There will be several short courses (three two-part series) in HPC offered through the FDI. These courses will be taught by Dr. Byoung-Do Kim, Justin Krometis, and Dr. Nicholas Polys. Courses will run from 3:00PM - 4:45PM, location TBA. Offered courses are:

• Intro to HPC at Virginia Tech
  • Intro to High Performance Computing -February 7
  • HPC Resources and User Environment at VT -February 14
• Intro to Parallel Programming
  • Introduction to Parallel Programming -February 21
  • Parallel Optimization and Parallel MATLAB -February 28
• Intro to Visual Computing
  • Deep Media -March 13
  • High-performance Visualization -March 20

Update: Courses will take place in Torgerson 3080. Registration is available here .

Byoung-Do Kim, Ph.D. will join ARC as Deputy Director of High Performance Computing, leading ARC's efforts in cross-disciplinary computational science support. Dr. Kim has worked in the areas of computational science and high performance computing for over 10 years. Since receiving his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Aeronautics and Astronautics Engineering from Purdue University, Dr. Kim has led multiple research projects in HPC and has been actively involved with NSF's TeraGrid project. He has led several advanced computing projects in HPC group at Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at The University of Texas at Austin. Prior to joining TACC, he worked at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) where he was responsible for HPC performance engineering and technical user support. Dr. Kim's research experience and interests include large-scale scientific application development and multidisciplinary research collaborations in HPC.

Sixteenth in the series, the 2011 International Web3D ACM Conference will address a wide range of topics about 3D on the World Wide Web and on Multimedia Devices. Topics include: tools, object retrieval, rendering, modeling, distributed virtual environments, exposing large-scale databases, Web-wide human-computer interaction, and innovative applications. The conference will be held June 20-22 in Paris, France. Registration is now open!
Preliminary program and registration

Our membership and participation the Web3D Consortium continues to generate interesting work across domains. For example the following paper was presented at this year's Medicine Meets VR:

Ullrich S, Kuhlen T, Polys NF, Evestedt D, Aratow M & John NW: "Quantizing the Void: Extending Web3D for Space-Filling Haptic Meshes", In Studies in health technology and informatics. Newport Beach CA, USA. 2011, February. 163:670-676. IOS Press.

The FDI tracks for Spring 2010 have been posted here. The 'Research Computing' track will introduce faculty to 'Deep Media,' or 3D virtual spaces containing images, sound, video, and animation, as well as the tools and process which drives the creation of such content. For a complete description and to register,
See the FDI track page.

Just published!

Polys, Nicholas F., Bowman, D.A., and North, C., "The Role of Depth and Gestalt Cues in Information-Rich Virtual Environments" International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, Elsevier 2010.

This hands-on summer track (Torgersen Hall) introduced 48 participants to the systems and resources available for High-Performance Computing at Virginia Tech. Attendees learned skills for including computational science in their research. Topics included: shared and distributed memory systems, the VT and TeraGrid allocation process, compilers and flags for VT HPC, submitting jobs to the queuing systems, OpenMP, Parallel Matlab, and MPI programming basics, debuggers, and visualization tools. This material gives faculty the practical skills for scaling research to VT's HPC infrastructure.
See images and materials here

Scientists at the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute and the Department of Computer Science at Virginia Tech have used high-performance computing to locate small genes that have been missed by scientists in their quest to define the microbial DNA sequences of life. Using an ephemeral supercomputer made up of computers from across the world, the mpiBLAST computational tool used by the researchers took only 12 hours instead of the 90 years it would have required if the work were performed on a standard personal computer.
Full News Story here

Summer Matlab track (8 - 10 June) Track O - An Introduction to MATLAB and Statistical Methods

A new computing system named ITHACA (ithaca.arc.vt.edu) will be opening to the VT computing community (check back here). Eight ITHACA nodes support up to 64 parallel MATLAB workers running a single program. Using parallel MATLAB can seem surprisingly easy, but there are important facts to learn about, including how you may need to restructure your code, how to run jobs interactively or in batch, and what to expect if you try to benchmark your code. Users may participate using their laptops if they have Matlab's Parallel Computing Toolbox installed. Otherwise, desktop machines will be used. This course will discuss the nuts-and-bolts of setting environments on your ITHACA account and your local machine to allow for remote job/task submission. A number of examples will be discussed.

Scott D. King, professor of geophysics in the College of Science, was invited by the Alexander-von-Humboldt Foundation to collaborate as a senior research fellow with other scientists at the Bayerishes Geoinstitut. King’s international colleagues are noted among the best in the world at high-pressure deep-earth research. News Story Here

Danesh K. Tafti, professor of mechanical engineering in the College of Engineering at Virginia Tech, has been named the William S. Cross Jr. Professor of Engineering by the Virginia Tech Board of Visitors. News Story Here