CISL presentations from SC05 conference available online
CISL staff participate in SC05 technical program, assist with StorCloud initiative, track evolving technologies
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| Dr. Richard Loft, deputy director of CISL R&D, talks about the NCAR cyberinfrastructure at SC05. More photos | |
Thirty-two staff members from the Computational and Information Systems Laboratory (CISL) of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) participated in SC05. Photo gallery
SC05, the 18th international conference on high-performance computing, networking, and data storage, was held this year in Seattle from Nov. 12–18. NCAR, a founding member of the SC conference organization, has been active in the conference since 1988, the year it first convened.
CISL staff offered presentations on a variety of topics of interest to the scientific computing community, showing how CISL research activities are creating new computational capabilities for the geosciences. Slides from these presentations are now available:
- The NCAR cyberinfrastructure
- NCAR supercomputing, 1963–2005
- Mathematical tools for the geosciences
- Biogeochemical grid computing
- Modeling with HOMME on BlueGene/L
- Visualizing terascale data sets
- Python interfaces to visualization software
- Petascale supercomputing
Dr. Christiane Jablonowski, a postdoc in CISL’s Computational Science Section, and her collaborator Dr. Quentin Stout from the University of Michigan offered a full-day tutorial called Parallel Computing 101. The tutorial was one of the best-attended at SC05, with approximately 90 participants. It introduced basic parallel computing concepts, using examples from large-scale engineering and scientific problems. Tutorial slides (approximately 350) are available upon request; send email to cjablono@ucar.edu
Dr. Richard Loft, deputy director of CISL Research and Development, chaired a birds-of a feather (BOF) session called “Geoscience Applications Requirements for Petascale Systems” with Dr. Robert Lee Pennington of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. The BOF addressed the challenges of creating a petascale system for Earth system sciences, showing the need for dialog between scientific researchers, computational scientists, and vendors.
CISL produced and staffed the NCAR research exhibit, which illustrated how high-performance computing is being used to advance scientific research in the NCAR/UCAR research community. The exhibit featured efforts such as the Earth System Modeling Framework, the High-Order Multiscale Modeling Environment, and the Institute for Mathematics in the Geosciences.
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| Gary New, assistant manager of CISL's Enterprise Services Section, stands in front of the enormous StorCloud data storage facility, which he helped deploy at SC05. More photos | |
Gary New, CISL computing facilities engineer, served as electrical chair for the SC infrastructure team, configuring and deploying the electrical infrastructure for various aspects of the conference. He also assisted with the electrical setup for StorCloud, an enormous, state-of-the art storage device that combined hardware, software, and access mechanisms to provide nearly a petabyte of data storage for exhibitors at SC05. StorCloud was architected and deployed entirely by volunteers from government, industry, and academia.
Tracking technologies, meeting with peers
CISL staff took advantage of SC05 to track rapidly evolving technologies by attending multiple tutorials, technical presentations, and BOFs on topics such as multiscalar simulation techniques, issues for the future of supercomputing, computational methods, and parallel debugging.
CISL staff visited industry and research exhibits, met with vendors to discuss project roadmaps and new applications, participated in a BlueGene/L Consortium meeting, and attended a meeting of SP-XXL, a user group focused on terascale scientific/technical computing on scalable parallel IBM systems.
CISL staff also conferred with colleagues and users from other research labs and universities, both in the U.S. and abroad, to discuss mutual interests in topics such as atmospheric science research, performance tools, benchmark comparisons, numerical methods, mathematical software, Grid technologies, computational environments, parallel file systems, and current and future collaborations
About CISL
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NCAR’s Computational and Information Systems Laboratory encompasses the Scientific Computing Division and the Institute for Mathematical Applications in the Geosciences. CISL supports high-end computing, data analysis, and data archival for the geosciences. CISL also conducts basic and applied research in information technology, computational science, and mathematics to help scientists address grand challenge problems.
The National Center for Atmospheric Research is operated by the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research under the primary sponsorship of the National Science Foundation.—Lynda Lester
