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Thursday April 11, 2013
1:00pm
Powell-Booth Room 100
“Turning Large Simulations into Numerical Laboratories”
Alex Szalay, Alumni Centennial Professor, Department of Physics and Astronomy, The Johns Hopkins University
The talk will discuss how large (100TB+) supercomputer-scale simulations can be turned into interactive public laboratories. Examples include simulations of turbulence and various cosmological simulations, soon to reach the PB scale.
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Jan 31, 2013 1:00 PM
Keith Spalding 410
Andrew Drake, CACR
We have performed an extensive search for RR Lyrae among the 500 million sources observed by the Catalina Surveys. We detect ~26,000 type-AB RR Lyrae (of which 20,000 are new discoveries) from a region spanning 3/4 of the sky. By determining accurate distances to the stars, we investigate the spatial distribution of structures within the Milky Way halo. Combining the RR Lyrae distances with SDSS spectroscopy we are able accurately trace the velocities and metallicities of hundreds of sources within the Sagittarius tidal streams system. We find the first strong evidence for a dense tidal stream that overlaps the Sagittarius system to distances beyond 100kpc, yet remains unexplained by any existing model.
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Tuesday, January 29th
12:00 – 1:00pm
105 Annenberg
*Lunch will be provided*
SPEAKER:
Alexandre Cunha
Center for Advanced Computing Research and Elliot Meyerowitz Lab, Caltech
TITLE:
Collaborative Image Analysis with the Masses: Challenges and Opportunities
ABSTRACT:
Extracting reliable quantitative information from digital images in an automatic fashion continues to be a difficult task. In many situations classical and contemporary algorithms only provide partial and sub-optimal results that might not be sufficient to carry on research studies thus leading practitioners to rely on manual annotations. We present our work on collaborative image segmentation, an online crowdsourcing system where computers, experts, and non-experts cooperate to produce robust results supporting the research of plant biologists. We address some of the technical and nontechnical challenges in building such a system and discuss the potential in employing the vision of crowds to help solve image processing problems which are still poorly solved by computers alone.
This is a work in progress in collaboration with Elliot Meyerowitz lab at Caltech and with Tsang Ing Ren lab at UFPE, Brazil.
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Tuesday November 27, 2012
Powell Booth Room 100
1:30PM
“General purpose GPU programming by CUDA—an introductory tutorial”
Dr. Hailiang Zhang, Caltech Center for Advanced Computing Research (CACR)
Abstract:
In recent years, various fields of large-scale scientific computations
have greatly benefit from the massively parallel programming. This talk
presents a brief introduction and tutorial on the state-of-the-art
general-purpose GPU programming platform—CUDA. The GPU device
architecture, memory hierarchy, and the general CUDA programming model
will be introduced. The CUDA numerical schemes of some vector and matrix
operations will be demonstrated as examples. Some CUDA applications on
molecular and biophysical modeling will be presented. The standard CUDA
toolkit libraries and some third party APIs will also be introduced.
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Students, postdoctoral fellows and faculty are invited to attend a Keck Institute for Space Studies (KISS) half-day short course entitled:
“Looking for Nuggets in Massive Data Streams”
Tuesday, June 7, 2011
9:00am – 12:30pm
Hameetman Auditorium, Cahill Building
This short course is being held in conjunction with the KISS study “Digging Deeper: Algorithms for Computationally-Limited Searches in Astronomy.”
This series of talks will review some of the tools and techniques used for detection and classification on transient signals in massive data streams in astronomy, e.g., searches for gravitational wave sources, or transient events in synoptic sky surveys. The focus of this short course is on advanced data mining and statistical techniques and algorithms.
Speakers include:
09:15 – 10:15 Signal analysis and parameter estimation in gravitational wave astronomy, Badri Krishnan (AEI)
10:15 – 10:45 Keynote talk: New Developments in Time Series Analysis, Jeff Scargle (NASA Ames)
10:45 – 11:15 Coffee break
11:15 – 11:45 Automated Classification of Transients, Ashish Mahabal (Caltech)
11:45 – 12:15 Machine Learning applications in Time Domain Astronomy, Pavlos Protopapas (CfA)
The short course will be videotaped and made available on the KISS website within two weeks after the workshop is completed.
Seating is limited and is available on a first come, first served basis – and no registration is required. An informal lunch is provided for all short course attendees.
Please see http://www.kiss.caltech.edu for more details.
