NAIS Events
("Events" include seminars, workshops, conferences, training programmes, and meetings.)
Edinburgh 2/5/2012--4/5/2012
Molecular dynamics has been described as a computational microscope, a versatile, high resolution method that can help to guide experiment or explore detailed mechanisms of molecular motion. Applications are wide ranging and include examples like the fracture or indentation of materials, structural rearrangements in crystals, and the transport of ions and small molecules through membranes. The evolution of computer hardware is rapidly changing the subject, with new algorithms needed for graphics processing units and hybrid computing architectures. The challenge is to boost the time and spatial scales accessible in simulation, while maintaining or improving accuracy in essential characteristics of the systems under study. The workshop will explore a range of new types of methods for accelerating molecular dynamics and for expanding its range of application. Go To Event Website
Edinburgh 30/04/2012--2/5/2012
The tutorial runs from 1pm Monday (April 30) to noon on Wednesday (May 2). It is organized by Berk Hess (KTH, Stockholm) and David Hardy (University of Illinois) with additional lecturers providing talks on special topics. The tutorial will address a variety of topics related to developing software for molecular dynamics in the HPC environment, including GPU computing and other current topics. The tutorial is intended for PhD students and other researchers who are either working in computational molecular science (interpreted broadly) or in high performance computing. The tutorial has strictly limited attendance due to space constraints. Go To Event Website
Edinburgh 9/1/2012--10/1/2012
This workshop, presented and led by MIke Giles (Oxford), will cover a variety of topics related to the use of GPUs for advanced scientific computing applications, including programming methods and example case studies. UK academics, including PhD students and postdoctoral researchers are encouraged to attend. Go To Event Website
London 11/10/2011--11/10/2011
The aims of the meeting are to showcase state of the art scientific computing applications, to identify some of the challenges posed by next generation high performance machines and indicate promising approaches to tackling the problem. Go To Event Website
Edinburgh, EPCC 26/09/2011--10/10/2011
General-purpose graphics-processing units (GPGPUs) have a growing presence in high-performance computing, as demonstrated by the latest Top 500 listing (November 2010) that lists three GPGPU-powered supercomputers in the top four. For computational science, GPGPUs offer the potential for a step-change in capability for a range of applications — facilitating faster, larger, and more complex simulations. However, to achieve this potential, one needs to invest effort to understand and apply GPU-specific programming models: this is both non-trivial and quite distinct from CPU-based programming.
NAIS is providing a training course, delivering overview-level training for numerical analysts and applications scientists who wish to include GPGPU support in their algorithm/application code. The course - which runs over three half-days - will consider CUDA programming (at the time of writing, the most popular model for GPGPU programming); performance and optimisation techniques; and parallel programing for multi-GPGPU computations. The course will also introduce some alternative programming models such as directives-based, OpenCL, and MATLAB for GPUs.
The course includes a mix of taught sessions and hands-on practicals. To get the most from the course, one should be familiar with Unix/Linux-based systems (e.g. use of batch systems and command-line interface), and be reasonably competent in either C or FORTRAN90. Go To Event Website
Edinburgh 1/8/2011--1/8/2011
GPU computing has made Teraflop supercomputing available to anyone with a computer. Algorithm, application and library developers need to be aware of and consider the potential in GPU computing and how it now extends into conventional multi-core x86 computing. NVIDIA introduced CUDA for GPU computing in February 2007. The rate of adoption has been remarkable as have been the improvements in application performance (10-times to 1000-times) for a variety of problem domains. NVIDA estimates that over a 1/3 billion CUDA-enabled GPUs have been sold world-wide. CUDA is now taught at 454 institutions worldwide.
This talk will discuss how simple it is to express problems in CUDA and particularly with the Thrust API. Results for a generic machine-learning data mining problem on a single GPU show an 85-times speedup over a modern quad-core Xeon processor (341-times single core performance) for a PCA/NLPCA problems using Nelder-Mead. The parallel mapping developed by Farber at Los Alamos is generally applicable to a range of optimization problems (SVM, MDS, EM, ICS, ...) and optimization methods (Powell, Levenberg-Marquardt, Conjugate Gradient, ...). Scaling results will demonstrate that this same mapping, and CUDA implementation exhibits near linear scaling to 500 GPUs. A CPU version scales to over 60,000 processing cores and delivers over 1/3 of a petaflop. Speedups using CUDA in a number of other problems domains plus links to downloadable source code will be provided. Finally, recent developments make CUDA a potential development language like Java, FORTRAN, and C++ for all application development including those applications intended for only x86 architecture deployments. Go To Event Website
Strathclyde 28/06/2011--1/7/2011
The 24th edition of the UK's Biennial Numerical Analysis conference. NAIS is providing a substantial part of the funding for this event. Go To Event Website
Glasgow 20/06/2011--22/06/2011
The focus of this 3-day meeting is on fast algorithms, numerical techniques, integral equations, iterative solvers, parallelization, optimization methods, recursive algorithms and high performance computing. Applications to be discussed include scattering and RCS, antennas and radiation, radar, metamaterials, optics, biomedical applications, wireless systems and propagation. Go To Event Website
Warwick 20/06/2011--24/06/2011
The Distributed and Unified Numerics Environment (DUNE) is a modular toolbox for solving partial differential equations using grid-based methods with special emphasise on parallel computing using distributed grids. This one week course will give an introduction to the DUNE core modules including the DUNE grid interface library, and the DUNE-FEM module. The school consists of lectures providing required background information but consists to a large part of hands on practical session. Go To Event Website
Edinburgh 13/06/2011--13/06/2011
The programme will feature talks by Gil Strang, Pavel Zhoblich, Des Higham, and Andrew Thompson Go To Event Website
Swansea 4/4/2011--8/4/2011
he meeting will consist of eight half-day sessions, each concentrating on a particular research area that is currently attracting significant interest within the community. The sessions will address the following themes: Multiscale modelling Interface modelling PDEs on surfaces and geometric evolution problems Biomedical applications, including new modelling techniques and patient-specific applications Computational rheology Atomistic-to-continuum passage, density functional theory and quasi-continuum methods Low order modelling: widening the range of high-fidelity time-dependent simulations Uncertainty modelling Go To Event Website
Edinburgh 18/01/2011--21/01/2011
This is a 4-day meeting organized by the Numerical Algorithms and Intelligent Software Centre and the Centre for Analysis and Nonlinear PDE. The goal of this meeting is is to study problems at the interface of the numerics and PDE communities, examining a variety of different problems in nonlinear partial differential equations for which numerical treatments and the use of high performance computers may lead to important new insight. Go To Event Website
St Andrews 19/11/2010
This is the third of a series of Scottish Parallel Computational Mathematics Meetings to explore and develop synergies between major Scottish research activities in parallel computational mathematics, e.g. NAIS, HPC-GAP, SCIEnce, Computational Statistics and Cognitive Neuroscience, Vector Processing Languages.
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Edinburgh 26/10/2010
General-Purpose Graphics Processing Units are changing the landscape of high performance computing, with the current number one theoretical peak performance supercomputer Nebulae based GPUs. On October 26th you will have the opportunity to hear about the abilities of GPUs for high performance computing, directly from two of the nVIDIA researchers: Chris Butler and Timothy Lanfear. This workshop will include both an introduction to the architecture and capabilities of the new Tesla series GPUs, as well as exemplar applications. Go To Event Website
Edinburgh 12/10/2010--12/10/2010
This short meeting will feature a collection of introductory talks addressing computational techniques for studying relaxation processes and molecular structure of glasses. PhD students are especially encouraged to attend. Go To Event Website
Edinburgh 20/09/2010--22/09/2010
This is a workshop on Matrix and Operator Pencils, run by the EPSRC-funded MOPNET Network. The final day of the meeting is devoted to HPC issues and funded by NAIS. Go To Event Website
Specific Themes
Note: it is anticipated that the meeting will be wider than these topics, but many of the invited presentations will be focussed on these issues.
Edinburgh 30/06/2010--3/7/2010
This meeting will address formulation issues, numerical methods, and the implementation of algorithms for probing molecular models, especially multiscale simulation methods. We will bring together mathematicians and computer scientists with physical scientists, to accelerate the transfer of theoretical methodology mathematical ideas into applications.
NAIS is providing partial support for this meeting, with cosponsorship from the EPSRC Research Network on Mathematical Challenges of Molecular Dynamics, and the E-Science Institute Go To Event Website
Edinburgh 25/06/2010
This is the annual meeting of the Numerical Algorithms and Intelligent Software Centre. The meeting will feature talks by Laxmikant Kale (Illinois) and Andreas Frommer (Wuppertal) as well as presentations by NAIS Staff. This is an open event for UK researchers funded by the NAIS Centre. Go To Event Website
Edinburgh 23/06/2010--24/06/2010
The workshop is intended to be a mix of training and project- facilitation. It will include elements of pertinent training for NAIS members, plus consider key themes that will help us to explore the vision of NAIS and plan future research areas for the consortium. The themes are:
* Extreme-scale computing.
* Novel approaches to scientific computing.
The workshop is targeted at NAIS members and NAIS-Network affiliates. Go To Event Website
Edinburgh 3/6/2010
Open research discussions on NAIS-related topics
Warwick University 20/05/2010--21/05/2010
The European Finite Element Fair (EFEF) is an annual series of completely informal small workshops throughout Europe with equal initial conditions for each speaker. EFEF provides a platform for high-level discussions on current research on finite element approximation, in the broadest sense, of partial differential equations. Authors are encouraged to present *one* new idea rather than review a full research project. In this spirit, the communication of recent and new results, even not yet published, is very welcome. A few, but strict, rules apply to EFEF in order to distinguish it from existing workshops and minisymposia in the field. Go To Event Website
Edinburgh 6/5/2010
Open research discussions on NAIS-related topics
Edinburgh 3/5/2010--5/5/2010
At the heart of the schedule there will be a poster session by researchers describing current work and presentation booths for SMEs allowing a dynamic interaction. The event includes a number of presentations by SMEs describing what they do, what they want from researchers and what they want the EU to do to help them.
The event will also include several cluster meetings discussing research directions relevant to NAIS, such as parallel programming and multi-core platforms. In addition, one of our keynote speakers is Mario Nemirovsky from the Barcelona Supercomputer Center. Finally, there will also be a presentation by the EU Project Officer Panagiotis Tsarchopoulos, outlining substantial funding opportunities in 2011.
If you are interested in interacting with the best computer systems researchers in Europe, meeting new industrial partners and getting funded by the EU, then this event will be of interest to you.
Go To Event Website
Edinburgh 6/4/2010--9/4/2010
The 2010 Joint Meeting will span 4 days and include a programme of plenary and other invited talks, focus sessions (special sessions and minisymposia), and contributed paper sessions. Each day will address a range of topics in pure and applied mathematics. Go To Event Website
Edinburgh 4/3/2010
The Intelligent Software team will lead the discussion by explaining the principles of our approach to parallel software development, and in particular the ways in which this requires algorithm designers to think about and express their problems.
Edinburgh 1/3/2010
The third session covers MPI, which is by far the most widely used library for message-passing parallelism. MPI can be called from Fortran, C and C++, and provides support for point-to-point and collective operations. The practical sessions involve writing simple parallel codes from scratch, to illustrate how to use the basic MPI operations in practice. Go To Event Website
Edinburgh 22/02/2010
The second session will cover OpenMP, the language most commonly used in computational science for shared-variables parallelism. OpenMP extends Fortran, C and C++, providing extensive support for loop-based and task-based parallelism. The practical sessions involve parallelising simple example codes to illustrate the basic OpenMP concepts and constructs.
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Edinburgh 15/02/2010
This three-day course gives an introduction to the basic concepts and programming techniques relevant to applied HPC and parallel computing. The first session will cover the fundamentals of modern HPC architectures and the two major parallel programming models: shared variables and message passing. Practical sessions will involve running existing parallel programs to investigate issues such as performance and scalability. Go To Event Website
Edinburgh 27/01/2010
The aim of this (informal) meeting is for people funded by NAIS project to get to know each other and learn about the various research activities that will progress during the first couple of years of the project. The plan is for a representative subset of the participants will have ~15 minutes to make a short presentation (slides encouraged, though not required) on their work/ likely involvement with the project. Go To Event Website
Edinburgh 11/9/2009
Edinburgh 10/9/2009
Dr Erickson is a Senior Research Staff member in the Computational Earth Sciences Group in the Computer Science and Mathematics Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. He is an expert in numerical models of global bio-geo-chemistry, and has developed simulations and models for the impacts of aerosols, biomass burning and soil moisture anomalies on climate. Recent activities have been related to extreme events. He is collaborating with NCAR and NASA on integrating numerical atmospheric/climate models, assimilation models and satellite data.
Go To Event Website
Edinburgh 9/9/2009
Dr Erickson is a Senior Research Staff member in the Computational Earth Sciences Group in the Computer Science and Mathematics Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. He is an expert in numerical models of global bio-geo-chemistry, and has developed simulations and models for the impacts of aerosols, biomass burning and soil moisture anomalies on climate. Recent activities have been related to extreme events. He is collaborating with NCAR and NASA on integrating numerical atmospheric/climate models, assimilation models and satellite data.
Go To Event Website