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Science Rendezvous 2016

April 28, 2016 in for_educators, for_press, for_researchers, for_users, frontpage, in_the_news, news, success_story

Join us Saturday, May 7th for Science Rendezvous! It is an annual festival at the University of Toronto that takes science out of the lab and onto the street.

At the SciNet booth, explorers of all ages will find out how researchers use computers for discovery. They will see how simple computer simulations that you can run in your web browser or laptop can reveal important facts about how complex systems behave.

Click here for more details about Science Rendezvous and its many exhibitors.

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Gravitational Waves detected!!!

February 12, 2016 in blog, for_educators, for_press, for_researchers, for_users, in_the_news, news, success_story, Uncategorized

On February 11th, 2016 (10:30AM EST), scientists from Caltech, MIT and the LIGO Scientific Collaboration together with representatives of the National Science Foundation, announced in a live press conference, the first direct detection of gravitational waves.
The event detected, named GW150914, was produced by two colliding black holes, inspariling and merging together. This signal was detected by LIGO on September 14th, 2015.

Details of this discovery can be found in the following papers:

Observation of Gravitational Waves from a Binary Black Hole Merger (Phys. Rev. Lett. 116, 061102)
The First Sounds of Merging Black Holes
Summary of the detection
Press Release
Related papers to GW150914
UofT News

Many of the researchers running simulations and analysing data in several of our clusters are directly involved in the efforts for accurately modelling, simulating and detecting gravitational wave signals.
As a matter of fact, one of the simulations used for visualizing one of the movies screened during the announcement of the discovery of gravitational waves, was performed on SciNet’s General Purpose Cluster (GPC).

“The first detection of gravitational waves passing through Earth is a tremendous discovery. These waves were generated by never before observed astronomical objects, colliding black holes. I am very grateful for SciNet and Compute Canada to provide the computing resources needed to explore the properties of binary black holes, research that was instrumental in building the waveform-templates that LIGO used in its momentous discovery.”
— Prof. Harald Pfeiffer (Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics, University of Toronto)

Simulation of a binary black-hole system emitting gravitational radiation (gravitational waves) performed on SciNet’s General Purpose Cluster (GPC).

These simulations were performed by solving Einstein’s equations of General Relativity using a code co-developed on SciNet, by the SXS/CITA collaboration.

Credit: SXS/CITA/SciNet

Another of the videos displayed on the press-conf, was also produced by solving Einstein equations using this same computer code co-developed on SciNet by the SXS/CITA collaboration.

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International HPC Summerschool 2016 in Slovenia

December 16, 2015 in blog, for_educators, for_researchers, for_users, frontpage, news, Uncategorized

Apply by 15 February 2016, decisions on March 9, 2016
Expenses-paid program
Sponsored by PRACE, XSEDE, Riken, and Compute Canada
website: http://ihpcss2016.hpc.fs.uni-lj.si/

The seventh International Summer School on HPC Challenges in Computational Sciences will be held from June 26-July 1, 2016, Ljubljana, Slovenia. This is an advanced summer school on High Performance Computing which targets graduate students and postdocs who already have some experience in HPC parallel programming (for instance, MPI, OpenMP, or CUDA/OpenCL), preferably on software used in successful research projects.

The organizers of this summer school are XSEDE, PRACE, Compute Canada, and RIKEN.

Leading American, Canadian, European and Japanese computational scientists and HPC technologists will offer instruction on a variety of topics. The program is still being finalized, but previous summer schools included the following:

Access to EU, Canadian, Japanese and U.S. HPC-infrastructures
HPC challenges by discipline (e.g., bioinformatics, computer science, chemistry, and physics)
HPC Programming Proficiencies
Performance analysis & profiling
Algorithmic approaches & numerical libraries
Data-intensive computing
Scientific visualization

Participation in the summer school is decided through an application process. Meals, housing, and travel will be covered for the selected participants. Applications from students in all science and engineering fields are welcome. Although the school targets graduate students and postdocs, applications from research assistants and faculty are also welcome. Preference will be given to applicants with parallel programming experience, and a research plan that will benefit from the utilization of high performance computing systems.

Applications are due by February 15, 2016.
For further information and to apply online, please click here .

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International HPC Summer School in Toronto

June 29, 2015 in blog, blog-general, for_educators, for_researchers, for_users, in_the_news, news, success_story

Eighty students from the US, Canada, Europe and Japan, plus about twenty speakers and over thirty mentors gathered at the University of Toronto from June 21 to June 26, 2015, to learn about High Performance Computing, and share experiences in this multi-disciplinary field (see https://ihpcss2015.computecanada.ca). Sponsored by PRACE, XSEDE, Riken, and Compute Canada , this was the sixth such advanced international summer school on High Performance Computing, which targets graduate students and postdocs who already have some experience in HPC parallel programming (for instance, MPI, OpenMP, or CUDA/OpenCL), preferably on software used in successful research projects.

Leading American, Canadian, European and Japanese computational scientists and HPC technologists offered instruction on a variety of topics, including HPC programming proficiencies, performance analysis, and visualization, as well as presentations of how HPC gets applied in fields such as geophysics, climate science, material science, cosmology, plasma phyiscs, and life sciences.

SciNet, a partner in the Compute Canada endeavour, was encited to be the local organization of this large international event.
It was an engaging week of instruction and networking that we hope has given the participants the skills and inspiration to use HPC resources to explore scientific projects at new and unprecedented scales.

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2015 Ontario HPC Summer School Registration Opened

May 29, 2015 in blog, for_educators, for_researchers, for_users, frontpage, news

The Ontario Summerschool on High Performance Computing provides attendees with opportunities to learn and share knowledge and experience in high performance, technical, and data-centric computing. The Ontario Summerschool on High Performance Computing will have three installments. The first will be in London (May 25-29), the second in Toronto (July 9-13), hosted by SciNet, while the third will be held in Kingston (July 27-31).

The format of the Toronto installment will be a five-day workshop with mixed lectures and hands-on sessions on a number of selected subjects, including shared memory programming, distributed memory programming, and general purpose graphics processing unit programming. To incorporate this many topic, the summer school has two parallel streams throughout, from which you can pick and choose.

SESSIONS

Linux command line: a primer
Introduction to High Performance Computing
Shared memory programming with OpenMP
Distributed memory programming with MPI
General Purpose GPU Programming with CUDA
Data Analysis with R
Parallel R
Scientific Computing with Python
Python for High Performance Computing
HPC optimization and debugging
Visualization

LOCATION

This event will be held in the Galbraith building, University of Toronto, 35 St. George Street, Toronto, Ontario M5S 1A4.

CERTIFICATE

Participants that complete more than three days worth of instruction will be given an Ontario Summerschool Certificate. Note that this certificate is separate from the SciNet certificates.

MORE INFORMATION AND REGISTRATION

For more information and (free) registration, please go to the website for all three installments:

https://www.sharcnet.ca/events/ss2015/

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Announcing SciNet’s Data Science Certificate Program

May 29, 2015 in for_educators, for_press, for_researchers, for_users, frontpage, news, Uncategorized

SciNet is pleased to announce the addition of a new certificate program, focused on Data Science.

As many of you know, SciNet not only provides compute cycles and storage, but also offers a wide range of education and training sessions. Users can already get a SciNet certificate in Scientific Computing or High Performance Computing when they have taken enough courses on those topics.

To reflect the growing trend in data-driven science, SciNet is now adding a new Certificate program, focused on Data Science.

To earn the SciNet Certificate in Data Science, users or students need to take at least 36 credit-hours of data science related SciNet courses such as “Hadoop workshop”, “Scalable data analysis with R / Python”, “Database Basics”, “Visualization”, and “Machine Learning”. Future courses on e.g. NoSql, statistics, and i/o and workflow, are being planned for the next academic year. Some parts of the upcoming Ontario Summer School Central to be held in Toronto in July at the University of Toronto, will count toward this certificate as well. See herefor details and registration regarding the summer school.

For other SciNet courses, you can register for on our education site, which will keep track of your progress in this new certificate, as well as for the other two certificates.

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Science Rendezvous 2015

May 18, 2015 in blog, blog-general, for_press, for_users, news, Uncategorized

We had a great time at Science Rendezvous on May 9th, 2015!

Science Rendezvous is an annual festival in Canada that takes science out of the lab and onto the street. The University of Toronto is one of the event sites, and SciNet has been part of this event for many years.

At the SciNet booth, explorers of all ages found out how researchers use computers for discovery. They saw how even simple computer simulations that you can run in your web browser or laptop can teach them important facts about how complex systems behave.

The most popular demonstration seemed to be slingshot, a game where the aim is to fire a laser beam towards a target (spaceship) through a set of black holes that change the beam’s trajectory. Other interactive simulations were a bouncing ball on a vibrating plate, a forest fire web application, and an ecological simulation of rabbits and wolves (the latter two are available at shodor.org).

Many thanks to the organizers who made this possible, and to everyone who turned out on a Saturday to discover science!

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SciNet to be the site for the new Large Parallel System

May 11, 2015 in for_press, for_researchers, for_users, in_the_news, news, Road_to_Niagara

As part of its strategy for Advanced Research Computing and High Performance Computing in Canada, Compute Canada has conducted a site selection for four new systems. These systems are intended to replace and augment the currently aging computational systems available to Canadian academic researchers.

Recognizing the diversity of ARC computing in academic research, Compute Canada is planning to install four systems. Three systems will be so-called General Purpose clusters, aimed at small to moderate sized jobs with a large variety of demands (e.g, IO, GPUS, memory, …).

The fourth machine will be a Large Parallel system, i.e. a tightly coupled parallel supercomputer intended for running large (on the order of at least 512 cores per job) parallel jobs, typically using the Message Passing Interface.

SciNet, at the University of Toronto, has been selected as the site for the LP system. The GP systems will be at the University of Victoria, at Simon Fraser University, and at the University of Waterloo.

Note that it is very hard at this stage to know when these new systems will be online. A rough, very tentative estimate is that they could start arriving sometime in 2016.

For more information regarding the selection, see the selection announcement by Compute Canada.

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Compute Ontario Research Day 2015

April 21, 2015 in blog-general, for_researchers, for_users, frontpage, news, Uncategorized

The Compute Ontario Research Day 2015 will be held on Thursday, May 21 at the Cambridge campus of Conestoga College Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning.

This will be a day filled with high performance computing related research done in Ontario. Have an interesting research story for which you used high performance computing (such as the facilities at SharcNet, SciNet, and HPCVL)? Want to share you experience with other Ontario HPC users? Consider giving a talk at the meeting.
This is the preeminent provincial high performance computing event at which professors, postdoctoral, graduate, and undergraduate students gather to learn about each other’s high performance computing related work.

The program will consist contributed and poster presentations and four invited speakers:

Prof. James Demmel
Department of Mathematics, Computer Science Division, University of California, Berkeley
Anil K. Goel
Vice President and Chief Architect, HANA, SAP
Prof. Harald Pfeiffer
Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics, University of Toronto
Prof. Aristotelis Tsirigos
Department of Pathology, School of Medicine, New York University

This conference is sponsored by Compute Canada and Compute Ontario, and is a collaborative event between SHARCNET, SciNet, HPCVL, and Conestoga College Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning.

For more information and registration, see https://www.sharcnet.ca/events/CORD2015.

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Big Data Challenge Day for High School Students

February 24, 2015 in for_educators, for_press, frontpage, in_the_news, news, Uncategorized

SciNet, SAS, the computer science department at Earl Haig Secondary School in Toronto, and NRC Research Press organized a Big Data Challenge for High School Students in 2014. Selected teams presented their analysis of a real data set of grocery purchases for the jury on Friday February 13, 2015. The winners were the team from Oakville-Trafalgar High School.

Read the full article at the University of Toronto News.

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