ARC-TS seeks pilot users for two new research storage services

By | General Interest, Happenings, HPC, News

Advanced Research Computing – Technology Services (ARC-TS) is seeking pilot users for two new research storage services.

The first, Locker, is group project storage focused on large data sets, and is available at a cost less than half that of current primary storage services. Locker still provides encryption, replication, snapshots, and workstation access. Example use cases for Locker are research projects in climate studies, genomics, imaging, and other data-intensive sciences.

The second service, Data Den, provides archive class storage for research data that is not actively used. As our lowest cost research storage offering, Data Den provides “cold storage” for massive amounts of data with 20 petabytes of encrypted and replicated capacity. Data Den allows researchers to preserve data between rounds of funding and management plans, and to free up space in more expensive primary storage by moving valuable, but not currently used, data.

Those interested in participating in the pilots should contact ARC-TS at hpc-support@umich.edu.

[SC2 Jobs] The UCL Research Software Development Group

By | SC2 jobs

Job Description

The UCL Research Software Development Group, founded in 2012, was the first of its kind, and is one of the leading university-based research programming groups in the UK. We are currently a team of 11 RSEs and we are looking for a new person to join us!

We work across college developing high-quality software in collaboration with scientists, engineers and scholars from all research domains.

Whether this means using Python to build up a database of ancient Sumerian writings, parallelising Fortran codes for surface catalysis simulations, adding red blood cells to a supercomputing simulation of brain blood-flow, refactoring DNA forensics code in R, or designing and building a big data image processing library in C++11 and Python, we do it all (http://bit.ly/ucl-rse-projects), bringing specialist programming expertise, modern development practices (CI, TDD, Agile…), and engineering rigour to academic software. We provide expert software engineering consulting services to world-leading research teams, and collaborate with scientists and scholars to build software to meet new research challenges.

For more details check out http://bit.ly/ucl-rse-oct18. Applications must be received by 14th October 2018. This position is permanent but subject to the availability of continued funding sourced from appropriate research collaborations, and is funded for two years in the first instance, with salary negotiable up to £46,359. On this occasion, we would also welcome applications from candidates interested in a part-time position.

Requirements

If the following describes you, then you should consider working with us:

  • You have created and maintained software to address research problems in one or more fields.
  • You can rapidly assimilate understanding of new scientific questions, and quickly connect research needs to software requirements.
  • You are committed to software development best practices, and know how to adapt these to research contexts.
  • You are expert in one or more languages and platforms used for scientific computing, and are keen to expand your knowledge.

Location

London, UK

Dates

Full time or part-time, funded for two years

Application Deadline

October 14, 2018

Eric Michielssen honored for paper describing new algorithm to solve Maxwell’s equations

By | General Interest, Happenings, News

Eric Michielssen, professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and Associate Vice President for Advanced Research Computing, has won the Sergei A. Schelkunoff Transactions Prize Paper Award for research impacting the ability to rapidly analyze electromagnetic phenomena.

This award is presented to the authors of the best paper published in the IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation during the previous year.

The 2017 paper, “A Butterfly-Based Direct Integral-Equation Solver Using Hierarchical LU Factorization for Analyzing Scattering From Electrically Large Conducting Objects,“ co-authored by Han Guo (ECE doctoral student), Yang Liu (MSE PHD, EE, 2013 2015; Lawrence Berkeley National Lab), and Prof. Jun Hu (UESTC), describes a new algorithm for solving Maxwell’s equations that is orders of magnitude faster than prior algorithms, opening the door to its use for the design and optimization of electromagnetic devices.

For more, see the College of Engineering press release.

Postdoctoral Position at U-M School of Public Health

By | General Interest, SC2 jobs

Postdoctoral Position

University of Michigan School of Public Health
Departments of Epidemiology and Health Management and Policy

Applications are invited for two two-year postdoctoral research positions to join the NIH-funded Center for the Assessment of the Public Health Impact of Tobacco Regulations, with a multidisciplinary and multi-institutional team of collaborators. The project will conduct analyses of the public health impact of tobacco regulations across a range of tobacco-related conditions and policy outcomes. The interdisciplinary team includes epidemiologists, economists, tobacco scientists, applied mathematicians and statisticians (Rafael Meza, David Mendez, Ken Warner, Nancy Fleischer (University of Michigan), David Levy (Georgetown University), Ted Holford (Yale University)).

Postdoc description and desired qualifications

The postdoc will develop and examine simulation models of tobacco use that explicitly consider multiple tobacco-products and multiple disease outcomes.

Desired areas of expertise include: dynamic and complex systems, parameter estimation, computer programming (familiarity with, R, Python, C++, Matlab), statistical analysis, econometrics and epidemiology modeling.

Experience developing mathematical/simulation models to address problems in public health, epidemiology or health outcomes is a plus.

Applicants should have a doctoral degree in Epidemiology, Health Economics, Econometric, Engineering, Applied Mathematics, Mathematics, Statistics, Operations Research or related field.

Compensation

Compensation (salary and benefits) will be offered according to University of Michigan and NIH guidelines.

The position is available immediately but starting date is negotiable. To apply please submit CV, names of references, and inquiries to Dr Rafael Meza at rmeza@umich.edu

The University of Michigan offers a vibrant mathematical modeling and complex systems community. Modeling expertise expands across departments including Epidemiology, Health Management and Policy, Complex Systems, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Mathematics and Statistics. The School of Public Health is renowned for its cutting-edge research on the applications of mathematical modeling in epidemiology and public health.

John von Neumann Postdoctoral Fellowship in Computational Science at Sandia

By | Funding Opportunities

Sandia National Laboratories invites outstanding candidates to apply for the 2019 John von Neumann Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Computational Science. This prestigious fellowship is partially supported by the Applied Mathematics Research Program in the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research.

Past  John von Neumann fellows include Alex Gorodetsky (2016), assistant professor in U-M’s department of Aerospace Engineering and MICDE affiliated faculty, and Eric Parish (2018), an Aerospace Engineering alumni and past MICDE fellow.

The fellowship provides an exceptional opportunity for innovative research in computational mathematics and scientific computing on advanced computing architectures with application to a broad range of science and engineering problems of national importance. Applicants must have or soon receive a Ph.D. in applied/computational mathematics or related computational science and engineering disciplines. Applicants must have less than three years of postdoctoral experience. This appointment is for one year, with a possible renewal for a second year, and includes a highly competitive salary, moving expenses and a generous  professional travel allowance.

Applications will be reviewed upon receipt. Complete applications received by November 26, 2018 will receive full consideration.

For more information please visit https://www.sandia.gov/careers/students_postdocs/fellowships/johnvonneumann_fellowship.html/

MICDE to provide data analysis and dissemination support for $18 million tobacco research center

By | General Interest, Happenings, News, Research

The University of Michigan School of Public Health will house a new, multi-institutional center focusing on modeling and predicting the impact of tobacco regulation, funded with an $18 million federal grant from the National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration.

The Center for the Assessment of the Public Health Impact of Tobacco Regulations will be part of the NIH and FDA’s Tobacco Centers of Regulatory Science, the centerpiece of an ongoing partnership formed in 2013 to generate critical research that informs the regulation of tobacco products.

The Michigan Institute for Computational Discovery and Engineering (MICDE) will support the center’s Data Analysis and Dissemination core by collecting national and regional survey data, conducting analysis of the use of tobacco products including vaping and e-cigarettes, and disseminate the resulting tobacco modeling parameters to other research centers and the Food and Drug Administration.

The center is led by MICDE affiliated faculty member Rafael Meza, associate professor of Epidemiology, and David Levy, professor of Oncology at Georgetown University.

For more on the center, see the press release from the U-M School of Public Health: https://sph.umich.edu/news/2018posts/tcors-091718.html

U-M part of new software institute on high-energy physics

By | General Interest, Happenings, News, Research

The University of Michigan is part of an NSF-supported 17-university coalition dedicated to creating next-generation computing power to support high-energy physics research.

Led by Princeton University, the Institute for Research and Innovation in Software for High Energy Physics (IRIS-HEP) will focus on developing software and expertise to enable a new era of discovery at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland.

Shawn McKee, Research Scientist in the U-M Department of Physics, is a co-PI of the institute. His work will focus on integrating and extending the Open Storage Grid networking activities with similar efforts at the LHC.

For more information, see Princeton’s press release, and the NSF’s announcement.