of Science SciDAC-2 program from the High Energy Physics, Nuclear Physics and Advanced Software and Computing Research programs; and the National Science Foundation Math and Physical Sciences, Office of Cyber-Infrastructure and Office of International Science and Engineering Directorates.

Contact Ruth Pordes (ruth@fnal.gov) or Miron Livny(miron@cs.wisc.edu) for more details. URL: www.opensciencegrid.org
See also "Grids, Clouds, and the Internet"


April 2008

TownHall report cover   

"Exascale" Town Meeting Report is online

The objective of this ten-year vision is to focus the computational science experiences gained over the past ten years on the opportunities introduced with exascale computing to revolutionize our approaches to energy, environmental sustainability and security global challenges.
Modeling and Simulation at the Exascale for Energy and the Environment Town Hall Meetings Report (pdf)


March 2008

Review cover   

SciDAC Review Spring issue now online

The Spring 2008 issue includes an interview with LBNL Director Dr. Steve Chu about collaborations for the future. Project articles include Fusion, Subsurface flow, and Climate. Other stories cover ANL, determining optimal simulation size, and better meshes for accelerators. Accomplishments, meetings, and workshops are highlighted. more


January 2008

SciDAC well represented in INCITE Awards

INCITE logo   

Of the 55 projects awarded computer time through the INCITE program for 2008, 15 are current SciDAC projects and 11 are to researchers from former SciDAC projects. Although SciDAC projects represent only 27% of the projects awarded, they account for 38% of the total processor hours awarded -- nearly 102 million of the over 267 million processor hours. Top awards to current SciDAC projects include 26.7 million processor hours for Lattice Quantum ChromoDynamics (LQCD) (R. Sugar, UCSB), 18 million for climate modeling (W. Washington, NCAR), and 17.5 million for nuclear structure research (D. Dean, ORNL). Top awards to researchers from past projects include 18 million processor hours for astrophysics (A. Mezzacappa, ORNL) and 14 million for applied math (P. Fischer, ANL).

The Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program was conceived specifically to seek out computationally intensive, large-scale research projects with the potential to significantly advance key areas in science and engineering. The program encourages proposals from universities, other research institutions and industry. For 2008, computational resources for the INCITE program will be provided by Argonne, Lawrence Berkeley, Oak Ridge and Pacific Northwest national laboratories. 2008 INCITE fact sheets (pdf)


SciDAC Outreach Center Is Soliciting Tutorials for SciDAC 2008

A day of tutorials will be held in conjunction with this year's SciDAC conference (SciDAC 2008). The main meeting will be held July 13-17 at the Fairmont Olympic Hotel in Seattle, and the tutorial day will be held in Redmond on Friday the 18th. Transportation will be provided from the conference hotel to the tutorial site. This year's tutorials are sponsored by Microsoft Research and the SciDAC Outreach Center. The audience for the tutorials is expected to include students from the surrounding universities, DOE Computational Science Graduate Fellowship students, and interested parties from industry. Last year there were just under a hundred students participating.

The SciDAC Outreach Center is soliciting ideas for tutorials from the SciDAC PIs. Anyone who would like to give a tutorial is asked to send the proposed topic to David Skinner (DESkinner@lbl.gov), along with any AV or computing requirements your tutorial might require. Projectors, wireless network, etc. will be provided. As they did last year, the SciDAC Outreach Center can provide temporary training accounts and batch queues for tutorials that would benefit from hands-on access to XT4, POWER5, and other HPC architectures.

The 2007 tutorial agenda is still available (for your reference).

December 2007

  

SciDAC 2008 web now LIVE!

            conference icon
The 2008 SciDAC Conference will be held July 13-17 at the Fairmont Olympic Hotel in Seattle Washington. See item above for the Tutorials call.

SciDAC Review Winter Issue Now Online

cover of Winter 2007 Issue of SciDAC Review   

The Winter 2007 issue includes an interview with Dr. George Smoot about the growing role of computation in cosmology, and his life since the Nobel Prize. In addition to cosmology, project features cover computing atomic nuclei (the Universal Nuclear Energy Density Functional) and medicine (Modeling the Molecular Basis of Parkinson's Disease). Other features cover the National Center for Computational Sciences and the Performance Engineering Research Institute.


November 2007

 

CTWatch Quarterly Publishes All-SciDAC Issue

The November 2007 issue of CTWatch Quarterly is titled "Software Enabling Technologies for Petascale Science". The issue is comprised of papers from SciDAC Institutes and Centers, with an introduction by Fred Johnson of DOE. Articles in this issue are:
- Failure Tolerance in Petascale Computers
- Enabling Advanced Scientific Computing Software
- Performance Engineering: Understanding and Improving the Performance of Large-Scale Codes
- Creating Software Tools and Libraries for Leadership Computing
- DOE's SciDAC Visualization and Analytics Center for Enabling Technologies -
   Strategy for Petascale Visual Data Analysis Success
- Emerging Visualization Technologies for Ultra-Scale Simulations
- End-to-End Data Solutions for Distributed Petascale Science
- Scientific Data Management: Essential Technology for Accelerating Scientific Discoveries
- The Earth System Grid Center for Enabling Technologies: Enabling Community Access to Petascale Climate Datasets

DOE and SciDAC at SC07

When the world’s leading experts in high performance computing, networking, storage and analysis convene in Reno, Nevada November 10-16, much of the scientific and technical program will reflect the expertise of researchers sponsored by the Department of Energy (DOE) at national laboratories and universities across the country.

Most notably are two of the invited plenary talks on Wednesday in room C-4 of the Reno-Sparks Convention Center. At 8:30 a.m. DOE Under Secretary for Science Raymond L. Orbach will speak on “The American Competitiveness Initiative: Role of High End Computation”. Dr. Orbach will be followed at 9:15 a.m. by 2006 Nobel Laureate George Smoot, astrophysicist at DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, who will talk on “Cosmology's Present and Future Computational Challenges”.

Throughout the course of the four-day SC07 technical program, DOE-supported researchers will have a role in: 18 of the 54 peer-reviewed technical papers, 5 of the 7 panel discussions, 10 of the 25 tutorial sessions, 6 of the 10 workshops, 2 of the 15 invited “Masterworks” talks, 13 of the 45 research posters.

Also, the prestigious Sidney Fernbach Computer Science and Engineering Award will be presented to Columbia University Prof. David Keyes, the leader of a DOE project to develop software to more efficiently solve problems involving partial differential equations. The project is part of DOE’s Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing (SciDAC program).
press advisory/more (doc)

October 2007

More projects added to SciDAC-2

Improving Ethanol Production Efficiency: Understanding Cellulase Enzymes


Trichoderma reesei (CBH I) enzyme atop cellulose
  
Michael Himmel of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory has been named the PI of a new SciDAC project: Understanding the Processivity of Cellobiohydrolase Cel7A (CBH I). Improving the efficiency of producing ethanol from lignocellulose (found in woody vegetation) is a vital step in reducing our nation's dependence on foreign oil. There is a class of enzymes called cellulases that are thought to breakdown cellulose using biochemical processes that are largely not understood. This SciDAC-2 project will advance our understanding of these critically important microbial cellulases. more on this project


September 2007

More projects added to SciDAC-2

Pointing the Way for Accelerator Science: ComPASS Project Aims for Petascale


electrons and generated wake fields in a Tesla cavity (particle bunch enlarged for illustrative purposes)
more accelerator images
  
Panagiotis Spentzouris of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory has been named the PI of a new SciDAC project: the Community Petascale Project for Accelerator Science and Simulation (ComPASS). This SciDAC-2 project will develop a comprehensive computational infrastructure for accelerator modeling and optimization, advancing accelerator computational capabilities from the terascale to the petascale to support DOE priorities for the next decade and beyond. The project will enhance the suite of parallel accelerator simulation tools developed in SciDAC-1, to provide interoperable, petascale components for beam dynamics, electromagnetics, electron cooling, and advanced accelerator modeling. Critical to this effort will be the embedded collaborations with the applied mathematics and computer science communities. In addition to use for Advanced Accelerator research, the enhanced simulation suite will be applied to important DOE accelerator projects, such as the International Linear Collider, the Large Hadron Collider, the Tevatron, and PEP-II; NP projects, such as the Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility (CEBAF) and the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), the CEBAF and RHIC upgrades, the Rare Isotrope Accelerator, and an NP electron collider, including ELIC and eRHIC; and BES projects, such as the Linac Coherent Light Source, the National Synchroton Light Source-II, the Spallation Neutron Source, and upgrades to the Advanced Photon Source. more on this project

SciDAC Conferences

The 2007 Proceedings have been mailed to attendees and are also posted online. Speaker videos are also linked.

The 2008 Conference will be held July 13-17 in Seattle.

SciDAC Review Fall issue now online

The Fall 2007 issue includes an interview with Dr. Michael Turner about the role of national laboratories, large-scale computing, and other aspects of the SciDAC program. Project features cover Biopilot, CSCAPES, and CScADS. Other stories cover PNNL, remembering Ken Kennedy, and an article by Dr. Strayer on the future of scientific supercomputing.
Read the online version.

July 2007

Annual Conference in Boston  

Speaker slides are posted.
Some posters are linked.
Videos coming soon.

310 badged attendees!
Tutorials to Facilitate the Dissemination and Utilization of Key SciDAC Software and Computational tools

As a complement to the SciDAC 2007 Conference June 24-28, a hands-on SciDAC Tutorials Workshop will be held June 29 at MIT. The SciDAC Tutorials Workshop is open to all physical scientists, mathematicians, computer scientists, and computational scientists, and we anticipate participation both by attendees of SciDAC 2007 and local students, postdocs, and researchers. There is no workshop fee, but registration in advance is required, and in the event of oversubscription, space in the tutorials will be allocated according to the order of registration. Participants should bring their own laptops for wireless access the tutorial software.

The SciDAC Tutorials Workshop is sponsored by:

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The Laboratory for Nuclear Science,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
http://www.lns.mit.edu/
    

Harvard School of Engineering & Applied Sciences

CyberInfrastructure Engineering Lab,
Harvard School of Engineering & Applied Sciences

Boston University

Center for Computational Science,
Boston University
http://ccs.bu.edu/

SciDAC Outreach Center

SciDAC Outreach Center
http://outreach.scidac.gov

June 2007

SciDAC Review Summer issue now online

The Summer 2007 issue includes an interview with Dr. Warren Washington about the importance of computer models for understanding, mitigating, and adapting to climate change. Project features cover the Flash Center, APDEC, and lattice QCD. Other stories cover ESnet and LANL.

SciDAC Review is a quarterly publication dedicated to sharing information, news, and achievements relevant to the SciDAC program and computational science in general.
Read the online version.


2007 SciDAC Conference Draws Over 300 Researchers

Images (clockwise from top): Plenary session, Vendor response to TownHall, Program Managers (3), Poster session
  

More than 300 members of the computational science community met in Boston June 24-28 at the 2007 SciDAC Conference. In welcoming participants, SciDAC Director Michael Strayer noted that “Perhaps no other area of research of the Department of Energy is so critical as computational science for understanding the fundamental components of nature and the behavior of complex systems.”

The conference program featured 36 plenary talks covering research areas ranging from nanotechnology to massive exploding stars, from climate change to developing fusion reactors as future energy sources. Other talks provided insight into the challenges of effectively utilizing the complex architectures of supercomputers for scientific discovery.

Conference participants, representing 55 universities, 20 national laboratories, 14 private companies, five government agencies and four countries also attended two evening poster sessions, during which 76 research posters were presented, often generating in-depth discussions of further research possibilities. Such interactions are a hallmark of the SciDAC program, which brings together multi-disciplinary teams from different institutions to tackle some of the most pressing scientific problems.


March 2007

SciDAC Review Spring issue now online

The Spring 2007 issue includes insights from two leaders in the supercomputing industry—Peter Ungaro of Cray and Rod Adkins of IBM. A special feature reviews the Applications, Centers, and Institutes that make up the SciDAC-2 projects awarded last September. Also in this issue are articles on climate modeling and computational chemistry, as well as shorter pieces on supercomputing at NERSC and a successful student mentoring program in Oak Ridge, TN.

SciDAC Review is a quarterly publication dedicated to sharing information, news, and achievements relevant to the SciDAC program and computational science in general.
Read the online version.


Annual Conference in Boston
Program selection is now underway for the annual conference.
Early registration is open for the Organizing Committee only.

New FES Grants Posted
New SciDAC grants have been posted in four Fusion Energy areas:
  • Electromagnetic Waves in Plasmas, Computational Physics and Applications
    [FAPN07-19 | LAB07_19]
  • Computational Magnetohydrodynamics
    [FAPN07-20 | LAB07_20]
  • Plasma Turbulence and Transport
    [FAPN07-21 | LAB07_21]
  • Computational Physics of Energetic Particles In Plasmas
    [FAPN07-22 | LAB07_22]
  • February 2007

    FY07 Appropriation Passed

    The SciDAC appropriations for FY07 were passed by congress and signed by the President in mid February. Anyone whose funding was caught up in the Continuing Resolution should see movement very soon.

    Don Batchelor
    Kwan Liu Ma
    Giullia Galli adding to the matrix
    SciDAC-2 Meeting Gets PIs Talking

    Nearly 80 SciDAC-supported researchers, project managers and support staff gathered in Atlanta in February to reinforce existing partnerships and discuss potential new areas of collaboration.

    The day-and-a-half meeting was organized by the SciDAC Outreach Center as part of its mission to support SciDAC outreach, training and research objectives. A primary focus of the outreach center is to foster communication within the high performance computing community.

    In addition to presentations about collaborations between scientists, applied mathematicians and computer scientists under the first set of SciDAC projects, the Atlanta meeting also featured two poster sessions. The posters provided talking points to get representatives of the SciDAC-2 scientific applications, centers and institutes talking. As a result, groups of various sizes congregated around the posters, talking intently about possible collaborations and support.

    “Without the posters, it would have been very hard, if not impossible, for us to communicate with one another about some of the key concepts, challenges, and capabilities,” said Kwan-Liu Ma, leader of the SciDAC Institute for Ultrascale Visualization. “The posters also enabled us to quickly identify potential collaborations and limiting the meeting size made it possible for me to get to know and also talk to almost all the PIs. It was also helpful to the answers of many questions asked by others but I did not think of.”

    One interactive poster featured a matrix in which PIs were asked to identify known and potential collaborations. The data collected from this poster will be used to create a Web-based display of SciDAC partnerships, which are an integral component of the program’s strategy for achieving computational science breakthroughs.

    January 2007

    SciDAC PI Organizational Meeting, February 5-6 in Atlanta

    First Annual Cray Technical Workshop - USA, February 26-28 in Nashville

    October 2006

    New SciDAC Solicitations

    The DOE Office of Science has issued two new solicitations to universities for SciDAC-2. The research areas are the Climate Change Prediction Program and Accelerator Science and Simulation. Accelerator Science and Simulation is also the topic of a related program announcement to DOE National Laboratories.

    September 2006

    Science at the Petascale

    On September 7, 2006 DOE announced $60 Million in new SciDAC projects (DOE press release | list of projects).

    Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing (SciDAC) computational science projects are aimed at accelerating scientific research in designing new materials, developing future energy sources, studying global climate change, improving environmental cleanup methods and understanding physics from the tiniest particles to massive exploding stars known as supernovae.

    As most of the projects funded under the initial SciDAC program have officially ended (alumni projects on this site) and the resulting success stories (pdf) underscore the value of multi-disciplinary collaborations. SciDAC-1 might appear to be a very hard act to follow. But with the announcement of SciDAC-2 projects, it’s clear that the Department of Energy (DOE) and the nation’s scientific computing community are up to the task – taking scientific advance to the petascale. [MORE]

    Second issue of SciDAC Review now available online

    The Review is a twice-yearly magazine that showcases different SciDAC projects and shares SciDAC-related news and science achievements. Read the online version.



    August 2006

    Annual SciDAC meeting set for 2007 June 24-29 in Boston

    Each year, scientists conducting research related to SciDAC meet to present scientific results, highlight their project progress and gain insight into new methods and techniques. Read about the 2006 conference.

    SciDAC Researchers Author Hundreds of Articles

    A hallmark of scientific research is the sharing of results and theories through articles thoroughly reviewed by other scientists and published in research journals and books. In the first SciDAC program, researchers reported more than 1,100 peer-reviewed publications and presentations as already published or accepted for future publication [pdf].


    July 2006 and earlier

    First issue of SciDAC Review now available online

    The Review is a twice-yearly magazine that will showcase different SciDAC projects and share SciDAC-related news and science achievements. Read the online version.


    2005 SciDAC Conference in San Francisco

    2004 SciDAC PI meeting in Charleston, SC

    2003 SciDAC PI meeting in Napa Valley

    2002 SciDAC PI meeting in Reston, VA

     


    Home  |  ASCR  |  Contact Us  |  DOE disclaimer