Undergraduate groups can now access Flux, U-M’s shared computing cluster, at no cost under the new Flux Academic Use program from Advanced Research Computing (ARC). Flux Academic Use aims to provide undergraduates with experience in high performance computing and access to computational resources for their projects; it is not meant for faculty-led research. Jobs submitted under Flux Academic Use will run only when unused cycles are available. To be most efficient, student groups should use short or checkpointed jobs to take advantage of these available cycles. Student groups can also purchase Flux allocations for jobs that are higher priority or time constrained; those allocations can also work in conjunction with the free Flux Academic Use jobs. Undergraduate groups must have a faculty sponsor to be eligible for Flux Academic Use. For more information, or to request time under Flux Academic Use, please email hpc-support@umich.edu.
The Midwest Big Data Hub, an NSF-funded group including U-M’s Michigan Institute for Data Science (MIDAS), is seeking proposals from early career researchers to enhance collaborations with data-producing organizations to improve access to data. Senior researchers are also welcome to apply for funding for activities that bring together data producers and researchers with significant participation from early career researchers.
The goal of the funding, provided by the Computing Community Consortium, is to improve partnerships and collaboration between data producing organizations in industry, government, and academia and researchers. Activities can include workshops, internships, hackathons at universities, data-related competitions, travel grants and lecture series. Awards will range from between $10,000 and $40,000.
Deadlines for applications are April 1 and May 1.
For more information, including how to apply, read the proposal description on the MIDAS website.
MICDE faculty members Paul Zimmerman (Chemistry) and Michael Cafarella (Computer Science), and MIDAS faculty member Honglak Lee (Computer Science) have been awarded 2016 Sloan Research Fellowships, which seeks to stimulate fundamental research by early-career scientists and scholars of outstanding promise.
Prof. Zimmerman’s research group develops and employs a broad spectrum of computational techniques to chemical problems.
Prof. Cafarella is a co-creator of Hadoop, the data processing system behind Yahoo, Twitter, and Facebook.
Prof. Lee’s research lies in machine learning and its applications to artificial intelligence.
For more information about the award see sloan.org/fellowships.
The Michigan Institute for Data Science (MIDAS) is hosting a data science summer camp for juniors and seniors in high school, from July 18 – 22, 2016.
Students in the camp, titled “From Simple Building Blocks to Complex Shapes: A Visual Tour of Fourier Series” will create art, diagnose disease, and play detective using the Fourier Series. Students will learn the basic mathematics behind Fourier series and use them to tackle data science problems by starting with simple building blocks and scaling up the complexity. Click to watch our preview video.
Any high school student can apply, with a special focus on Juniors and Seniors. Interest in mathematics and art is strongly encouraged; experience with trigonometry recommended. The camp will be full day, and attendance is expected all five days. Contact the organizers at midas-camp@umich.edu or visit the camp’s website for more information.
The Modular Data Center, which houses the Flux HPC cluster, will be without power starting from 6 a.m. to approximately 6 p.m. on Saturday, April 2, for preventative maintenance of electrical infrastructure on North Campus. Additional networking maintenance for campus storage systems is going to start at 11pm Saturday night at the Administrative Services Building machine room which will also impact the HPC clusters.
Therefore, we expect Flux, Armis, /scratch and transfer hosts to be out of service from 6 a.m. until at least midnight.
During the outage, annual preventative maintenance on the MDC will also take place. ARC-TS will also take advantage of the outage to install firmware updates to our new InfiniBand switch.
We will update the outage schedule as needed on Twitter at @ARCTS_UM.