| What's New in MCS? (archives) |
| Open Positions | MCS and the UofChicago/Argonne National Laboratory Computation Institute have a variety of positions open for predoctoral and postdoctoral researchers, scientific programmers, graduate students, and undergraduates. Students should also check our Student Opportunities Web site. |
| What's New | GADU is made the gateway to the Genomics Grid. The GADU (Genome Analysis and Database Update) system being developed at Argonne is the first genomics-based application to run on the U.S. Department of Energy's Science Grid. Outstanding mentor. Gregor von Laszewski has been named recipient of an Outstanding Mentor 2002 award, given by the Office of Science (Undergraduate Research Programs). |
| Argonne installs teraflop computer system | A teraflop Linux cluster recently installed in the MCS Division will provide high-performance computing for Argonne's entire scientific community.... More Ian Foster wins Lovelace medal. Ian Foster (with his colleague Carl Kesselman) will be presented the 2002 Lovelace Medal from the British Computer Society for work on the Globus Project and Grid computing. The Lovelace medal is presented to individuals who have made significant contributions in the advancement of information systems.
Globus Toolkit chosen best of the R&D 100 Award Winners. The toolkit was named the most promising technology development of the year at the awards presentation in October. Information about the winning nomination is available on our Web site. For the Globus Project, please see the Globus Web site. |
| Gordon Bell Prize 2001 | Argonne researchers win Gordon Bell Prize. A team of researchers from Argonne National Laboratory, Northern Illinois University, the University of Chicago, and the Max Planck Institute have won a 2001 Gordon Bell Prize in high-performance computing. |
| SC2000 Successes | Argonne made an impressive show at SC2000. In the SC2000 Network Challenge, two grand prize winners and one runner-up used Globus technologies, and the Globus Toolkit was used in more than 20 exhibits. |
| SC Global | The Access Grid will go global as part of next November's SC2001 supercomputing conference. SC Global organizers, led by Ian Foster, are encouraging organizations worldwide to take part in the event. Visit SCGlobal's Home Page. |
| Theory Institute | MCS researchers recently held a theory institute on simulation in hemodynamics. See the Web writeup. |
| LANS | We have established within MCS a Laboratory for Advanced Numerical Software. |
| Best Paper Award | Argonne researchers Robert Ross and Rajeev Thakur, in collaboration with colleagues from Clemson University, have won the Best Paper Award at the 4th annual Linux Showcase and Conference. |
| Beale-Orchard-Hays Prize | Two Argonne papers have been acknowledged for excellence in computational mathematics, receiving honorable mention in the Beale-Orchard-Hays Prize competition. |
| Globus Toolkit Widely Used | The Globus Toolkit has been used successfully for constructing the ASCI Computational Grid. |
First ab initio calculations of 10-body nuclei done on Chiba City
| On Monday, June 26, 2000, the use of Chiba City to make the first ab initio computations of 10-body nuclei was announced at the Elba International Physics Center, Elba, Italy, in the opening talk of the conference "The Nuclear Standard Model: Ieri, Oggi, Domani." The calculations were done by Steven Pieper, Kalman Varga, and Robert Wiringa of ANL's Physics Division, using the Mathematics and Computer Science Division (MCS) Chiba City, a cluster of 256 dual-processor 500 MHz Pentium III processors running Linux. So far three cases have been studied: two well-known nuclei -- 10B, which has 5 protons and 5 neutrons, and 10Be, which has 4 protons and 6 neutrons; and the nucleus 10He, which was first experimentally observed only in 1993. With 2 protons and 8 neutrons, 10He is the most neutron-rich nucleus to be experimentally measured; calculations of it are important to verify our nuclear models for the neutron-rich nuclei to be produced at the proposed Rare Isotope Accelerator. The Green's function Monte Carlo program used for the calculations has been developed on a succession of MCS massively-parallel processors, starting with the SP1. The work has been done with Vijay Pandharipande and his student Brian Pudliner, University of Illinois at Urbana, and Joe Carlson, Los Alamos; the Elba conference was celebrating the sixtieth birthday of Professor Pandharipande. During this work, the researchers have previously made the first precise calculations of all known nuclei with six to nine nucleons using realistic two- and three- nucleon interactions. Pieper and Wiringa will be receiving the University of Chicago Distinguished Performance Reward for this work in July. The new 10-body calculations required some 15,000 CPU-hours (7,500 dual processor node-hours) for each case. The agreement of the calculated and experimental values for 10B and 10Be is excellent; 10He is slightly underbound. These results will be used to further refine our model of nuclear interactions which has been developed from our calculations of lighter nuclei. |
Researchers at MCS and the U of Iowa find exact solution to QAP problem
Comment: Added 06/22 by jmb. | Jeff Linderoth and Jean-Pierre Goux (guest appointee) of the Mathematics and Computer Science Division at Argonne National Laboratory have teamed with researchers from the University of Iowa to solve the "nug30" Quadratic Assignment Problem. The research team used Condor to compute the solution, together with tools from the Globus toolkit. |
McCune receives Herbrand Award
| Dr. William McCune has been named recipient of the Herbrand Award for the year 2000. The award is given by Conference on Automated Deduction (CADE) Inc. to honor exceptional contributions to the field of automated deduction. McCune is a senior scientist in the Mathematics and Computer Science Division at Argonne National Laboratory. He was cited for his outstanding success in answering the Robbins question, which had challenged mathematicians and logicians for six decades, and for his design of the powerful program OTTER, which has become a benchmark for automated deduction programs. McCune's contributions to the field also include powerful inference rules and numerous new strategies that have dramatically increased the likelihood of finding a proof. Indeed, McCune is without peer in answering open questions in such diverse areas as combinatory logic, group theory, algebra, and logic calculi. Most recently, he has ventured into yet another area of automated deduction: program verification. The Herbrand Award will be presented at the CADE-17, which will take place in June 2000 in Pittsburgh. |
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Latest Results on Chiba
| The ANL Physics Division program for Green's function Monte Carlo calculations of light nuclei recently achieved a sustained full job speed of 38 GFLOPS using just half of the Chiba City computer (253 CPUs on 127 nodes). The speed on each CPU was 153 MFLOPS, and the speed-up efficency was 99.3%, using ethernet connections. The program will have to use Myrinet to test it on the entire 256-node machine, but the high speed-up efficency suggests that full machine speed of 76 GFLOPS (30% of peak) should be possible. The per CPU speed is about 75% of that achieved on Denali and the new NERSC IBM SP, running the same program; it is 95% of the speed on Quad processors. |
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Chiba City Cluster
| The 512-CPU Linux cluster, called Chiba City, is now opened to the U.S. research community, including universities, laboratories and industry. The Chiba City cluster provides a flexible development environment for scalable open source software in four key categories: cluster management, high-performance systems software (file systems, schedulers and libraries), scientific visualization, and distributed computing. |
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MCS Division director named to new Alliance post
| Rick Stevens, head of the Mathematics and Computer Science division at Argonne National Laboratory and co-lead of the Alliance's Enabling Technologies teams, will become the chief computational architect of the Alliance. Unofficially Stevens has been in this role for some time, and his responsibilities will increase as development of the broadband Grid and the Alliance Centers for Collaboration, Education, Science and Software (ACCESS) continues. Stevens will help create an integrated prototyping effort with the Department of Energy Office of Science and the NSF's PACI program. |
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Researchers at MCS and the U of Iowa solve QAP to provable optimality
| Jeff Linderoth (Enrico Fermi scholar) and Jean-Pierre Goux (guest appointee) of the Mathematics and Computer Science Division at Argonne National Laboratory have teamed with researchers from the University of Iowa to solve a challenging quadratic assignment problem. The research team used Condor to compute the solution. |
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Gordon Bell Prizes
| Two groups of researchers from MCS took home two of the four prizes in the 1999 Gordon Bell Prize competition at SC99. Both groups won in the "Special Category", which emphasizes high-quality algorithms and software libraries.- Paul Fischer and Henry Tufo won for their development and application of spectral element algorithms to incompressible fluid flow applications. The code developed by Fischer and Tufo achieved a performance of 380 Gflops on 4096 processors.
- Bill Gropp, Barry Smith, and Dinesh Kaushik teamed with W. Kyle Anderson (NASA Langley) and David Keyes (ODU and long-time MCS collaborator), on the application of an unstructured mesh technique to computational fluid dynamics problems. The team's code achieved a sustained performance of 227 Gflops on 6000 processors.
The Gordon Bell Prize was instituted in 1988 by Dr. Gordon H. Bell, one of the designers of the DEC VAX computer systems, and along-time patron of the field of high performance computing. Technical Paper entries to the Bell prize are judged annually by a panel of three respected figures in high performance computing. For the 1999 Gordon Bell Prize, Dr. Bell has increased the stipend to $5000. |
