By Elizabeth Leake (STEM-Trek)

Great news! Top500 announced the student cluster competition teams that will compete during the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC) in Frankfurt, Germany June 16-20, 2019.

While the US didn’t send a team last year, it’s good to know that the U-Mass Green Team will be there!

If you read my two-part series in Top500 about the competition last summer, you may recall me noting that the US was a no-show. In 2012 when the contest was first launched, Germany, and two US teams prevailed. But from 2013 forward, South Africa, two Chinese universities, and Singapore have rallied, with South Africa winning the top honor for three out of the past seven years.

Since many US states and European countries have hosted student cluster competitions longer than others, their absence or failure to place in the top three inspired me to interview team leaders to find out …

By Paul Devlin (University of Dallas; STEM-Trek Blogger)

I started my day with the “Machine Learning in HPC Environments” workshop. The workshop moderator briefly talked about Alan Turing’s proposal of intelligent computers and how the term “machine learning” was coined in reference to teaching a computer to play games. ML developers still work hard to game computers good at games, but the moderator named some important changes that have occurred in the field. He pointed to better algorithms, big data, and more computing power as the primary culprits for the dramatic improvement in machine learning software in recent years. After all these huge advances, how will machine learning be able to progress even further? By the end of the workshop, I was convinced that the answer is training parallelization.

The first keynote talk was by Dr. Azalia Mirhoseini from Google Brain. She discussed a novel architecture for deep neural networks …

By Nox Moyake (South African Centre for HPC; UbuntuHouse@SC18 Blogger @STEM-Trek)

The Centre for High Performance Computing (CHPC) South Africa has won the Workforce Diversity Leadership Award following votes by readers of HPCWire, a leading high performance computing online publication.

The centre won the award for leading the re-purposing and re-deployment of high performance computing systems in Africa, a project done in collaboration with Texas Advanced Computing Centre, Cambridge University, Dell as well as the Departments of Science and Technology and of International Relations and Cooperation of South Africa.

The project’s aim is for these retired systems to be re-used for training purposes and well as for academic research in research councils and in universities.

Cover photo: HPC Ecosystem Team with Tom Tabor, CEO: HPCWire

By Wendi Sapp (ORNL; XSEDE Campus Champion for Sustainable Horizons Institute)

The first activity began at 7:15 am in a ballroom for a mentoring breakfast. It was fun to start the day in an altruistic way. Although I was still tired from the previous days’ activities, it was refreshing to talk with more students.

After the keynote, we all made our way into the exhibit hall. I had plans to connect with colleagues at their booths and to meet a few others who were recommended to me. Finding my way through the booths and bumping into people I know was an interesting situation. I never thought that I would “know” so many people at such a large conference. Eventually, I found my way to …

By Wendi Sapp (ORNL; XSEDE Campus Champion for Sustainable Horizons Institute)

Today I am involved in the Early Career program. I’m looking forward to meeting people who haven’t been at their jobs for very long. The day begins with an introduction and activity based on our Clifton Strengths assessment results. After meeting some of the participants of the program, we begin a new activity. We break into groups of 4-5 people and form a fake company. We assign roles based on people’s strengths. For example, Latifa was chosen as our CEO because she is organized and can “Woo” others. We feel she will be effective at accomplishing her vision. I decide that my strengths are well-suited for a Marketing and Communications Director position. I’m very …

By Wendi Sapp (ORNL; Sustainable Horizons Institute)

After getting through the registration line, I headed down the long hallway toward my first SC19 Workshop. I was distracted by familiar voices and faces, which made it difficult to continue toward the room to make it on time.

I found a seat and reviewed the schedule. The keynote speaker would kick it off with a talk about using HPC to recover lost histories of black women. After discussing the details about the goals of the project and how the research team chose search terms to produce key documents that would make up the projects corpus, the speaker made a few comments about the concept that writing is a privilege. I was taking notes to prepare …

Elizabeth Leake (STEM-Trek) presented on the topic of entrepreneurship to a full assembly at the Botswana Innovation Hub on Friday, Nov. 16.

Here’s her presentation: BIH Coffee Presentation 45 minutes

Cover photo: Artist’s rendering of what the new BIH building will look like upon completion. It’s a work in progress; about 80 percent complete at this time. For more illustrations and an in-depth description of the facility, visit ProdAfrica Business Directory.

Photo below: Leake and Tirelo Ramasedi (BIH).

By Luna Backes Drault (Texas A&M)

SC is

SC is innovation… from new ideas to products, from concepts to prototypes, from technology to society.

SC is collaboration… from a node to a supercomputer, from a researcher to a consortium, from people to communities.

SC is communication… from inter-node to intra-node, from conversations to keynotes, from gathers to scatters.

SC is inspiring… from new minds to experts, from human brains to artificial intelligence, from passion to innovation.

SC is science… from observations to questions, from hypotheses to experiments, from data to conclusions, from conclusions to SC publications.

SC is networking… from students to advisors, from business to friendship, from partners to competitors.

SC is empowering… from majorities to minorities, from students to directors, from genders to ethnicities.

SC is fun… …

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. 

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