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.

“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.

“Software Challenges for Extreme Scale Systems”
Vivek Sarkar, E.D. Butcher Chair in Engineering, Professor of Computer Science, Rice University

ABSTRACT:

It is widely recognized that  computer systems anticipated in the
2020 timeframe will be qualitatively different from current
and past computer systems.  Specifically, they will be built using
homogeneous and heterogeneous many-core processors with 100’s of
cores per chip, their performance will be driven by parallelism
(million-way parallelism just for a departmental server), and
constrained by energy and data movement.  They will also be subject to
frequent faults and failures.  Unlike previous generations of hardware
evolution, these Extreme Scale systems will have a profound impact on
future software.  The software challenges are further compounded by
the need to support new workloads and application domains
that have traditionally not had to worry about large scales of
parallelism in the past.

The challenges across the entire software stack for Extreme Scale
systems are driven by programmability and performance requirements,
and impose new requirements on programming models, languages, compilers, and runtime systems.
We focus on the critical role played by the runtime
system in enabling programmability in upper layers of the software
stack that interface with the programmer, and in enabling performance
in lower levels of the software stack that interface with the
hardware.  Examples of key runtime primitives will be drawn from early
experiences in the Habanero Multicore Software Research project
(http://habanero.rice.edu) which targets a wide range of homogeneous
and heterogeneous manycore processors.  On the programmability front,
the runtime primitives are shown to support important semantic guarantees
for different classes of programs.  On the performance front, we show how general structures for
task creation, synchronization, and termination can be implemented in a scalable manner
on manycore processor testbeds that are representative of the challenges
that we will face in future Extreme Scale processors.

BIO:

Vivek Sarkar conducts research in multiple aspects of parallel
software including programming languages, program analysis, compiler
optimizations and runtimes for parallel and high performance computer
systems.  He currently leads the Habanero Multicore Software Research
project at Rice University, and serves as Associate Director of the
NSF Expeditions project on the Center for Domain-Specific Computing.
Prior to joining Rice in July 2007, Vivek was Senior Manager of
Programming Technologies at IBM Research.  His responsibilities at IBM
included leading IBM’s research efforts in programming model, tools,
and productivity in the PERCS project during 2002- 2007 as part of the
DARPA High Productivity Computing System program.  His past projects
include the X10 programming language, the Jikes Research Virtual
Machine for the Java language, the MIT RAW multicore project, the ASTI
optimizer used in IBM’s XL Fortran product compilers, the PTRAN
automatic parallelization system, and profile-directed partitioning
and scheduling of Sisal programs.  Vivek holds a B.Tech. degree from
the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, an M.S. degree from
University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a Ph.D. from Stanford University.
He became a member of the IBM Academy of Technology in 1995, the
E.D. Butcher Chair in Engineering at Rice University in 2007, and was
inducted as an ACM Fellow in 2008.  Vivek has been serving as a member
of the US Department of Energy’s Advanced Scientific Computing
Advisory Committee (ASCAC) since 2009.

*Lunch will be Provided*

Community Participation in Disaster Management Through Information Technology

K. Mani Chandy
Simon Ramo Professor, Caltech

This talk describes ongoing work by GPS (geology and planetary sciences), civil engineering, CACR (Center for Advanced Computing Research) and Computer Science at Caltech on community sensor networks for disaster management. The research group includes PhD students, undergraduates, research staff and faculty. This talk looks at questions such as: Can ordinary people, such as school children, deploy sensors to detect shaking from earthquakes? Can a system based on installation and deployment of sensors by self-selected members of the community provide early warning (of a few seconds) of impending shaking? Are sensors in phones useful for disaster management? What sorts of sensors can be used to detect hazardous radiation? Can “personal hazard stations” in homes and offices be used to sense and respond to disasters such as fires? The talk describes research challenges including design of sensors, methods of exploiting Cloud computing systems, and algorithms for rapid detection of geospatial events. A new initiative by the Computing Community Consortium on disaster management will be described briefly.

*Lunch will be provided*

SPEAKER:
Matthew Graham
Computational Scientist
Center for Advanced Computing Research, Caltech

TITLE:
Characterizing the Time Domain

ABSTRACT:
The new generation of synoptic sky surveys promise unprecedented amounts of data and information and automated processing and analysis is a necessity. Light curves, however, can show tremendous variation in their temporal coverage, sampling rates, errors and missing values, etc., which makes comparisons between them difficult and training classifiers even harder. A common approach to tackling this is to characterize a set of light curves via a set of common features and then use this alternate homogeneous representation as the basis for further analysis or training. Many different types of feature are used in the literature to capture information contained in the light curve: moments, flux and shape ratios, variability indices, periodicity measures, model representations. In this talk, we will review characterization features with particular attention to the problem of determining accurate and reliable periods for astrophysical objects.

Hod Lipson (Cornell)

Machine Science: Distilling Natural Laws from Experimental Data, From Particle Physics to Computational Biology
Can machines discover scientific laws automatically? For centuries, scientists have attempted to identify and document analytical laws that underlie physical phenomena in nature. Despite the prevalence of computing power, the process of finding natural laws and their corresponding equations has resisted automation. This talk will outline a series of recent research projects, starting with self-reflecting robotic systems, and ending with machines that can formulate hypotheses, design experiments, and interpret the results, to discover new scientific laws. While the computer can discover new laws, will we still understand them? Our ability to have insight into science may not keep pace with the rate and complexity of automatically-generated discoveries. Are we entering a post-singularity scientific age, where computers not only discover new science, but now also need to find ways to explain it in a way that humans can understand? We will see examples from psychology to cosmology, from classical physics to modern physics, from big science to small science.

About the speaker: Hod Lipson is an Associate Professor of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering and Computing & Information Science at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY. He directs the Creative Machines Lab, which focuses on novel ways for automatic design, fabrication and adaptation of virtual and physical machines. He has led work in areas such as evolutionary robotics, multi-material functional rapid prototyping, machine self-replication and programmable self-assembly. Lipson received his Ph.D. from the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology in 1998, and continued to a postdoc at Brandeis University and MIT. His research focuses primarily on biologically-inspired approaches, as they bring new ideas to engineering and new engineering insights into biology. For more information visit http://www.mae.cornell.edu/lipson

Dr. Theodor Holm Nelson
Designer-Generalist, The Internet Archive

“Toward a Minimal Cosmology of Software”

Abstract: The computer world is a tangle of traditions that are deeply entrenched: operating systems that force hierarchy on a nonhierarchical  world; tables that force regularity on an irregular world; the PARC user interface (”GUI”), designed for secretaries in order to sell printers, which substitutes fonts for connection. Meanwhile, no databases are suitable for casual users who want to manage their evolving lives. We will discuss minimalist alternatives to the prevailing paradigm – not to overthrow it, obviously, but perhaps to create an island / control center of simplicity, elegance and personal usability.

About the speaker:  Theodor (Ted) Nelson is an Internet pioneer and a controversial figure, known for coining such words as hypertext,
micropayment, etc. He was first to envision a personal computer industry and world-wide publishing between computer screens. His designs are for an entirely different computer world to keep track of our ever-changing lives and ideas.

Professor Nikolay N. Mirenkov
School of Computer Science and Engineering
University of Aizu

February 14, 2012
11:00AM
Powell-Booth Room 100

AIDA is a language of algorithmic CyberFrames and CyberFilms within the Filmification modeling (F-modeling) environment where pictures and moving pictures are used as super-characters for the representation of features of computational algorithms and data structures. AIDA stands for “animation and images to develop algorithms.”Within this approach algorithms are considered as activities in 4-D space-time where some “data spaces” are traversed by “fronts of computation” and necessary operations are performed during these traversal processes. There are compound pictures to define algorithmic steps (called Algorithmic CyberFrames) and generic pictures to define the contents of compound pictures. Compound pictures are assembled into special series to represent Algorithmic CyberScenes and Algorithmic CyberFilms. The generic and compound pictures are developed and acquired in special libraries (galleries) of an open type where supportive pictures of embedded clarity annotations are also included. In this approach, the end user usually does not create new pictures,but do get them from existing galleries. In this presentation, features of AIDAand F-modeling environmentwill be explained and examples of programs(including fluid dynamic simulation) will be demonstrated.