Note: Enrollement for the Many-core Processors course is now closed.

CHAPEL HILL, NC—Graduate students, post-docs and faculty and industry professionals can participate in summer programs offered by the Virtual School of Computational Science and Engineering (VSCSE) free of charge at RENCI (the Renaissance Computing Institute), 100 Europa Dr., Chapel Hill.

RENCI will host two VSCSE summer courses:

• Petascale Programming Environments and Tools, July 6 – 9
• Proven Algorithmic Techniques for Many-core Processors, Aug. 2 – 6

The $100 registration fee has been waived to attend the VSCSE at RENCI. RENCI is the only VSCSE site in North Carolina.  Registration allows students to fully interact with other sites and with instructors, participate in hands-on lab activities and access high performance computing resources. Certificates will be awarded to all students who complete a course.

Lunches and snacks  will be provided as part of the full-day class sessions. Students will be expected to pay their own travel and lodging costs. The RENCI website provides a list of nearby accommodations to assist attendees.

To participate in summer courses, prospective students must first be enrolled in the Virtual School. Enrollment is free and can be completed at https://hub.vscse.org/. After enrolling, students can register for courses (note: simply ignore the request for payment and do not provide your credit card information). On-site enrollment is limited to 40 students per class and students will be accepted on a first-come, first-served basis.

The VSCSE helps graduate students, post-docs and young professionals from all disciplines and institutions across the country gain the skills they need to use advanced computational resources to advance their research. Support for the Virtual School is provided by the Great Lakes Consortium for Petascale Computation, the National Science Foundation, the state of Illinois, the Committee on Institutional Cooperation and Internet2 Commons.

For questions related to on-site courses offered at RENCI, please send email to vscse@renci.org.  For directions to RENCI, see the RENCI website.

VSCSE poster

Local hotel accommodations
Sheraton Chapel Hill Hotel*
One Europa Drive
Chapel Hill, North Carolina  27517
T: 919-969-4900
F: 919-942-3557
http://www.sheraton.com/chapelhill

Residence Inn by Marriott Chapel Hill*
101 Erwin Road
Chapel Hill, North Carolina  27514
T: 919-933-4848
F:919-942-3737
http://marriott.com/RDUHL

Hampton Inn*
1740 Fordham Blvd.
Chapel Hill, North Carolina  27514
T: 919-968-3000
F: 919-929-0322
http://www.hamptoninn.com/hi/chapelhill

The Carolina Inn (approx. 4.4mi from Europa Center)
211 Pittsboro Street
Chapel Hill, NC 27516
T: 919-933-2001
http://www.carolinainn.com/

* Walking distance

Scientists, academicians, technologists, architects and engineers from around the world are invited to present their ideas, experience and views related to computational wind engineering at the Fifth International Symposium on Computational Wind Engineering (CWE2010) in Chapel Hill, NC, May 23-27, 2010. The deadline for submitting all proposals is October 17, 2009.

The symposium, hosted by the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI), the UNC Center for the Study of Natural Hazards and Disasters, and the University of North Carolina Institute for the Environment, will provide a platform for discussing and exchanging the latest information on all computational wind engineering topics, including (but not limited to) Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations used in wind engineering. Each CWE symposium reflects the scientific advances in the developing CWE sciences as well as the rapid advances in high performance computing hardware and software used by wind engineers.

The theme for CWE2010 is CWE Applications for Homeland and Societal Security. Theme topics include natural and human-caused hazards and disasters, linking human health effects and property damage with CWE, simulation of meteorological phenomena, fires in buildings, cities and forests, use of CWE in developing wind energy systems and their optimum siting, and much more. Both oral and poster presentations are being sought on all CWE topics. In addition there are four special topic plenary sessions:

• Applying Computational Wind Engineering to Practice: Perspectives from the Political, Academic, Corporate, and Public Sector Community
• Trends in High Performance Computing for Wind Engineering
• Development, Validation, and Application of Atmospheric Boundary Layer Models and Turbulence Models for CWE
• Coupling Computational Wind Engineering and Mesoscale Meteorological Models

For more information on the symposium and the call for proposals, see www.cwe2010.org.

As a way to share results with its key audiences, RENCI introduced a Technical Reports series in 2008. The reports show interim and final results of long-term research projects and address a wide range of issues in technical fields.
Technical reports will be listed by year and number. Check out the first two reports at http://www.renci.org/publications/techreports.php.

The BoF, Federal Activities Impacting Long Term HEC Strategies, takes place on at 12:15 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 14 in rooms C3 and D1-3 at the Reno-Sparks Convention Center.  It will feature presentations by Dan Reed, director of the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI); Phillip Colella, of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; and George Strawn of the National Science Foundation.

Reed, a member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), co-authored the recently published report Leadership Under Challenge: Information Technology R&D in a Competitive World, which assesses the United State’s global competitiveness in networking and information technology and provides recommendations aimed at ensuring that the federal Networking and Information Technology R&D (NITRD) Program is appropriately focused and implemented. NITRD is a $3.1 billion program that includes 14 federal agencies. Reed will discuss the recommendations of the PCAST report, which include rebalancing the NITRD portfolio, revamping IT education and training programs, re-prioritizing some NITRD topics and improving interagency planning and coordination.

The National Academies study Toward Better Understanding the Potential Impact of High-End Capability Computing on Science and Technology also will be discussed at the BoF.

Reed also will deliver the keynote address at the International Workshop on Performance Analysis and Optimization of High-End Computing Systems. The workshop will be held Sunday, Nov. 11, in room A9 of the Reno-Sparks Convention Center. Reed’s talk, Optimizing the Computing Cloud, will look at the challenges of performance analysis and reliability as we move into the era of the ubiquitous computing cloud that delivers computing, data analysis, search and retrieval, collaboration tools and other services. 

Other RENCI activities at SC07 include:

• BoF: Developing Applications for Petascale Computers, 5:30 p.m. – 7 p.m., Tuesday, Nov. 13, rooms A2 – A5.  Reed, Thom Dunning, director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, and Ed Seidel, director of the Center for Computation and Technology at Louisiana State University, will host a session that addresses major issues related to petascale computing, including application capabilities and algorithms, libraries, programming techniques and performance analysis and optimization.

• BoF: Evaluating Petascale Infrastructure: Benchmarks, Models, and Applications, 5:30 p.m.  – 7 p.m., Wednesday, Nov. 14, rooms A3 and A4. Reed, Rob Fowler, RENCI’s chief domain scientist for HPC, and Allan Snavely of the San Diego Supercomputer Center will lead a discussion on recent progress in evaluating the performance, reliability, energy efficiency and usability of petascale computing systems and in developing applications that scale effectively on these systems. Vendors, funding agencies, infrastructure operators, application developers, and others interested in the design, operation and use of large systems are encouraged to attend.

• Poster Session: RENCI researchers will present several posters in the Ballroom lobby beginning at 5:15 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 13: Performability Modeling for Scheduling and Fault Tolerance Strategies for Grid Workflows(Lavanya Ramakrishnan, Dan Reed); An Open Framework for Scalable, Reconfigurable Performance Analysis(Todd Gamblin, Rob Fowler, Dan Reed).

• Education program: RENCI Research Assistant Emma Buneci will present a poster, A Framework for Qualitative Performance Analysis of Large-Scale Scientific Applications, as part of the SC Education Program, which begins Saturday, Nov. 10.

Registration is now open for the 2007 Microsoft eScience Workshop, hosted by the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI). This free workshop will be held Oct. 21-23 at the University of North Carolina’s Friday Center for Continuing Education. To register, go to http://www.mses07.net.

The conference also seeks presentation ideas on topics related to all areas of e-science. Some examples include:

• Modeling of natural systems
• Knowledge discovery and merging datasets
• Science data analysis, mining, and visualization
• Healthcare and biomedical informatics
• High performance computing in science
• Innovations in publishing scientific literature, results, and data
• The impact of eScience on teaching and learning
• Applying novel information technologies to disaster management
• Robotics in science
• Scientific challenges with no obvious computing solutions

The program committee will evaluate abstracts and those not selected for presentation will be offered the chance to participate in a poster session. Abstracts are being accepted online at https://cmt.research.microsoft.com/escience07/. The deadline for abstract submissions has been extended to Aug. 20. 

The workshop will address the challenges created by the ubiquitous use of computers in scientific research. As the possibilities of scientific computing have expanded, new issues have begun to impact researchers across disciplines. Insights made possible in a discipline through computational resources catalyze change and accelerate discovery in other areas. More and more, researchers must communicate and share information with colleagues in other disciplines.

The Microsoft eScience Workshop will bring together scientist from a variety of disciplines to share their research and their experiences of how computing is shaping their work. The focus will be on the research, and the technologies that make that research possible.
 
Workshop co-chairs are RENCI Director Dan Reed and Tony Hey, Microsoft’s corporate vice president for technical computing. Event posters are available upon request from smercer@microsoft.com.

RENCI is hosting a two-week summer institute for high school students to explore key concepts in computers, electronics and robotics. The summer institute will take place July 16-27 at the Renaissance Computing Institute’s Chapel Hill location, 100 Europa Drive.

Talented high school juniors and seniors involved in the Math Science Education Network Program through UNC-Chapel Hill and juniors and seniors from the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics are invited to apply. The students will engage in hands-on learning activities, career exploration and networking with RENCI scientists, researchers and developers, and skill building in advanced computing technologies.  The deadline for applications is March 30 or until the program is full. 

The institute will pose a number of challenges to the talented teenagers who participate. Can a PlayStation 3 be used as a supercomputer? How do you train a robot to safely navigate an office building? Can a 15-foot wide balloon provide visual and virtual eyes in the sky during an emergency? Can an aerobatic remote controlled airplane be adapted into a storm-chasing UAV? How do chemists, biologists, computer scientists, meteorologists and engineers work together to solve really tough problems in genetics, disaster management, and collaborative visualization?

Summer Institute participants will explore these and other questions through daily hands-on learning activities and lectures. They will learn about technology and science career paths, and develop skills related to advanced computing technologies. In addition the students will take field trips to Triangle area technology hot spots in research, education and industry.

The program aims to challenge and stimulate students’ critical thinking, collaboration, and project development abilities and to facilitate mentor relationships with RENCI staff and other technologists, engineers and scientists. The curriculum will focus on biology, computational chemistry, high performance computing, and robotics.

Chapel Hill, NC—Full-time faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill are invited to collaborate with the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI) through the RENCI Faculty Fellows Program. 

The RENCI Faculty Fellows program gives UNC-Chapel Hill faculty the opportunity to partner with RENCI in order to explore new research opportunities and directions; translate new ideas into technology prototypes; develop new community service or educational programs; or develop interdisciplinary projects that integrate the arts or humanities with science.

Fellowships of one academic year or one semester will begin either in the summer or fall 2007 semester. Proposals must be submitted by April 1. A full Call for Proposals with guidelines and submission information is available athttp://www.renci.org/focusareas/fellows/.

Fellows will receive up to $50,000 in support and will have access to RENCI high-performance computing, storage, visualization and data management/analysis capabilities as well as sensor and hardware prototyping resources. They will work with RENCI staff and research scientists to realize the goals outlined in their proposals and will have resources to explore and develop new opportunities and multidisciplinary projects. Fellows will be expected to spend a portion of their time in residence at RENCI and to be actively involved with RENCI during their appointment.

Please read the RENCI Faculty Fellows Call for Proposals and submit completed proposals by April 1 to Margaret Buedel (buedel@renci.org).  All those who submit will be notified of acceptance by May 15. For question or clarifications, please contact RENCI Deputy Director Alan Blatecky at alan@renci.org or 919-445-9643.

The association is honoring Reed for his “outstanding research in the field of high performance computing, exemplary professional leadership, and distinguished national service.” He becomes a fellow of the AAAS section on information, computing and communication.

In addition to his RENCI duties, Reed is vice chancellor for information technology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Chancellor’s Eminent Professor at UNC-Chapel Hill. He founded RENCI in 2004 after serving as director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and as head of the computer science department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Reed is a member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) and the current chair of the Board of Directors of the Computing Research Association (CRA). He served on President Bush’s Information Technology Advisory Committee, where he chaired the computational science subcommittee. Reed is a member of the Biomedical Informatics Expert Panel for the National Institutes of Health’s National Center and chairs the policy board for the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, the Department of Energy’s high performance computing center for scientific research.

Election as a Fellow of AAAS is an honor bestowed upon members by their peers. Fellows are recognized for meritorious efforts to advance science or its applications. Nominations undergo review by the steering groups of the association’s sections. New Fellows were elected by the AAAS Council in October. They will be recognized for their contributions to science and technology at the Fellows Forum on February 17, 2007, during the AAAS Annual Meeting in San Francisco.

RENCI, Catalyst for Innovation
The Renaissance Computing Institute brings together computer and discipline scientists, artists, humanists, industry leaders, entrepreneurs, state leaders and educators for collaborations designed to reshape science, the economy, the state of North Carolina and the world. RENCI leverages its expertise and resources in leading edge computing, networking and data technologies to ignite innovation and find solutions to previously intractable problems. Founded in 2004 as a major collaborative venture of Duke University, North Carolina State University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the state of North Carolina, RENCI is a statewide virtual organization.  For more, see www.renci.org.

• Simon Szykman, Director, National Coordination Office for
• Networking and Information Technology Research and Development
• Irving Wladasky-Berger, Vice President, Technical Strategy and
• Innovation at IBM
• Christopher Jehn, Vice President, Government Programs, Cray Inc.
• Jack Waters, Executive Vice President and CTO, Level 3
• Communications Inc.
• Joseph Lombardo, Director, National Supercomputing Center for
• Energy and the Environment University of Nevada, Las Vegas
• Michael Garrett, Director, Airplane Performance, Boeing Commercial Airplanes
• Stanley Burt, Director, Advanced Biomedical Computing Center
• Tom West, CEO, National LambdaRail

The webcast and witnesses’ written testimony are available here.

Story Courtesy HPC Wire

Reed, director of the Renaissance Computing Institute, Vice Chancellor for Information Technology Services at UNC-Chapel Hill, and Chancellor’s Eminent Professor at UNC-Chapel Hill, will speak at 1:30 p.m. at Peabody Hall, room 104. The lecture, titled “Computing the Future: Release 2016,” will speculate on technology advances over the next decade and their potential impacts on everything from education to healthcare to entertainment. Will wearable and embedded medical sensors mean healthier, longer lives for an aging population? Will global electronic social networks shape our perceptions of reality and create the global village that  Marshall McLuhan predicted? And what will be the role of the university in a world of ubiquitous sensors, artificial intelligence and global wireless communications?

As director of an institute that pushes collaboration to a new level and as a university IT leader that believes technology and technologists must partner with academic and business communities to create the learning environments of the future, Reed does not believe in passively allowing the future to happen. Instead, he advocates aggressively inventing the future and using technology to reach and exceed expectations. In this presentation, he will describe some visions of a technology-enriched future—driven by new inventions, by national and international policies, and by global competition—and their applicability to North Carolina.

The one-hour talk will be followed by a question and answer session. It is free and open to the public.