ACADEMIA

CHAMPAIGN, IL -- The third Linux Clusters Institute (LCI) workshop and the first to be held outside the U.S. is set for March 18-22 at the IBM Laboratory in Montpellier, France. Participants must register by February 1. A registration form is available at http://www.linuxclustersinstitute.org/registration.html. Those who plan to participate are encouraged to register as soon as possible since space is limited to 20 people. The LCI provides advanced technical training for those interested in deploying high-performance Linux computing clusters. The group was founded by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Albuquerque High Performance Computing Center (AHPCC) at the University of New Mexico, and the Advanced Computing Technology Center at IBM Research. The LCI includes some of the world's foremost specialists in building and deploying Linux clusters at NCSA, AHPCC, and IBM. Each LCI workshop spans a full week and consist of two modules: The first module lasts two days and covers systems administration and management issues. Participants learn about administering Linux clusters in support of secure, reliable, high-performance computing. Topics include networking, remote administration, job scheduling, account management, security, backup, monitoring tools, and tools and scripts used for common tasks. The second module runs for three days and focuses on developing and optimizing Linux cluster applications. Users and prospective users learn about configuring, acquiring, and using Linux clusters. Topics include Intel architecture details, memory subsystem and cache tuning, CPU tuning (including SSE/vectorization), multithreaded code optimization, distributed memory optimization using MPI, graphical debugging with TotalView, hardware performance toolkits, MPI tracing tools, and dynamic instrumentation tools. Participants can attend either or both modules. Additional workshops are planned for June at NCSA in Champaign, IL, and for September at AHPCC in Albuquerque, NM. For more information on the LCI, see http://www.linuxclustersinstitute.org/. The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is a leader in developing and deploying cutting-edge high-performance computing, networking, and information technologies. NCSA is a partner in the TeraGrid project, a National Science Foundation initiative to build and deploy the world's largest, fastest, most comprehensive, distributed infrastructure for open scientific research. NCSA also leads the National Computational Science Alliance (Alliance), a partnership to prototype an advanced computational infrastructure for the 21st century that includes more than 50 academic, government, and industry research partners. The NSF Partnerships for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (PACI) program funds the Alliance. In addition to the NSF, NCSA receives support from the state of Illinois, the University of Illinois, private sector partners, and other federal agencies. For more information, see http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/. The Albuquerque High Performance Computing Center (AHPCC) at the University of New Mexico (UNM) is a leading academic site for Linux-based high-performance computing and scientific programming. Research scientists form across the U.S. use AHPCC resources as part of their research programs. Within UNM, AHPCC assists over 20 associated faculty and their students from the Colleges of Arts and Science, Engineering, Fine Arts, and the School of Medicine, in their research and teaching programs. Further information regarding AHPCC and its activities can be found at http://www.ahpcc.unm.edu/. The Advanced Computing Technology Center (ACTC) is an organization based at IBM's T. J. Watson Research facility in Yorktown Heights, NY. It is an organization of highly skilled computational scientists from a broad range of scientific disciplines. Their mission is to further the advancement of computational science through tools and applications research, and to accelerate the transfer of technology and information into the HPC community. Further information regarding the ATTC and its activities can be found at http://www.research.ibm.com/actc/. Contact: Karen Green NCSA Public Information Officer kareng@ncsa.uiuc.edu 217.265.0748 phone 217.244.7396 fax