The XSEDE15 Conference was held in St. Louis, Mo., from July 26-30. The fourth annual conference showcased the discoveries, innovations, challenges and achievements of those who use and support XSEDE resources and services, as well as other digital resources and services throughout the world, like supercomputers and help services. The host hotel, the Renaissance St. Louis Grand, saw approximately 525 attendees from over 150 organizations, 44 states, plus Washington, D.C., Canada, and Puerto Rico fill its halls.

The conference included a program specifically designed for students, a full day of tutorials, a poster session, and scientific visualization showcase, plus, numerous nationally-known sponsors, meetings for Campus Champions, a welcome networking event, judged lightning talks and an awards lunch.

The student program included many ways for high school, college and graduate students to show off their work, interact with other students and experts in the cyberinfrastructure and science communities. On Sunday night as the conference began in earnest, there was a student and mentor dinner where Ed Seidel, director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, was the keynote speaker. Students were able to pair up with a mentor at the conference in order to gain knowledge and investigate problems in a field of their choosing.

A few tutorials on Monday gave students who may be novices the ability to learn some basics about high performance computing and cyberinfrastructure, including a two-part tutorial called “Supercomputing in Plain English.” Dozens of students took part in the poster session, and the winners for best early academic poster were: Zachary Hartwick, Kasey Barrington, Derek Waterson, and Edward Ackad for “Heterogenous Layered Clusters Irradiated by an Ultra-Intense Resonant X-ray Laser”; and for best graduate student poster: Daniel Tward, Anthony Kolsany, Nicolas Charon, Michael Miller and Laurent Younes for “GatewayGPU Acceleration on the Stampede Cluster for the Computational Anatomy Gateway.”

A group of 12 won Best Student Paper for “Multidisciplinary research and education with open tools: Metagenomic analysis of 165 rRNA using Arduino, Android, Mothur and XSEDE”: Tara Urner, Kristin Muterspaw, Deeksha Srinath, Ruth Lewis, Maria Sanchez-Miranda, Mercedes Mayorga-Mendez, Ivan Babic, Ben Smith, Peter Limiszki, Olafur Petursson, David Cerda-Granados, and Charles Peck.

“We wanted to offer a robust collection of tutorials and talks for our students, but we also made a real effort to help students meet with other HPC professionals and researchers in a manner that could allow them to ask broader questions,” said Jenett Tillotson, student program chair for XSEDE15. “Participation in the conference among students is a priority, and I hope that each and every one of our students had positive interactions, both on the technical side, and in terms of meeting peers and mentors.”

Plenty of plenaries

The XSEDE15 Conference saw a strong group of plenary speakers, plus, for the first time, a plenary panel, which discussed many new compute resources available to the XSEDE users and the community at large.

Kurose

Jim Kurose, Assistant Director, National Science Foundation, Directorate of Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE), gave the keynote address at XSEDE15 in which he stressed the importance of layered cyberinfrastructure architectures and reference models for accelerating the pace of scientific discovery across all scientific disciplines. In order to support these advances, the NSF supports a dynamic cyberinfrastructure ecosystem composed of multiple resources including data, software, networks, high-end computing, and most of all, people and their expertise.

Pascucci

For a supercomputing center or cyberinfrastructure to be successful, it must effectively use data management techniques for massive data.  In his plenary talk titled “Extreme Data Management Analysis and Visualization: Exploring Large Data for Science Discovery,” Valerio Pascucci discussed that one technique he and his colleagues at the Center for Extreme Data Management Analysis and Visualization (CEDMAV) have developed involves the use of a framework for processing large-scale scientific data with high-performance selective queries on multiple terabytes of raw data. This data model is combined with progressive streaming techniques that allow processing on a variety of computing devices, from iPhone to simple workstations, to the input/output of parallel supercomputers. An overarching aspect of Pascucci’s talk was that the technology and people aspects of data management and visualization must go hand in hand. Effective collaboration in which everyone is engaged and clearly communicating is crucial so techniques can be developed that leave little room for heuristics and emphasize a formalized mathematical approach for the best outcomes. Topology, he explained, is one of those effective techniques for the analysis and visualization of massive scientific data. Also a central concept of the talk was the idea that computational infrastructure for scientific discovery is highly interdisciplinary and encompasses performance, analytics, user access, and applications.

Gates

Dr. Ann Quiroz Gates, professor and chair, computer science department, and director of the NSF-funded Cyber-ShARE Center of Excellence, established in 2007, at the University of Texas-El Paso shared the importance of teamwork.

In the past two decades, there has been a surge in investments in large scale team science projects. The term “team science” denotes a team of diverse members of conduct research in an interdisciplinary manner. The term “convergent research” is also used in this context. The success of working in large, diverse teams is influenced by a variety of environmental factors that impact efficiency, productivity, and overall effectiveness.

“To learn is to become a member of a practicing community imparting tools, language, knowledge and skills and to develop a deep commitment to the work and each other’s success,” Gates shared. “Teams break down because of miscommunication and the misalignment of goals.”

Plenary panel

A plenary panel at the XSEDE15 Conference highlighted the broad spectrum of computing resources provided by the NSF, including several new and testbed projects and an effort to help more people use cyberinfrastructure to advance their research.

“I don’t think there ahs been a time previously when NSF funded the diversity of systems that are available today,” said panelist Craig Stewart, the Associate Dean of Research Technologies at Indiana University. Stewart is also the executive director of Indiana’s Pervasive Technology Institute, which leads the national science and engineering cloud Jetstream, soon available to XSEDE users.

A group of six others led talks about their resources, as well: San Diego Supercomputer Center’s Comet (SDSC Director Mike Norman), Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center’s Bridges (PSC director of strategic applications Nick Nystrom), Texas Advanced Computing Center’s Wrangler (TACC director of data intensive computing Niall Gaffney), Chameleon (Kate Keahey), CloudLab (Robert Ricci), and ACI-REF (Jim Bottum). Read more about this plenary panel here.

Towns optimistic about continuation of XSEDE

XSEDE PI John Towns gave a short talk after the awards ceremony, noting that the XSEDE project has submitted a proposal to NSF to renew the project for another five years.

“It’s thanks to the tremendous work throughout the organization that we have been given this opportunity by the NSF,” said Towns. “We think XSEDE 2.0 can grow and offer more services to the community that will provide the backbone to a national cyberinfrastructure for researchers, scientists and engineers.

“We’re proud of the strides we’ve made as an organization in offering not just compute resources, but help services, training and education. I feel like we have staked out a claim on new territory in the greater cyberinfrastructure and high performance computing world, and our value has been seen by the NSF.”

XSEDE16: Welcome to Miami

XSEDE16 Chair Kelly Gaither, director of visualization at TACC, revealed to attendees the date and location of XSEDE16: Miami.

The fifth annual conference will take place at the Intercontinental Miami Hotel July 17-21, 2016. The themes will be the importance of diversity, big data, science at scale, and how they interconnect to deliver the next-generation of science and technology.