I attended two very interesting tutorials Sunday and Monday.

On Sunday, I went to the Containers session, which gave a great overview over Container technologies like Docker, Shifter, and a little on Singularity. Then there was a detailed tutorial on Docker/Shifter, which was interesting, but personally I would’ve been more interested in Singularity, since that’s the one we actually use for our High Energy Physics jobs.

On Monday, there was a very informative tutorial on how to purchase HPC resources, detailing the entire process from the first stages of planning the RFP all the way to bringing the cluster into production. The speakers were very knowledgeable, and quite entertaining as well.

I’m very grateful for the opportunity to go to all these sessions with the full workshop and tutorial passes I got — not to forget the free and quite good food at the tutorial lunches Sunday and Monday. 😉

The two plenary sessions on Monday evening and Tuesday …

UbuntuHouse@SC18 blogger Noxolo Moyake describes her Dallas debut and SC18 with amusing anecdotes! We are eager to experience this wonderful city through her eyes, and to learn which SC sessions interest her the most. Thanks, Nox!

Follow her SC18 blog!

Nox Moyake is a senior research marketer for the South African Center for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) at the Centre for High Performance Computing in Cape Town. Moyake is a journalist, writer, editor and publications production specialist with more than seven years of experience in the HPC industry. She has hosted, organized and attended many workshops and international conferences. This year, she will blog about SC18 for STEM-Trek. 

Thank you sponsors and friends! 

UbuntuHouse@SC18 blogger Genito Maure shares a bit about his travel from Mozambique to Dallas, Texas-US. This is his fifth time in the US, but his first SC & Dallas rodeo!

Follow his SC18 blog!

When he’s not pursuing professional development opportunities, Genito supports the African HPC Ecosystems project on behalf of the University of Eduardo Mondlane in Maputo, Mozambique.

Maure is skilled in numerical modeling and simulation of physical processes, statistical data analysis, fortran, high performance computing, shell scripting, climate change adaptation, and more. He earned a PhD in Environmental and Geographical Science from the University of Cape Town and currently works as a professor at UEM, the oldest and largest university in Mozambique that serves 40,000 students.

Watch UbuntuHouse@SC18 sponsors’ and friends’ websites to see what they will be doing at SC18!

by Dan Lorts (STEM-Trek Blogger and HPC Advocate)

Well Monday at SC18 started off in typical fashion; I arrived late, thanks to lovely Dallas traffic and the fact that everyone forgets how to drive when it’s raining.

I checked in after walking a ‘short’ distance, which at the Dallas Convention Center is a hike at times, and was greeted by a conference center employee who, because I was using my cane, took me straight to the front of the registration desk and promptly checked me in without any problems.

Then there was the first major decision everyone must make at SC18…which lanyard was I going to pick up and use for my badge? It is a  tough decision (not enough scientific data…). I picked up two; Micron and Cray since they were kind to support STEM-Trek’s SC delegation this year.

Another attendee was having the same difficulties and so I …

By Dan Lorts (STEM-Trek Blogger and HPC Advocate)

How about a behind the scenes look at what happens during the setup of a big conference like SC18?

It just so happens that I also work part-time for an event security company that is one of many providing services at SC18. This first group of pictures was taken during the second night of the setup. The floors were taped to identify the location of booths and placement of not only electrical connections but also the required data connections (Fig 1: show floor space map; cover image).

There were contractors running all over the place, including SciNet engineers who were setting up dNOCs and running the fiber connections per the above layout. The green Xes indicate completed booths; there were three additional sheets with booths in progress.

So, as you walk around or view pictures of the SC18 exhibit floor, remember how …

Elizabeth Leake (STEM-Trek) recently asked SC18 travel grant awardees (traveling to Dallas, Texas Nov. 9-16), “Shall we call our AirBnB South Fork or Ubuntu House?”

All she heard were crickets.

“Remember? J.R. Ewing was the lead character in the 1980’s teledrama, and South Fork was the name of his ranch.”

Again. Silence…

She began to realize this cohort was either too young to have known about the television series, Dallas, or grew up in places where it was never a ‘thing.’  They should consider themselves lucky to have avoided a decade of show-inspired “Texas Helmet Head” and massive shoulder pads. Seriously; we looked like linebackers!

So, Ubuntu House it is!

From Wikipedia: Ubuntu (Zulu pronunciation: [ùɓúntʼù])[1][2] is a Nguni Bantu term meaning “humanity.” It is often translated as …

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 Supercomputing Conference, ISC High Performance. Bond’s first ISC blog post was featured in HPCwire on June 26, 2018. All photos by Bond.

ISC Tutorial Day: Sunday

Knowledge. As a relative newcomer to the field of high performance computing (HPC), this is primarily why I attend. The last few years have been a flurry of HPC conferences, workshops, and Linux Cluster Institutes as I try to educate myself and become more conversant about supercomputing. Repetition is helpful, since it is easy to forget from one conference to …

Featured in HPCwire on June 13, 2018

Xiaoxiang Zhu (朱晓香) who works for the German Aerospace Center (DLR) and Technical University of Munich (TUM), was awarded the 2018 PRACE Ada Lovelace Award for HPC for her outstanding contributions in the field of high performance computing (HPC) in Europe.

Dr. Zhu is a professor of Signal Processing in Earth Observation (SiPEO) at TUM and head of the Department EO Data Science at the DLR Remote Sensing Technology Institute.

This was the third year that the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE) issuedthe Lovelace Award, and it was presented to Zhu on May 28 during the PRACEdays18 conference in Ljubljana, Slovenia, by Sinéad Ryan who chairs the PRACE Scientific Steering Committee.

I caught up with Dr. Zhu in Ljubljana, and she agreed to this interview.

Dr. Zhu, EO research is important to many disciplines, but it is complex and I imagine few understand how it is applied. How would you describe it to a layperson?

 “Urbanization is one of the most important megatrends of global change. Currently 55 percent of the world’s population lives in urban communities, and that percentage is ticking upward; in 1950, 30 percent lived in cities, but by …

A multinational delegation recently attended the Understanding Risk in Shared CyberEcosystems workshop, or URISC@SC17, in Denver, Colorado. URISC participants and presenters from 11 countries, including seven African nations, 12 U.S. states, Canada, India and Nepal, also attended SC17, the annual international conference for high performance computing (HPC), networking, storage and analysis that drew nearly 13,000 attendees. Von Welch (Indiana University), who directs the Center for Trustworthy Scientific Cyberinfrastructure, provided expert oversight for the URISC program. Welch invited nine specialists who presented open-source tools and cybersecurity best practices.

URISC Presenter Nick Roy, Director of Technology and Strategy for Internet2’s InCommon Federation, explained eduGAIN and its benefits to the global research community. “From a local management standpoint, eduGAIN saves managers time and effort because home credentials provide authentication and access to resources, instrumentation and data that are physically located at institutions in in 48 member countries that comprise an …