Press Releases

Now that HPCS is over for another year, please tell us about your conference experience by completing the online survey and help shape future conferences in the HPCS series.

Our stellar array of speakers and contributors have already gone on to make more news:

• “The Making of the BigBrain – The First Ultra-High Resolution 3D Human Brain Model” – this huge neurology and computing accomplishment, announced at HPCS 2013, has gotten huge press coverage.
• One of our invited speakers, Brett Goldstein, has gone on to be named the first Fellow in Urban Science at the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago.

In addition, almost all of the very popular HPCS 2013 tutorials now have their materials posted online. Whether you attended and want a refresher, or you couldn’t attend all the sessions you wanted to, this is an excellent resource to explore.

Matthew Woolhouse, a researcher at the McMaster Institute for Music & the Mind at McMaster University seeks answers in 20 million songs.

Last October, Woolhouse started a five-year project funded by telecommunications giant Nokia. Inside McMaster’s new Digital Music Lab, Woolhouse and his team peer into the company’s closely guarded data and study the music-downloading habits of its mobile-phone users. More …

Planning for HPC Summer School 2013 is underway. This is SHARCNET’s 10th annual, intensive education event. For the third year in a row, Summer School is being jointly run by SHARCNET, SciNet and HPCVL with three offerings (west, central and east). Summer School (west) will be hosted by Western University, May 21 – 24. This four-day Summer School offers courses on a number of selected subjects including:

• Programming distributed systems using message passing
• Programming shared memory systems with threads
• Programming GPGPUs Parallel computing: theory and practice
• Debugging and profiling
• Using packages and libraries for scientific and engineering computing
• Visualization

Training will include both in-class lectures and computer labs with hands-on exercises on programming distributed and shared memory systems, cell systems and GPGPUs. Online registration will be open soon!

HPCS 2013, “Big Data + Big Compute = Big Insight”, will take place in Ottawa, 2-6 June. The first two days (Sunday and Monday) will consist of tutorial workshops covering introductory and advanced tools for high performance computing, and the technical sessions of the symposium will take place Tuesday through Thursday. Information will be posted and updated at http://2013.hpcs.ca.

Submissions are open for contributed works relating to our theme. We are particularly interested in policy-relevant work at the intersection of HPC and Big Data across all sectors: Society (including topics such as Medicine, Privacy, and the Power grid), Industry (including such topics such as Data mining, Oil and Gas, and business analytics), Government (including such Traffic modelling, data mining for internal), and Academia (from the physical sciences to digital humanities).

Submissions for contributed works will be due on 2 April. There will be two streams for submissions – full-paper works and abstracts. Submissions will be refereed and notifications of acceptance will go out by 3 May. Proceedings will be published in Journal of Physics: Conference Series, an open-access, indexed, refereed journal. Both full-paper submissions to the conference and its proceedings, and extended abstract submissions to the conference will be accepted.

HPCS 2013 will have a “best visualization” prize for accepted technical submissions. We encourage those submitting to the conference to submit along, with their paper or extended abstract, any particularly great visualizations or movies (max 3 per submission) resulting from the work, along with a caption and brief for-the-public blurb about the work, as part of their submission. These materials will not influence the peer review of the technical submission. After acceptance, a separate panel will judge the visualizations, and particularly compelling visualizations will be used in publicity material to promote the work and the conference.

Submissions are accepted here.

The Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) is pleased to launch calls for proposals for two unique funding opportunities under the Discovery Frontiers Program. The research community is encouraged to consider applying for innovative funding opportunities that will see new groups of researchers from a variety of disciplines tackle major research challenges related to mining large volumes of data.

The umbrella program for these new calls is Discovery Frontiers, a program that features a limited number of large international activities, opportunities or projects that are of high priority in the context of advanced research in Canada. They are led by world-class researchers and include teams that generate substantial impact, for the benefit of Canadians.