The rise of Uber has convinced many pundits, economists, and policymakers that freelancing via digital platforms is becoming increasingly important to Americans’ livelihood. It has also promoted the idea that new technology—particularly the explosion of platforms enabling the gig economy—will fundamentally alter the future of work.
As a former owner of a PT Cruiser, I can safely say the iPad probably did more damage to the car than the other way around.
Carver: IBM iDataPlex
NERSC's next medium-sized scientific computing system will be an IBM iDataPlex Linux cluster. The IBM system, selected in a competitive procurement, provides excellent performance, good energy efficiency per flop, and a familiar environment for mid-range parallel applications. It is intended to replace Bassi and Jacquard.
The system will be named after the American scientist George Washington Carver.
The world's fastest supercomputer, Roadrunner, at Los Alamos National Laboratory has completed its initial "shakedown" phase doing accelerated petascale computer modeling and simulations of a variety of unclassified, fundamental science projects.
The Roadrunner system is now beginning its transition to classified computing to assure the safety, security, and reliability of the U.S. nuclear deterrent.
Capitalizing on this national security investment, 10 unclassified projects were selected for this opportunity to use Roadrunner, a hybrid-architecture, 1.105 petaflop/s computing system, during a six-month period that ended in September 2009.
These projects were also used to put a "work load" on the Roadrunner system so that scientists could optimize the way large codes are able to run on the machine. The Roadrunner open science projects represent the best of science, and the value of enabling technologies at Los Alamos, and were selected from across the Laboratory by a special committee.
A sampling of the projects include:
* ORIGINS OF THE UNSEEN UNIVERSE
Astrophysicists have created the largest-ever computer model of an expanding, accelerating universe to help scientists understand both dark matter and dark energy, two cosmic constituents that remain a mystery.
* THE LARGEST HIV EVOLUTIONARY TREE
Mapping Darwinian phylogenic evolutionary relationships for large numbers of Human Immunodeficiency Virus genetic sequences results in an HIV family tree that may lead researchers to new vaccine focus areas.
* NONLINEAR PHYSICS OF HIGH-POWERED LASERS
Computer scientists adapt VPIC, a particle-in-cell plasma physics code, to simulate laser plasma interactions on the Roadrunner petascale supercomputer - models critical to understanding inertial confinement fusion at the National Ignition Facility.
* MODELING TINY NANOWIRES AT LONG TIME-SCALES
How nanowires break under stress is simulated atom-by-atom over a period of time that is closer than ever to experimental reality to see how the movement of single atoms can change a material's mechanical or electrical properties.
* EXPLORING MAGNETIC RECONNECTION
Magnetic reconnection is a basic process that occurs within hot ionized gases known as plasmas. This process often leads to an explosive release of energy that is stored within the magnetic fields, and plays a key role in the earth's magnetosphere, solar flares, magnetic fusion machines, and a variety of astrophysical problems.
* HOW SHOCK WAVES CAUSE MATERIALS TO FAIL
Physicists use SPaSM computer code to conduct multibillion-atom molecular dynamics simulations of materials as extreme shock-wave stresses break the materials into pieces, for the first time attempting to create atomic-scale models that describe how voids are created, how materials may swell or shrink under stress, and how a once-broken bond might reform.
The University of California will have to shelve plans for a $113 million computer research center in the hills above the Berkeley campus until a federal agency studies possible damage to Strawberry Canyon, a federal judge has ruled.
U.S. District Judge William Alsup of San Francisco issued an injunction in March prohibiting construction of the center, the possible new home of U.S. Department of Energy supercomputers, until he rules on whether a new environmental study is needed.
On Monday, Alsup said the project would be funded and controlled by the federal government and therefore is covered by federal law, which requires a government study of potential environmental harm before construction.
Although the federal government has not committed to paying for the computer center, Alsup said UC expects it to do so. He also said the Energy Department paid the salaries of employees at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory - including its then-director, Steven Chu, now the U.S. energy secretary - who influenced the project's scope and budget.
Both UC and the federal agency had argued that the center, which the university would own, would be a state project. The university conducted an environmental study under California law last year and decided that constructing the building would not harm the hillside, a conclusion that opponents questioned.
Construction had been scheduled to start in March. The judge has quoted project officials as saying a further environmental report would cause a year's delay.
The proposed Computational Research and Theory Facility, a joint project of the university and the UC-operated Lawrence Berkeley laboratory, is to be built on lab property near Strawberry Canyon.
The 126,000-square-foot building would house high-performance Energy Department computers now located in a leased building in Oakland that is running out of space. It would be used by researchers and students from both the university and Lawrence Berkeley.
A group called Save Strawberry Canyon sued in July 2008, saying construction in a steep area prone to fires and virtually atop the Hayward Fault was risky. The group said the university could move at least some of the computer equipment to industrially zoned land it owns in Richmond.
Cray Inc. (NASDAQ: CRAY) today announced that the company has won the contract to install a next-generation supercomputer at the Department of Energy's (DOE) National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) located at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The multi-year supercomputing contract includes delivery of a Cray XT5(TM) massively parallel processor supercomputer, which will be upgraded to a future-generation Cray supercomputer. When completed, the new Cray will deliver a peak performance of more than one petaflops (quadrillion mathematical calculations per second).
Like NERSC's current 355-teraflops Cray XT4(TM) system, nicknamed "Franklin," the new supercomputing system will help advance open science research in climate modeling, biology, environmental sciences, combustion, materials science, chemistry, geosciences, fusion energy, astrophysics, nuclear and high-energy physics, and other disciplines, along with scientific visualization of massive data sets. Click here for more information about the scientific work done on Franklin.
"As NERSC is the primary supercomputing center for DOE's Office of Science, making Cray's latest technology available to our users will accelerate innovation across a wide range of scientific disciplines, helping scientists tackle problems of vital importance to our nation's future," said Michael Strayer, Associate Director of DOE's Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research.
According to NERSC Director Kathy Yelick, Cray was awarded the contract based on several factors, including performance and energy efficiency on a set of application benchmarks that capture the challenging workload of the 3,000 NERSC users.
"Because we serve such a large and scientifically diverse user community, it's critical that our systems deliver the best performance while running real-world applications -- especially as users scale their codes to run on tens of thousands of processor cores," Yelick said.
The new Cray system will provide many pioneering features, including the ability for users to customize the operating system for their own codes and to schedule jobs and access their data without logging in to the supercomputer. Yelick adds, "Cray's new cooling system and interconnect network technology mesh well with our research efforts into energy efficient computing and programming models."
"We are proud that NERSC chose Cray as its ongoing partner to provide its diverse and demanding users with advanced scientific computing capabilities," said Peter Ungaro, president and CEO of Cray. "Our partnership with NERSC expands beyond our supercomputers to working together to get the most efficient and effective use of the systems as possible -- a partnership that benefits all Cray customers around the globe. We are excited at the scientific achievements that NERSC's users have made on the Cray XT4 'Franklin' system, and we are looking forward to the advancements that will be made on both our Cray XT5 system as well as our future systems that are part of this contract."
Consisting of products and services, the multi-year contract is valued at over $50 million. The full system is expected to go into production in late 2010.
1 Los Alamos National Laboratory
United States Roadrunner (IBM Cell + Opteron System)
2 Oak Ridge National Laboratory
United States Jaguar (Cray XT5)
3 Forschungszentrum Juelich (FZJ)
Germany JUGENE (IBM Blue Gene/P Solution)
4 NASA/Ames Research Center/NAS
United States Pleiades (SGI Altix)
5 Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
United States BlueGene/L (IBM Blue Gene)
6 National Institute for Computational Sciences/University of Tennessee
United States Kraken (Cray XT5)
7 Argonne National Laboratory
United States (IBM Blue Gene/P)
8 Texas Advanced Computing Center/Univ. of Texas
United States Ranger (SunBlade x6420, Opteron)
9 Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
United States Dawn (IBM Blue Gene/P)
10 Forschungszentrum Juelich (FZJ)
Germany JUROPA (Bull Sun Constellation)
Birds-of-a-Feather Sessions (BOFs)
Submissions are invited for BOF sessions, which allow conference attendees to discuss topics of mutual interest.
We are seeking:
* Sessions that result in informal group discussion on any topic related to supercomputing
* Sessions targeted to start building new communities related to Supercomputing areas are also very welcome
As an example, here is a list of topics that worked well as BOFs last year:
- Systems (e.g. Ranger, Roadrunner), Product Lines (e.g. BlueGene, Altix, Cell), and Architectures (e.g. clusters, grids)
- Software Packages (e.g. MPICH, OSCAR, PBS, Rocks, TotalView)
- Lists and Competitions (e.g. Top500, Green 500, HPC Challenge)
- Languages and Programming Models (e.g. OpenMP, MPI, PGAS)
- Government Initiatives and Groups (e.g. NITRD, grant policy, NSF HECURA) Future of HPC (e.g. pathways to the future, trends)
Please keep in mind that BOFs are not intended for commercial presentations, but for technical ones. Sessions where a particular system, environment, architecture, tool, etc. is presented will also be considered, as long as it is of interest to a broad cross-section of SC09 attendees.
Sessions will be 60 or 90 minutes long. The format within the session is free for the organizer to define.
SC09 will provide meeting room facilities and post daily schedules of the approved BOFs, which are open to all conference attendees, including exhibitors and exhibits-only badge holders.
Submissions open on March 16th, 2009. Visit https://submissions.supercomputing.org/ to make a submission. Submission will close on July 27th.
Questions: bofs@info.supercomputing.org
Summary
Berkeley Lab anticipates several openings for post-doctoral fellows in the NERSC Division to address the challenges of petascale computing on new multicore architectures. The fellows will work with high-profile applications in the areas of bioscience, fusion, climate and material science as well as in the development of scalable algorithms and novel language implementations for modern petascale systems. The fellows will have access to leading edge computational platforms as well as prototypes of experimental systems and close interaction with DOE Office of Science Principal Investigators who are receiving significant allocations of high-end computer time under the ASCR Leadership Computing Challenge. Interaction with faculty and students of the University of California, Berkeley and other major research universities is available depending on the specific project. The fellows will have the opportunity to gain experience in the NERSC production environment facility and practical knowledge of the skills necessary for deployment of large-scale multi-user hardware and software.
Duties
The fellow will participate in research projects to develop, analyze, and optimize performance of HPC applications and their run-time environment. This project may involve several of the following activities: analysis and optimization of parallel application programs; benchmarking these codes on systems from single CPUs to large scale HPC systems; the development of improved algorithms for multi-core systems; research in a specific computational application domain; publication and dissemination of these research activities through refereed publications and conference presentations.
Qualifications
Required: PhD degree in computer science, computational science, applied mathematics or a related scientific/engineering application domain area is required. Excellent written and oral communication skills are required. Demonstrated ability to work independently, work collaboratively in an interdisciplinary team, and contribute to an active intellectual environment. Experience with code development in a UNIX/Linux - based environment.
Desired: Experience in one or more of the following areas: (1) High-performance computing, (2) Domain science expertise relevant to biosciences, climate, fusion, or similar application fields, (3) Experience tuning and debugging large science applications, (4) Advanced HPC languages and methods (PGAS, CUDA, OpenCL, etc.).
Equal Employment Opportunity
Berkeley Lab is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Employer committed to the development of a diverse workforce.
Notes
All positions require the completion of a background check. This is a one-year term appointment with the possibility of renewal. The Berkeley Lab offers competitive salaries for post-doctoral positions with excellent benefits.
