This is the February, 2001 newsletter of the ITC Research Computing Support Group. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the information presented here please contact the ITC Research Computing Support Group via e-mail to res-consult@virginia.edu, or at the Research Computing Support Center, 244 Wilson Hall, 243-8800. The Research Computing Support Center is open 9AM-5PM, Monday through Friday.
The Research Computing Task Force is launching a drive to solicit broad reaction to the issues it has identified as critical to research computing support.
The Office of Information Technologies (OIT) and the Office of the Provost for Research and Public Service are co-sponsoring a grounds-wide review of institutional support for research through computing and information technology. The Research Computing Task Force is charged with identifying the gaps and needs for additional support and formulating specific short- and long-term recommendations on enhancements and new resources.
The Task Force invites comments from faculty, researchers, and graduate students on the adequacy of research computing support. To facilitate submitting comments, the Task Force has established a "Request for Comment" Web form:
http://intercom.virginia.edu/SurveySuite/Surveys/rctf
This form includes a preliminary list of computing factors identified as important to research activity.
Comments may also be e-mailed to any member of the Task Force. Membership and other information about the Task Force can be found at:
http://www.itc.virginia.edu/rctf
The Task Force recognizes the myriad claims on researcher's time, and appreciates all comments, particularly those received before February 22.
February 21: Program Timing and Profiling
This will be a discussion on timing and profiling codes to identify performance
bottlenecks in computational intensive codes. There will also be a discussion
on TAU ( http://www.acl.lanl.gov/tau/),
a tool that can be used to profile MPI code and multi-threaded codes. Profiling Matlab
codes will also be discussed
March 21: Mathematica 4.1
This talk will provide an introduction and overview of Mathematica 4.1. Topics
discussed will include the new features of Mathematica 4.1 and application
examples. For further information about Mathematica, see the Research Computing
Support Web page
www.itc.virginia.edu/research/mathematica.html.
April 18: IDL 5.4
This talk will provide an introduction and overview of IDL 5.4. Topics discussed
will include analysis and visualization using IDL as well as using the Wavelet
Toolkit. For further information about IDL, see the Research Computing Support
Web page www.itc.virginia.edu/research/idl.html.
The Research Computing Support Center has received the latest version of Stata, version 7. as part of its participation in Stata Corporation's "GradPlan".
Under the GradPlan, faculty, staff and students can now obta in Stata software at reduced, academic pricing, and the software can be installed on home or office computers, either UVa or personally owned. To obtain software under this plan, individuals contact Stata Corp. directly to order Stata software and documentation. You can then pick up your materials the next business day (generally) from the Research Computing Support Center which holds a supply of Stata materials in inventory. See our Stata webpage for how to get your copy of Stata at:
http://www.itc.Virginia.EDU/research/stata.html#avail
If you purchased Stata6 between October and December, 2000 when Stata 7 was shipped, Stata will upgrade the software for the difference in price between Stata 6 and Stata 7. You need to contact Stata Corporation directly to find out about the pricing.
For additional information about the GradPlan and Stata Corporation contact information, visit:
http://www.stata.com/info/order/edu/price-gradplan.html
The Tenth SIAM Conference on Parallel Processing for Scientific Computing is being held in Portsmouth, Virginia, from March 12-14th. From the Conference web page:
"The Society for Applied and Industrial Mathematics is proud to present the Tenth Conference on Parallel Processing. This biannual series of conferences has played a key role in promoting parallel scientific computing and parallel numerical algorithms. The conference is distinguished by its emphasis on the mathematical and technical aspects of scientific computing on parallel machines. The conference provides a forum for communication among the applied mathematics, scientific computing, and information technology communities. For the tenth conference, we will emphasize three key technologies used today with parallel computing: cluster computing, data mining, and visualization. We will also emphasize three important current applications areas: biology, cosmology, and large-scale simulations. But we will also look to the future in a number of promising emerging technologies. Contributions exploring these, or any aspect of parallel scientific computing are welcome."
The Conference also includes a short course on Java for High Performance Computing as well as a course on Beowulf Clusters.
Conference homepage: http://www.siam.org/meetings/pp01/
A newer version of ImageMagick has recently been installed for the Silicon Graphics workstations in /uva/bin.
ImageMagick is a robust collection of tools and libraries to read, write, and manipulate an image in any of the more popular image formats including GIF, JPEG, PDF, and Photo CD. With ImageMagick you can create images dynamically, making it suitable for Web applications. You can also resize, rotate, sharpen, color reduce, or add special effects to an image and save your completed work in the same or differing image format. Image processing operations are available from the command line, as well as through C, C++, and PERL-based programming interfaces.
The ImageMagick home page is: http://www.simplesystems.org/ImageMagick/ It is hoped that the Sun and Aix versions of ImageMagick will be updated soon.
We are pleased to announce that Ms. Kathy Gerber joined the ITC Research Computing Support Group on January 22.
Ms. Gerber has a masters in Mathematics. She has done SAS programming for many years and taught mathematics at the college-level.
She will be providing support for both the statistical and the scientific software packages.
The SGI servers crick.med.virginia.edu, o200-1.sp2.virginia.edu,
o200-2.sp2.virginia.edu, and o200-3.sp2.virginia.edu will be shut down
on Wednesday, February 21, beginning at 4 p.m. with o200-1. The systems
must be moved to a different location in the ITC computer room. The
downtime for each server is likely to be no more than an hour, and we
expect to have all these systems back up and running before 8 p.m.
ITC Unix Systems Group
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