SHC back in production mode

Thanks to SHC users for your patience during Preventive Maintenance on the InfiniBand chassis and associated infrastructure. Any questions, comments, or concerns should be addressed to:

SHC Preventive Maintenance Notice

CACR’s Shared Heterogeneous Cluster (SHC) will take extended Preventive Maintenance in the near future to address issues with the InfiniBand switch - the fast interconnect fabric for the cluster.

Downtime is scheduled for Monday, June 29, 8AM through Tuesday, June 30, 12 noon to deploy a new switch chassis. After this major hardware upgrade/repair, the cluster will be much more serviceable and will be operating with optimal communications.

SHC user questions or concerns are welcome, please contact:

CACR Seminar: “The Meta Clustering and Consensus approach to interactive data analysis”

June 23, 2009
2PM, Powell Booth 100

Roberto Tagliaferri
NEuRoNe Lab, DMI Università di Salerno, Fisciano (Sa)

Clustering of real-world datasets is a complex problem. Optimization models seeking to maximize a fitness function assume that the solution corresponding to the global optimum is the best clustering solution. Unfortunately, this is not always the case, mainly because of noise or intrinsic ambiguity in the data, and due to these reasons several assessment techniques fail.

Here we present a set of tools implementing classical and novel techniques to approach clustering in a systematic way, with applications to complex biological datasets. The tools deal with the problem of generating multiple clustering solutions, performing cluster analysis on such clusterings  (i.e. Meta Clustering) and reducing the final number of clusterings by the appropriate application of different Consensus techniques.

A subsequent crossing of prior knowledge to the obtained clusters helps the user in better understanding its meaning and validates the solutions. A collection of visualizations and interactive tools makes possible the challenge of managing such huge amount of information, allowing the user to extensively investigate for extracting knowledge from data.

CACR Staff to Receive Service Awards

CACR is proud to announce that five of our employees will receive recognition at Caltech’s 54th annual Service Awards Ceremony, to be held in Beckman Auditorium on Tuesday, June 2, 2009.

Many thanks to Chip, Sharon, Michael, Mark, and Santiago for their many years of service to the institute and to CACR!

• Charles “Chip” Chapman (30 years)
• Sharon Brunett (20 years)
• Michael Aivazis (10 years)
• Mark Bartelt (10 years)
  
• Santiago Lombeyda (10 years)

Chip Chapman has been employed at Caltech since 1976. After starting in the physics stockroom and lecture hall in East Bridge, he went on to build several microcomputers from scratch with Prof. Ricardo Gomez for data acquisition and analysis in the physics sophomore lab. The project ended as IBM introduced the personal computer. In 1981 Chip worked in high energy physics with Prof. Geoffrey Fox, supporting the first campus network and DEC VAX computers. Later, he managed the Educational Computing Project, delivering over $5M worth of IBM PCs to the campus. In 1990 Chip helped form the Caltech Concurrent Supercomputing Facility, which later transformed into today’s Center for Advanced Computing Research. He held the position of technical supervisor during the era when the world’s fastest supercomputer was running at Caltech. Chip had a central role as liaison to the architect, contractors, and physical plant in the renovation of the Powell-Booth Laboratory for Computational Science, where he presently serves as facilities manager. He was also a main contributor to the high performance computing (HPC) task force report that is helping to define the future of HPC on campus. Chip has worked with students and scientists on many projects and research programs including the CASA Gigabit Testbed, the Scalable I/O Initiative, the Beowulf Project, and Caltech’s Center for Simulation of Dynamic Response of Materials.

Sharon Brunett came to Caltech in 1989 as a Computing Analyst at the Caltech Concurrent Supercomputing Facility (CCSF). CCSF later transformed into today’s Center for Advanced Computing Research (CACR), where Sharon is currently a senior computational scientist and manager of the CACR operations group. She determines appropriate hardware and software solutions to meet CACR’s resource needs, and serves as a liaison to research groups all over campus, including projects in astronomy, biology, high energy physics, materials science, and geophysics. Sharon played a major role in Caltech’s Center for Simulation of Dynamic Response of Materials, which provided significant funding to Caltech and CACR for ten years. That project’s success helped in the development of Caltech’s current Predictive Science Academic Alliance Program Center, in which Sharon also plays a significant role. Sharon’s dedicated nature and welcoming attitude have made her a key player in the history, and future, of computational science and engineering at Caltech.

CACR Seminar: “The Hypergrid: An Architecture for a New Web”

Tuesday, June 2, 2009
2 pm, 100 Powell-Booth

Prof. Crista Lopes
UC Irvine; also, Core Developer, OpenSim; Co-Founder, Metaverse Ink; Co-Founder, Encitra

OpenSim is chartering territory in making Virtual Worlds interoperable with each other and with the Web.  At the heart of it there is the Hypergrid, an emerging architecture that allows the seamless transfer of users’ agents between grids operated by different entities. While the Hypergrid is coming to life in the context of OpenSim-based 3D Virtual Worlds, its foundations shed a new light into what the Web could be.

About the speaker:   Dr. Crista Videira Lopes is an Associate Professor in the School of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Irvine. Prior to being in Academia, she worked at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (1995-2001). She is most known as co-inventor of AOP (Aspect Oriented Programming). She also made contributions to Ubiquitous Computing research with her work on lightweight software acoustic modems that encode small amounts of data in socially-acceptable sounds. Recently she has been working on infrastructures for Virtual Worlds. She is the recipient of several NSF grants, including a prestigious CAREER Award. Dr. Lopes has a PhD from Northeastern University, and MS and BS degrees from Instituto Superior Tecnico in Portugal.