SCIENCE

Filippo Spiga (left) is a graduate of the University of Milano-Bicocca and currently works for IBM. Spiga discusses visualization tools with summer school participants Daniele Selli, an Italian student from the Technical University of Dresden, Germany and Luca Graziani, Italian student from the Max Planck Institute for Astrophyics, Garching, Germany (on the right).

Sixty graduate and postdoctoral scholars from 20 nations were selected from more than 100 applications. Participant expenses were paid by DEISA and TeraGrid. "The number of applications received from US and European computational scholars reflects a broad interest in international collaboration and HPC-related training," said Towns. "We were especially happy with the broad range of disciplines represented by the student community," he added. In addition to the vast range of research arenas and nationalities represented, about 20 percent were female. "We are committed to recruiting under-represented communities into science and engineering careers," said Scott Lathrop, TeraGrid’s area director for Education, Outreach and Training.

The DEISA and TeraGrid teams worked together to select the location, panel of presenters, program offerings, and student participants to develop an environment that would foster learning, relationship-building and scholarly collaboration.

Jake Searcy is in the high energy physics Ph.D. program at the University of Oregon, USA and works on the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research near Geneva, Switzerland.

The program opened with a keynote presentation by TeraGrid’s Program Director from the Office of Cyberinfrastructure at the National Science Foundation (NSF), Barry Schneider. "The global computational science community recognizes the benefits of increased collaboration and the sharing of resources and ideas," said Schneider. "Ever since Galilean times, through the early works of Stephen Hawking, scientific breakthroughs have been largely achieved by individuals in a laboratory. The grand challenge problems of today and tomorrow will be solved by globally distributed, multidisciplinary teams of researchers using powerful technology," he added. "The five biggest challenges for the global research community are: computing technology; data, provenance, and visualization; software; organization for multidisciplinary computational science; and education. There is need for a global computational science/cyberinfrastructure (CI) ecosystem," he added. Schneider concluded his keynote with a description of NSF’s Cynerinfrastructure Framework for 21st Century Science and Engineering.

Katelyn White, University of California (UC) at Santa Cruz, was among the U.S. attendees. White, a second year graduate student in the UC Applied Math program with a research focus in Computational Fluid Dynamics/Magnetohydrodynamics, felt the experience was very worthwhile. "I enjoyed the conversations (in particular the birds-of-a-feather) where I talked to people I wouldn't have met if it were not for this opportunity. I made some great connections that I will undoubtedly leverage," she said. "I will also be able to implement some of the tools I learned in my research."

"I was especially interested in the presentations about visualization by Sean Ahern, Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Uwe Woessner from the High Performance Computing Center (Höchstleistungsrechenzentrum) Stuttgart (HLRS) of the University of Stuttgart (HLRS)," said summer school participant Filippo Spiga, graduate of the University of Milano-Bicocca. "From a business and communication standpoint, I believe that if you want to effectively communicate your research to non-technical people, it helps to show them what the numbers mean," he added. "Visualization helps to support pure numbers and promote a deeper understanding of the science."

"For me the biggest problem with the workshop is that I have more ideas then I have time to implement!" said Jake Searcy, University of Oregon Ph.D. student. "I study high energy physics and work on the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research near Geneva, Switzerland. One thing that I learned at the Summer School is how to add our database files (ROOT files) to VisIt (a visualization tool developed by Lawrence Livermore Laboratory) so I can try different visualization methods for multivariate data. Given some free time I would really like to see if a GPU would speed up our event simulation, or see if we could do a better job indexing our large datasets. This experience gave me a lot to think about," he added.

In addition to learning how to tackle a broad spectrum of HPC challenges in disciplines such as material sciences, quantum chromo dynamics, plasma physics, life sciences, astro sciences and climate research, students learned about HPC resources that are available through DEISA, the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE) and TeraGrid. Additional presentations addressed a range of related topics such as parallel programming and models, algorithmic approaches and libraries, performance analysis and profiling, and data intensive computing and visualization. The Summer School closed with a lively discussion about ways to facilitate future trans-continental collaboration.

For more information about the summer school, see: http://www.deisa.eu/Summer-School/ The talks are available athttp://www.deisa.eu/Summer-School/talksM