This proposal seeks funding for partial support of a series of three workshops designed to stimulate the use of new, emerging programming models and advanced high performance computing (HPC) architectures in a variety of computational science disciplines. These workshops are designed to explore computational methods for use in conjunction with the HPC systems acquired with funding from the National Science Foundation (Grants 0958379 and 0855217). The goal of the workshop series is to accelerate the use of computational science to solve critical problems in science, engineering, and other disciplines by promoting an exchange of information between systems developers, software developers, and domain scientists. To accomplish this goal, the workshop series will explore long-term trends in high performance computing as well as the very recent developments in processor accelerator technology, for example graphics processing units (GPUs), and in partitioned global address space (PGAS) programming models and how these recent developments are part of an evolutionary path to future exascale high performance computing systems.
at the City University of New York from 2011-2012 with funding acquired by the National Science Foundation grant 1118376 and with funding provided by the CUNY Research Foundation. The three workshops were designed to explore computational methods for use in conjunction with the HPC systems acquired with funding from the National Science Foundation Division of Computer and Network Systems, grants 0958379 and 0855217. These workshops were directed towards to faculty, researchers and students in the New York City tri-state region with a goal to stimulate research in computer engineering, compiler development, and computational science as well as the development of new applications in the research community. The workshops were multidisciplinary and provided a solid resource for the use of new, emerging programming models and advanced HPC architectures. The three workshops covered the following subjects: (1) Data, Graphs, and Combinatorics in Bio-Informatics, Finance, Linguistics and National Security held on 26-27 July 2011. (2) Advanced Computational Methods in Engineering and Environmental Science held on 26-28 September 2012. (3) Accelerators in High Performance Computing and Computational Science held on 5-6 June 2012. These workshops enabled the research community and universities (CUNY and non-CUNY) to attend lectures given by experts from academe, government funded research laboratories, and industry. This provided an opportunity for learning and networking throughout the research community. Additionally, the audience was provided opportunities to ask questions during the Question and Answer, and Discussion Panel segments. The workshops served an important role in establishing new communications and fostering collaborations between CUNY researchers and researchers at other universities as well as between CUNY researchers and the business community, on the use of computational methods and HPC. These interactions are expected to lead to new, joint research projects in the environmental sciences, ecology, computational chemistry (both in molecular dynamics and ab initio chemistry) and linguistics. A few of the research collaborations that resulted from these workshops included: Increased use of NAMD and Amber (including GPU enabled versions) be CUNY researchers at the Institute for Macromolecular Assemblies (IMA) and interaction between IMA researchers at CUNY and the developers of molecular dynamics codes at SDSC and the Beckman Institute. Increased interaction between IMA researchers and D. E. Shaw. Increased interactions by CUNY researchers in Ecology and researchers at Princeton University and also with Jason Bakos. U of South Carolina. Interactions between Columbia College-Chicago, the University of Edinburgh, and the CUNY HPC Center on multi-media. The workshops were successful with a combined attendance of 255 attendees. The workshops were held at the College of Staten Island (CSI) and the City College of New York (CCNY) campuses. Another direct result of the workshops was that CUNY senior management provided an additional investment in HPC equipment and technical staff. In fact, at the end of the third workshop that was attended by the CUNY CIO, the CIO provided the HPC Center with $500,000 in additional funding for equipment and an additional technical staff person line. Details on the workshops and access to many of the presentations and training materials available on the CUNY High Performance Computing Website at: www.csi.cuny.edu/cunyhpc
