HPC Subcommittee on Outreach and Education:  Meeting notes, 12/3/08

Attendees: Benjamin Felzer (chair), Brian Davison, Gale Fritsche, Brandon, Leeds, Liangjie Hong, David Myers, Imre Polik

1.       HPC Day:  Format has been morning introductory and technical session (Brandon suggests using Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center to discuss parallel toolkits and Matlab as possible topic); lunch; keynote speaker; open forum and panel discussion with 3 Lehigh faculty (Ben F. would be one; bioimaging professor another).  Date to be Friday in April, dependent upon schedule of keynote speaker.  Possible keynote speakers:

a)      Imre got following suggestions from Tamas Terlaky, department chair (Industrial and Systems Engineering):

Bill Pulleyblank, Vice President, Center for Business Optimization,

IBM's Business and Consulting Service. He was directing the group that created BlueGene. He actually gave a talk at Lehigh in 2005, a Schantz lecture at ISE. (Gale likes this option)

Ulisses Mello, IBM Watson, he is the new leader of the numerical analysis group. His topic is computational geoscience.

Eva Lee, Director, Center for Operations Research in Medicine and

HealthCare at GeorgiaTech. Her topic is HPC-cancer therapy treatment.  It would be good to combine this with Lehigh's new health initiative. (Brandon likes this tie-in)

b)    Imre also suggested Reha Tutunca, a portfolio manager with Goldman Sachs

c)    David suggested someone from the BATS stock exchange

d)    Brandon suggested someone to represent CLOUDS computing

e)    George Kledaras on the Board of Trustees as source of suggestions

f)     Ben suggested someone from the NCAR Computational and Information Systems Laboratory (www.cisl.ucar.edu) – possibly Tom Bettge, the director of Operations and Services, to talk about how to establish a supercomputing environment for climate model applications

2.             HPC web pages: suggestions

a)    Specify update date (rather than simply “new”)

b)    Left menu too close to edge of screen

c)    Consider contacting Lucy Games (Art and Architecture) about a student project to design a more appealing banner

d)    Refine Condor pages to better apply to novice users (e.g. Ben will probably have comments on that in the near future).  Currently specifies how to determine which machine to submit jobs to and some rudimentary examples, but otherwise points user to U Wisconsin official Condor pages

3.             Visibility

a)    Currently Liangjie maintaining monthly statistics and keeping track of how people are entering the HPC www page

b)    Increase visibility of LTS seminars to students and faculty

c)    Open day each month in the LTS building to be staffed by Brandon or Liangjie to encourage students and faculty to discuss HPC issues (in setting where still possible for them to get work done, such as the “pit”).

d)    Brian pointed out that the new Engineering HPC committee will raise our visibility within the Engineering college

4.             Report on Teragrid (Brandon, from Supercomuting08 conference)

a)   Pathway Fellowship program: provide semester or summer support for student or faculty to move their computational problem to the Teragrid

b)   Campus champions: should we send a representative to the Teragrid conference once per year?

c)   Please correct spelling of “scientific” on Teragrid www page!