COLUMBUS, Ohio, July 23, 2018 — Several Ohio Supercomputer Center staff members will be attending the PEARC18 conference, being held this week (July 22-27) in Pittsburgh, Pa. PEARC (Practice & Experience in Advanced Research Computing) is an outgrowth of the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) initiative of the National Science Foundation.

“OSC staff are making a significant contribution to this year’s conference,” said David Hudak, Ph.D., executive director of the center. “They will be presenting technical accomplishments achieved supporting Ohio’s university community, leading a discussion on business models for sustaining university research computing and leading the student program, which engages a diverse range of undergraduates to consider advanced studies and careers in computing.”

According to the conference website, the PEARC18 conference “provides a forum for discussing challenges, opportunities and solutions among directors, managers, computational scientists, end users, students, educators, system administrators, user support staff, as well as industry and government agency representatives from around the world.” The program tracks being offered this year are: Facilitation of Advanced Infrastructure; Applications of Advanced Computing Infrastructure; Visualization and Data Analytics; Workforce Development and Diversity.

In addition to attending various programs offered at the conference, OSC staff members will be presenting several papers and posters, as well as leading tutorials, workshops and birds-of-a-feather sessions:

• A paper titled “Supporting parallel, interactive Jupyter, and RStudio in a scheduled HPC environment with Spark, and MPI frameworks using Open OnDemand” by Douglas Johnson, OSC Chief Systems Architect; Jeremy Nicklas, former OSC Web and Interface Applications Engineer; Shameema Oottikkal, OSC Data Applications Engineer; Eric Franz, OSC Web & Interface Application Lead Engineer; David Hudak, Ph.D., OSC Executive Director; and Brian McMichael, former OSC Web and Interface Applications Engineer.
• A paper titled “Teaching Data Science through Social Change” by Katharine Cahill, Ph.D., OSC Education and Training Specialist.
• A paper titled “Scaling Puppet and Foreman in HPC” by Trey Dockendorf, OSC HPC Systems Engineer; Johnson; and Troy Baer, OSC HPC Systems Senior Engineer.
• A workshop titled “Challenges to HPC Education and Training (CHET18)” led by Cahill.
• A workshop titled “Student Modeling Challenge” led by Cahill.
• A poster titled “Code Optimization and Stabilization for a High-Resolution Terrain Generation Application” by Judith Gardiner, Ph.D., OSC Scientific Applications Senior Engineer; Karen Tomko, Ph.D., Director of Research Software Applications; Myoung-Jong Noh, Ph.D., Senior Research Associate at The Ohio State University; Ian Howat, Ph.D., Professor of Geology at The Ohio State University.
• A poster titled “HPC Educational Programs for Middle School and High School Students” by Alan Chalker, Ph.D., OSC Director of Strategic Programs; Cahill; and Steven Gordon, Ph.D., OSC Senior Education Specialist.
• A poster titled “Scaling large parallel file system backups” by Johnson; Lin Li, OSC Systems Engineer; and Edward Wahl, OSC Senior Systems Specialist.
• A tutorial titled “Introduction to Python 3 and Jupyter Norebooks” by Cahill and Steven Lantz, Senior Research Associate at the Center for Advanced Computing at Cornell University.
• A birds-of-a-feather session titled “Open OnDemand – Present and Future Plans” led by Franz, Chalker and Hudak.
• A birds-of-a-feather session titled “Academic HPC center ROI calculations and cloud provider comparisons” led by Chalker and Hudak.
• A birds-of-a-feather session titled “Raising the Bar for High Quality HPC Learning Repositories” led by Cahill and Scott Lathrop, the Education, Outreach & Training Technical Program Manager at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications.
• A birds-of-a-feather session titled “Supporting Student-Driven Research: Fostering Mentorship to Promote Student Success” led by Cahill.

The Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC), a member of the Ohio Technology Consortium of the Ohio Department of Higher Education, addresses the expanding computational demands of academic and industrial research communities by providing a robust shared infrastructure and proven expertise in advanced modeling, simulation and analysis. OSC empowers researchers with the vital services essential to make extraordinary discoveries and innovations, partners with businesses and industry to leverage computational science as a competitive force in the global knowledge economy and leads efforts to equip the workforce with the key technology skills required to secure 21st century jobs. For more, visit www.osc.edu.

---

Source: Ohio Supercomputer Center