Press Releases

SHARCNET is running its annual User Satisfaction Survey to seek feedback from the user community on all aspects of our organization and operations. Users will find the survey within the SHARCNET web portal and are encouraged to respond by June 15th. Everyone who completes the survey will be entered into a draw for a 32GB Pico USB flash drive.

Tell us what you think! Results from the survey help us evaluate our success in meeting users’ HPC needs and improve our services in the future. Summary results from previous surveys are also available via the web portal.

We are now accepting registrations for Canada’s premier HPC conference. Register before April 30th to benefit from the early-bird rates. Pre-conference tutorials have also been planned, as well as special workshops on government data and data journalism. Visit the HPCS website for details.

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 27th annual High Performance Computing Symposium (HPCS), Canada’s foremost supercomputing conference, will take place on June 2 – 6, 2013 in Ottawa, Ontario.

HPCS 2013 – Advanced Research Computing: Across Disciplines, Across Canada recently launched its website and information about the technical program is expected to be posted in the next few weeks. Interested delegates may also sign up for email updates here.

HPCS is a multidisciplinary conference where computational researchers from all disciplines in industry and academia, computer scientists, and vendors exchange new tools, techniques and interesting results in and for HPC computational research. More information about the conference series in general is available at hpcs.ca.

SHARCNET is issuing a call for Letters of Intent for Round IV of SHARCNET’s Research Support Programmes: Dedicated Programming Support. This programme provides support for computational projects of exceptional potential that will have lasting impact and value and that require significant support from SHARCNET to proceed. For Round IV, applications are encouraged that satisfy the programme objectives and priority will be given to proposals that:

• Propose to make novel, effective and large-scale use of non-standard architectures especially GP-GPU.
• Propose to develop innovative visualization applications and techniques that emphasize the visualization of large datasets especially using distributed/parallel visualization/rendering techniques.
• Propose a programme of work that will enable innovative projects from disciplines that are traditionally not major users of HPC.
• Are from established HPC disciplines and that propose to develop and introduce new packages, techniques or algorithms that are substantially different than those extant in the field. Applications that propose to scale to very large numbers of processors are encouraged.

The deadline for Round IV LOI’s is October 5, 2012, and selected applications will be invited to submit a full proposal by November 30, 2012.

Please refer to the application guidelines for more information about this programme.