News (2007 3rd Quarter - Archive)12 September 2007WASP Seminar Wednesday 12 September 2007, 4pm What is Open Source?
Patrick Coleman
Vice-President, Perth Linux Users Group Abstract Patrick Coleman will be speaking about the Open Source Software movement - what it is and why you should be interested in it. The seminar will provide an introduction to the concept of Open Source Software, and the OSS development model. The history of OSS will be discussed, leading to the current motivations behind the OSS movement and how it is changing the way software is developed and sold throughout the industry. An overview of major OSS projects and their current deployments will also be provided.
About Patrick Coleman Patrick Coleman is the Vice-President of the Perth Linux Users Group. He runs an open-source web hosting company, and has extensive experience administering and supporting open source software deployments.
Tuesday 31 July 2007WASP Seminar Tuesday 31 July 2007, 4pm University of Texas at Austin (UT), Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), and UWA Collaborations Dr. Graham Carey, University of Texas at Austin and Dr. Bill Barth, TACC
Abstract
Dr. Carey and Dr. Barth will provide an introduction to their institutions and discuss potential collaborations and other opportunities with the University of Western Australia. The seminar will provide an introduction on the current interest in Computational Engineering Science in the US and then sketch the evolution of Computational Engineering and Sciences at the University of Texas over the past 4 decades. Dr. Carey will then describe the associated development of the Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences (ICES).?This will include discussion of the historical development from the 70's to present day, the?recent expansion in the number of research groups comprising ICES, the associated infrastructure, the establishment of an interdisciplinary doctoral degree program, the ACES Research building and facilities, the Visiting Researcher Fellowship Program, The seminar program, and Center Simulation Activities and Applications. The ICES computer facilities and link to TACC will be mentioned. The second part of the presentation deals with the Texas Advanced Computing Center( TACC).?These Overview and CES infrastructure talks will be followed by additional targeted technical talks on aspects of Computational Engineering and Science technology, Applications and Visualisation (see WASP seminar schedule). Dr. Carey and Dr. Barth will also provide an introduction to their work and discuss potential collaborations and other opportunities with the University of Western Australia.
About TACC
The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at the University of Texas at Austin is one of the leading advanced computing centers in the United States, enabling and enhancing groundbreaking research in the sciences, engineering, and beyond. TACC supports computational research in all scientific disciplines, conducts leading-edge research and development in advanced computing technologies, and educates the public and the next generation of researchers about the role of advanced computing in research and society. TACC offers a comprehensive range of advanced computing resources and services, from operating high performance computing systems to enabling scientific visualization and large-scale data analysis to developing distributed and collaborative computing environments. TACC provides these resources to UT Austin researchers, researchers at UT System institutions around the State of Texas, and, as a participant in the NSF's TeraGrid project, the US scientific community. TACC has recently been awarded the first of the US NSF's "Track 2" awards to acquire, deploy, and operate, in partnership with Sun Microsystems, a supercomputer of unprecedented scale in academic computing. The new system, dubbed Ranger, will provide more than 500 TFlop/s of peak floating-point performance, 125 TB of memory, and 1.7 PB of on-line disk storage and is likely to be the most powerful supercomputer in the world at the time of its deployment in December 2007. This talk will given an overview of TACC's rapid growth from a small university center to a leading member of the open-science supercomputing community, discuss TACC's current resources, service offerings, and technology research, and outline the deployment of Ranger and the challenges it presents. About Dr. Carey Dr. Carey specializes in computational methods in engineering and applications to computational mechanics using finite elements. He has served on the UT College of Engineering faculty since 1976 and is also Director of the Computational Fluid Dynamics Lab. He currently holds the Richard B. Curran Centennial Chair in Engineering.?He has written 150 technical articles and reports and authored eight books. Dr. Carey has four years of industrial experience.?/p>
About Dr. Barth
Dr. Barth joined TACC in 2003 as a Research Associate in the High Performance Computing Group. Before coming to TACC he was involved in many Assistantships at The University of Texas both prior to and during working towards his Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering.?His areas of research are Finite Element Methods, Fluid Mechanics, and High-Performance Parallel Computing.
1 August 20071 August 2007, 12:00pm WASP Seminar
Parallel Adaptive HPC Simulations and Uncertainty Quantification in Computational Engineering and Science Graham F. Carey
Director CFDLab, ICES, The University of Texas at Austin Abstract
The rapid evolution of computer technology and advances in methodology, algorithms, and software are transforming research, analysis and design. Here we examine the increasing impact of computer simulation on fundamental research and on engineering and scientific practice. We begin with a brief commentary on the evolution of finite element modeling and simulation on ‘advanced computers?to provide a perspective. This provides the background for a discussion of recent research we are conducting on methodology, software and applications using adaptive finite element techniques on parallel computers. The basic ideas will be described and applications using our open source software “libmesh?will be presented from engineering and science, including some recent biomedical science simulations. Some remarks on the recent interest in adaptive models, verification and validation and uncertainty quantification will be included. In particular, recent research combining Monte Carlo studies using Latin Hypercube Sampling for uncertainty quantification will be described. The seminar will conclude with some remarks on the interdisciplinary educational thrust in computational engineering science.
(CFDlab associates B. Kirk, V. Garg,?J. Peterson, R. Stogner)
Thursday 19 July 2007Drishti volume rendering course and workshop
Presented by Ajay Limaye from the VizLab, ANU 9am until 12 noon - Introduction, theory of operation, demonstration of features. 1pm onwards - Practical workshop. Sample volumetric datasets will be provided but attendees are encouraged to arrange for their own research volumetric datasets to be installed on the workstations. Registration is required and the number of attendees is limited. To ensure a place please register early by contacting Paul Bourke by phone (6488 8097) or email (paul.bourke@uwa.edu.au). Volumetric datasets are those where one or more variables are known at each point on a regular grid within some three dimensional box, familiar examples include MRI, CT, and CAT scans. Visualising volumetric data is a common requirement in many research projects and it continues to be challenging as volumetric datasets grow in resolution and complexity. Drishti is a very capable volume rendering package developed at the ANU to meet the needs of research projects there but it is increasingly being used by researchers worldwide in a diverse range of disciplines. Drishti implements a number of volume rendering innovations, in particular, higher quality visual cues by using two dimensional transfer functions (voxel value and local gradient). It leverages the processing power of the GPU to maximise interactive (realtime) exploration of the data. We are fortunate to have the original author of the software to run this course and workshop. The WASP is located in the south wing, on the Ground floor of Physics.
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