By Baylen Brus, HPC Systems Administrator

As a young professional just beginning my career in High-Performance Computing (HPC) Systems Administration, I was honored to have the opportunity to attend the Practice & Experience in Advanced Research Computing conference (PEARC19) in Chicago, Illinois last summer.

With my only HPC experience being with the Argon cluster at the University of Iowa, I was excited to learn about technologies outside of my environment and how other clusters are built and maintained. PEARC furthered my knowledge of the developments in HPC, and cyberinfrastructure, in general.

The thing I find the most fascinating about the field is the amount of open-source development that makes everyone’s lives easier when it comes to managing these massive systems. Hearing people talk about what software packaging was like before Spack or OpenHPC were around makes me pretty glad I’m starting in the field while these tools are …

By Trey Godbolt, Junior at the University of Iowa, Business Analytics program

Day 1:

The first day of the Practice & Experience in Advanced Research Computing (PEARC19) conference in Chicago, Illinois began with the car ride from Iowa City. I rode with Elizabeth Leake (STEM-Trek), and we picked up another student, Badisa Mosesane (University of Botswana), at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Badisa was completing a three-month cyberinfrastructure internship at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. After picking up Badisa, we all traveled to Oak Park, Illinois and the AirBnB we would stay at for the remainder of the trip. After dropping off our luggage, we went to the Hyatt Regency in Chicago for the Student Program Opening; a brief orientation to the conference.

Day 2:

This was my first full day at PEARC19. I was scheduled to work as a student volunteer for the session titled, …

Originally featured in TOP500 on June 26, 2018

The International Supercomputing Conference (ISC18) kicked off on Monday, June 25 in Frankfurt, Germany, with Maria Girone, Chief Technology Offier of CERN openlab delivering the opening keynote address. She explained how CERN’s needs will drive exascale computation and data science innovation in the future.

Founded in 1954, CERN straddles the Franco-Swiss border, and has an annual operating budget of one billion Swiss francs. With 22 member-states, its resources support 15,000 scientists around the world, and employs 2,500 at Swiss and French sites. CERN is home to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator.

In addition to probing the fundamental structure of our universe, understanding the very first moments of our universe after the big bang, and searching for dark matter, CERN technicians and scientists are always developing new technologies for accelerators and detectors. Its instrumentation …

Dear Elizabeth,

First of all, thank you so much for finding a donor for my flight from Gaborone to Johannesburg. Please extend my gratitude to the wonderful people at South Africa’s Airlink Airlines!

Many thanks to ISC Marketing & Communications Manager Nages Sieslack, ISC Student Program Coordinator Colleen Sheedy and the ISC High Performance conference for the travel grant award! I appreciate STEM-Trek’s help covering up-front costs until ISC could make a reimbursement from my grant, and for the pocket euros. If not for everyone’s unwavering and collaborative support, it would have been difficult for me to attend the conference. People like you are rare, and worthy of being celebrated. You are my heroes!

My favorite part of the conference was the “Deep Learning Demystified” tutorial by NVIDIA and Leibniz Supercomputing Center. I was excited to experiment with Deep Learning models to do Object Detection on ocean shots, generate heat …

In this blog, Marcus Bond, an XSEDE Campus Champion and professor of inorganic chemistry and x-ray crystallography at Southeast Missouri State University, shares his experience at the International School of Crystallography at the Ettore Majorana Foundation and Centre for Scientific Culture in the mountaintop village of Erice, Sicily, June 1-10.

This crystallography school has been held annually since 1974. Program themes change each year, and there is usually a single topic. However, this year two distinctly different themes were presented simultaneously: Electron Crystallography and Quantum Crystallography. While attendees of both met jointly for a few lectures, each held separate sessons and workshops. Everybody came together informally for meals, social events, excursions …

Featured in HPCwire on June 20, 2018

The University of Ljubljana in Slovenia hosted the third annual EHPCSW18 and fifth annual PRACEdays18 events which opened May 29, 2018. The conference was chaired by PRACE Council Vice-Chair Sergi Girona (Barcelona Supercomputing Center), and officially opened by PRACE Managing Director and Chair of the EHPCSW & PRACEdays OPC Serge Bogaerts. An official welcome was provided by PRACE Council Chair Anwar Osseyran (Dutch National HPC Center, SURFsara); and University of Ljubljana Minister of Education, Science and Sport Maja Makovec Brenčič.

With 343 registered attendees from Europe, Australia, Asia and the United States who represented a wide range of disciplines, EHPCSW18, with many co-located meetings, was a monumental feat of execution. Much of the credit goes to local organizers, contracted consultancies and volunteers who serve on planning committees. I was especially grateful for the opportunity to work closely with the communication team …