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Aug 16
0

New course for fall 2018: On-Ramp to Data Science for Chemical Engineers

By | Educational, General Interest, Happenings, News

Description: Engineers are encountering and generating a ever-growing body of data and recognizing the utility of applying data science (DataSci) approaches to extract knowledge from that data. A common barrier to learning DataSci is the stack of prerequisite courses that cannot fit into the typical engineering student schedule. This class will remove this barrier by, in one semester, covering essential foundational concepts that are not part of many engineering disciplines’ core curricula. These include: good programming practices, data structures, linear algebra, numerical methods, algorithms, probability, and statistics. The class’s focus will be on how these topics relate to data science and to provide context for further self-study.

Eligibility: College of Engineering students, pending instructor approval.

More information: http://myumi.ch/LzqPq

Instructor: Heather Mayes, Assistant Professor, Chemical Engineering, hbmayes@umich.edu.

Jul 25
0

University of Michigan awarded Women in High Performance Computing chapter

By | General Interest, News

The University of Michigan has been recognized as one of the first Chapters in the new Women in High Performance Computing (WHPC) Pilot Program.

“The WHPC Chapter Pilot will enable us to reach an ever-increasing community of women, provide these women with the networks that we recognize are essential for them excelling in their career, and retaining them in the workforce.” says Dr. Sharon Broude Geva, WHPC’s Director of Chapters and Director of Advanced Research Computing (ARC) at the University of Michigan (U-M). “At the same time, we envisage that the new Chapters will be able to tailor their activities to the needs of their local community, as we know that there is no ‘one size fits all’ solution to diversity.”

“At WHPC we are delighted to be accepting the University of Michigan as a Chapter under the pilot program, and working with them to build a sustainable solution to diversifying the international HPC landscape” said Dr. Toni Collis, Chair and co-founder of WHPC, and Chief Business Development Officer at Appentra Solutions.

The process of selecting organizations to participate in the program accounted for potential conflicts of interest; Geva did not vote on U-M’s application.

About Women in High Performance Computing (WHPC) and the Chapters and Affiliates Pilot Program

Women in High Performance Computing (WHPC) was created with the vision to encourage women to participate in the HPC community by providing fellowship, education, and support to women and the organizations that employ them. Through collaboration and networking, WHPC strives to bring together women in HPC and technical computing while encouraging women to engage in outreach activities and improve the visibility of inspirational role models.

WHPC has launched a pilot program for groups to become Affiliates or Chapters. The program will share the knowledge and expertise of WHPC as well as help to tailor activities and develop diversity and inclusion goals suitable to the needs of local HPC communities. During the pilot, WHPC will work with the Chapters and Affiliates to support and promote the work of women in their organizations, develop crucial role models, and assist employers in the recruitment and retention of a diverse and inclusive HPC workforce.

WHPC is stewarded by EPCC at the University of Edinburgh. For more information visit http://www.womeninhpc.org.  

For more information on the U-M chapter, contact Dr. Geva at sgeva@umich.edu.

May 07
1

MICDE awards seven Catalyst Grants

By | General Interest, Happenings, News, Research

The Michigan Institute for Computational Discovery and Engineering has awarded its second round of Catalyst Grants, providing between $80,000 and $90,000 each to seven innovative projects in computational science. The proposals were judged on novelty, likelihood of success at catalyzing larger programs and potential to leverage ARC’s computing resources.

The funded projects are:

Title: Exploring Quantum Embedding Methods for Quantum Computing
Researchers: Emanuel Gull, Physics; Dominika Zgid, Chemistry.
Description: The research team will design quantum embedding algorithms that can be early adopters of quantum computers on development of advanced materials for possible applications in modern batteries, next-generation oxide electronics, or high-temperature superconducting power cables.

Title: Teaching autonomous soft machines to swim
Researchers: Silas Alben, Mathematics; Robert Deegan, Physics; Alex Gorodetsky, Aerospace Engineering
Description: Self-oscillating gels are polymeric materials that change shape, driven by chemical reactions occurring entirely within the gel. The research team will develop a computational and machine learning program to discover how to configure self-oscillating gels so that they undergo deformations that result in swimming. The long term goal is to develop a general framework for controlling autonomous soft machines.

Title: Urban Flood Modeling at “Human Action” Scale: Harnessing the Power of Reduced-Order Approaches and Uncertainty Quantification
Researchers: Valeriy Ivanov, Civil and Environmental Engineering; Nikolaos Katopodes, Civil and Environmental Engineering; Darren McKague Climate and Space Sciences and Engineering; Khachik Sargsyan, Sandia National Labs.
Description: The research team will demonstrate urban flood monitoring and prediction capabilities using NASA Cyclone Global Navigation Satellite System (CYGNSS) data and relying on state-of-the-science uncertainty quantification tools in a proof-of-concept urban flooding problem of high complexity.

Title: Advancing the Computational Frontiers of Solution-Adaptive, Scale-Aware Climate Models
Researchers: Christiane Jablonowski, Climate and Space Sciences and Engineering; Hans Johansen, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab.
Description: Researchers will further develop a 3-D mesh adaptation model for climate modeling, allowing computational resources to be focused on phenomena of interest such as tropical cyclones or other extreme weather events. The project will also introduce data-driven machine learning paradigms into modeling of clouds and precipitation.

Title: Deciphering the meaning of human brain rhythms using novel algorithms and massive, rare datasets
Researchers: Omar Ahmed, Psychology, Neuroscience and Biomedical Engineering
Description: The team will develop a set of algorithms for use on high performance computers to analyze de-identified brain data from patients in order to better understand what electrical oscillations tell us about rapidly changing behavioral and pathological brain states.

Title: Embedded Machine Learning Systems To Sense and Understand Pollinator Behavior
Researchers: Robert Dick, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science; Fernanda Valdovinos Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Center for Complex Systems; Paul Glaum, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.
Description: To understand the mechanisms driving the population dynamics of pollinators, the research team will develop technologies for deeply embedded hardware/software learning systems capable of remote, long term, autonomous operation; and will analyze the resulting new data to better understand pollinator activity.

Title: Deep Learning for Phylogenetic Inference
Researchers: Jianzhi Zhang, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology; Yuanfang Guan, Computational Medicine and Bioinformatics.
Description: The research team will use deep neural networks to infer molecular phylogenies and extract phylogenetically useful patterns from amino acid or nucleotide sequences, which will help understand evolutionary mechanisms and build evolutionary models for a variety of analyses.

For more on the Catalyst Grants, see http://micde.umich.edu/catalyst/.

May 07
0

CASC image competition open for submissions

By | General Interest, Happenings, News

The image competition for the Coalition for Academic Scientific Computation (CASC) 2019 annual brochure is now open. Winning images will be featured in the brochure, which is distributed to industry, government and academia. An image from U-M Aerospace Engineering Professor Joaquim Martins was on the cover of the 2016 edition, and several U-M investigators have had their work featured in the brochure in other years.

Images will be judged on the following criteria:

  • Illustrative of research underway at the center submitting the proposed images
  • Focus on research that offers a broad representation of what CASC members have undertaken
  • Timeliness of visualization relative to events currently in the news
  • Exhibits intellectual merit
  • Provides scientific, cultural, economic impact
  • Compelling, visually interesting, lively, colorful images in a  high-resolution format

Please send potential submissions to Dan Meisler, ARC Communications Manager, at dmeisler@umich.edu. The deadline is June 11, 2018.

Mar 26
0

Winning posters announced for MICDE 2018 Symposium

By | Events, General Interest, Happenings, News

Approximately 50 posters from post-docs and graduate students across campus entered the Poster Competition at the 2018 MICDE Symposium on March 22, 2018. We’re proud to announce the winners:

  • First Place ($500): “Modeling and Enhanced Sampling of Protein-Protein Recognition,” Yanmin Wang, Chemistry
  • Second Place ($300): “Non-Newtonian Computational Model of Thrombosis Initiation,” Sabrina Lynch, Biomedical Engineering
  • Third Place ($200): “Computational Modeling of Particle-Laden Flows,” Gregory Shallcross, Sarah Beetham, and Yuan Yao, Mechanical Engineering
  • Honorable Mention: “UM/LISA: Efficient Linear and Nonlinear Guided Wave Simulation,” Hui Zhang, Aerospace Engineering
  • Honorable Mention: “Temperature-Dependent Green’s Function Methods for Electronic Structure Calculations,” Alicia Welden, Chemistry
  • Honorable Mention: “Non-invasive Diagnostics of Coronary Artery Disease using Machine Learning and Computational Fluid Dynamics,” Kritika Iyer, Biomedical Engineering
  • Honorable Mention: “Automated Diagnosis and Prognosis System for Traumatic Brain Injury Patients with Subdural Hematoma,” Negar Farzaneh
Mar 06
0

ConFlux cluster expands

By | General Interest, Happenings, HPC, News

ARC-TS has installed 15 new compute nodes into the ConFlux cluster. These nodes have the same 20 cores CPU as the original set, but with 256 GB of RAM instead of 128 GB. Neither the original nodes nor the newly added ones contain any GPUs

As a result, jobs should spend less time in queue, and users can be more liberal in their memory requirements.

Feb 05
0

HPC training workshops begin Tuesday, Feb. 13

By | Educational, Events, General Interest, Happenings, HPC, News

A series of training workshops in high performance computing will be held Feb. 12 through March 6, 2018, presented by CSCAR in conjunction with Advanced Research Computing – Technology Services (ARC-TS).

Introduction to the Linux command Line
This course will familiarize the student with the basics of accessing and interacting with Linux computers using the GNU/Linux operating system’s Bash shell, also known as the “command line.”
Location: East Hall, Room B254, 530 Church St.
Dates: (Please sign up for only one)
• Tuesday, Feb. 13, 1 – 4 p.m. (full description | registration)
• Friday, Feb. 16, 9 a.m. – noon (full description | registration)

Introduction to the Flux cluster and batch computing
This workshop will provide a brief overview of the components of the Flux cluster, including the resource manager and scheduler, and will offer students hands-on experience.
Location: East Hall, Room B254, 530 Church St.
Dates: (Please sign up for only one)
• Monday, Feb. 19, 1 – 4 p.m. (full description | registration)
• Tuesday, March 6, 1 – 4 p.m. (full description | registration)

Advanced batch computing on the Flux cluster
This course will cover advanced areas of cluster computing on the Flux cluster, including common parallel programming models, dependent and array scheduling, and a brief introduction to scientific computing with Python, among other topics.
Location: East Hall, Room B250, 530 Church St.
Dates: (Please sign up for only one)
• Wednesday, Feb. 21, 1 – 5 p.m. (full description | registration)
• Friday, Feb. 23, 1 – 5 p.m. (full description | registration)

Hadoop and Spark workshop
Learn how to process large amounts (up to terabytes) of data using SQL and/or simple programming models available in Python, R, Scala, and Java.
Location: East Hall, Room B250, 530 Church St.
Dates: (Please sign up for only one)
• Thursday, Feb. 22, 1 – 5 p.m. (full description | registration)

Jan 11
0

2016-2017 Education Snapshot

By | Educational, General Interest, News

Over the past year, MICDE’s educational programs and activities have experienced tremendous growth. The Graduate Certificate in Computational Discovery and Engineering currently has 50 students enrolled, spanning 19 departments from 5 different schools and colleges. Sixteen students graduated within the last academic year, and 44 have graduated since the Graduate Certificate was established in 2013. Even further, the number of women in the program went from zero in 2014 to 15 currently enrolled.

The Ph.D. in Scientific Computing has experienced extraordinary growth, with 74 students enrolled from 20 departments, and four schools or colleges. We added a section to our web site with both programs’ alumni information.

We are working to broaden as well as to deepen the activities and resources available to students in both programs. Twenty MICDE fellowships were awarded this academic year to students in our programs. We continued to sponsor student software teams at competitions, as well as individual students presenting their work at leading conferences. On-campus, MICDE student activities include networking lunches, and the Scientific Computing Student Club (SC2). On the programmatic front, our non-engineering students now have access to a CAEN account that gives them more options to connect and use U-M High Performance Computing resources. Relevant grant opportunities for students are tracked and updated in MICDE’s grant webpage. 

2016-2017 MICDE Fellow Yuxi Chen (ClaSp) presenting his work at the MICDE Annual Symposium

Several educational projects and initiatives are afoot at MICDE, including a Massively Open Online Class (MOOC) in Computational Thinking targeting both high school students and their teachers. This MOOC aims to introduce learners to algorithmic approaches to problems. This initiative is being developed in collaboration with the School of Education, the office of Academic Innovation, and with input from a number of high schools in the Detroit Metropolitan Area.The two new courses launched by MICDE faculty last year, Methods and Practices of Scientific Computing, and Data-Driven Analysis and Modeling of Complex Systems, were successful in their first offerings during the 2016-2017 academic year, and are being offered again in 2017-2018. Other teams of MICDE faculty are at work across campus to develop new courses in computational science.

Jan 11
0

2016-2017 Outreach and Industrial Engagement Snapshot

By | General Interest

2017 miRcore’s GIDAS Biotechnology Summer Camp participants

Community Outreach

MICDE remains committed to advancing the understanding of science in general, and computational science in particular, in the community. To this end we have continued our support of internal and external organizations. Externally, our ongoing support of the non profit science outreach group, miRcore, included running MICDE sponsored compute cycles on Flux for high school students participating in miRcore’s computational biology summer camps through their student network called GIDAS. We also continued to support the undergraduate Biosoftware Team that has competed in the International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) year competition for the past five years. The team participates in the software track aimed for computer scientists and developers to nurture their knowledge of biology, and for computational biologists, bioinformaticians and biologists to enhance their aptitude for building software. Over the past couple of years, the team has been developing ProtoCat, a software developed to address the issue of reproducibility in synthetic biology. It is a collaborative platform on which researchers share their experiment protocols and users can customize them to meet their own needs. For the third year in a row, the team returned with a gold medal.

2017 BioSoftware Team

Internally, less than two years since its inception, the Scientific Computing Student Club (SC2) has established several activities that complement the formal training in computational science available at U-M, including through MICDE’s PhD in Scientific Computing, and Graduate Certificate in Computational Discovery and Engineering. Over the past year, the SC2 had his own invited speakers, organized tours to the Flux facility and the U-M 3D Lab, organized the first Visualization Challenge, co-sponsored by NVIDIA, and just recently added a section on its web page for academic and non-academic job opportunities. During the 2017 Fall Term, SC2 students ran a weekly Machine Learning Collaborative Workshop, and the group is planning a hands-on series on code parallelization.

Industrial Engagement

We continue working towards increasing our engagement with industry. Over the last two years, in addition to NVIDIA, MICDE has established partnerships with IBM, through the joint design and development of our computer cluster, ConFlux, and with Toyota Research Institute, through a funded project on scientific software for materials research. We are now working in partnership with the U-M Business Engagement Center to create an MICDE industrial affiliates program, which will provide many additional avenues for interaction between our students or faculty and industry.