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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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Big Data Challenge for HighSchool Students 2016

February 12, 2016 in blog-general, for_educators, for_press, frontpage, success_story

SciNet in partnership with STEM Fellowship (http://stemfellowship.org/), SAS and Open Data Toronto, organized the second edition of the “Big Data Challenge for High School Students”.

On Feb. 4th, the 2015/2016 Big Data Challenge for high school students took place. 8 teams from several schools across the GTA presented their research on data analytic in front of peers and judges.

Inspired by “Big Data in the City” theme, students gathered data from Open Data Toronto, analysed and investigated topics such as: immigration relocation strategies, emergency response for first responders services, identification of clusters in Toronto, environmental analysis of Toronto neighbourhoods, debt risk analysis of the city, collision patterns and prevention, data mining from social media related to energy efficient companies, among many others.

SciNet members, in addition to organize this event participated evaluating the initial proposals and judging the final 8 qualified for the final presentation.

Participants of the Big Data Challenge will be participating in tours to SciNet’s datacenter, as an unique opportunity to experience and visit the home of the largest super-computers in Canada!

Congratulations to all the participants!!!

Further information can be found in the following links:

http://stemfellowship.org/bigdata

http://journal.stemfellowship.org/doi/abs/10.17975/sfj-2015-013

https://support.scinet.utoronto.ca/education/go.php/230/index.php/ib/1//p_course/230

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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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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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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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International HPC Summer School 2015

January 20, 2015 in blog, for_educators, for_press, for_researchers, for_users, frontpage

Apply by 11 March, decisions on 1 April
Expenses paid by program
Sponsored by PRACE, XSEDE, Riken, and Compute Canada
website: https://ihpcss2015.computecanada.ca

The sixth International Summer School on HPC Challenges in Computational Sciences will be held from June 21-26, 2015, in Toronto, Canada. 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. SciNet, a partner in the Compute/Calcul Canada national advanced research computing platform, acts as the local organizer and contact.

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

Applications are due by March 11, 2015.
For further information and to apply online, please click here .

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McMaster Students Create Fractal Movies Using BlueGene/Q Supercomputer

May 30, 2014 in blog, blog-general, for_educators, for_press, frontpage, in_the_news, news, Uncategorized

$superfractals$

Computing and software students at McMaster University created some stunning videos of fractals using the BlueGene/Q, one of the most powerful computers in the world, administered by SOSCIP and hosted by SciNet.

Read the full articles on McMaster University’s Daily News’ or on HPC wire.

The videos can be seen on YouTube.

Details on the SCOSCIP BlueGene/Q at SciNet can be found on our wiki.

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SciNet and the Discovery of the Higgs Boson

July 4, 2012 in blog, blog-general, frontpage, in_the_news

“SciNet is absolutely central to make anything out of what happens,” Teuscher [a University of Toronto ATLAS Researcher] said in this Toronto Star article.

SciNet, and the other Compute Canada centres, play a significant role in the work of the Large Hadron Collider and the physicists who use it.

Want to learn more about computation and the Higgs? This PC Advisor article has a very good overview of the massive data challenges that the worlds largest scientific experiment faces, and this blog post describes how the frontiers of computing and of science affect each other.

There are many excellent video descriptions of the physics such as What is the Higgs boson? by theoretical physicist John Ellis, and this explanation of the Higgs mechanism by CMS (one of the CERN experiments) spokesperson Joe Incandela. And this week’s CERN Bulletin has a number of articles describing both the physics and the experimental details that went into this discovery.

For a University of Toronto perspective, the University of Toronto news has a good writeup.

The resulting science papers are starting to come out, and some are freely available:
Landmark Papers on the Higgs Boson Published and Freely Available in Elsevier’s Physics Letters B, and Observation of a new particle in the search for the Standard Model Higgs boson with the ATLAS detector at the LHC.

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