Thank you

Thank you all for such a wonderful experience. It was something that few people get to do, and I felt truly blessed to have Mr Blair and Harrison Cook with me for the ride. I doubt I shall ever forget the adventures we had and the people we met. Who knew boot shopping could be so much fun!

Thank you everyone!

Godspeed,
Travis

We also got a mention in HPC Wire of course

Australian Teens Pick Up Supercomputing Knowledge, Souvenirs on Trip to SC15

We made Scientific Computing!

Well it seems we are kind of famous! We made Scientific Computing...

Australian Teens Pick Up Supercomputing Knowledge, Souvenirs on Trip to SC15

Day 4: SC15

Today was one of those days where the sessions on offer at the SC conference all fall into place and the experience is magic. The boys have already mentioned two of the sessions so I'll focus on the other SC parts of our day.

We started with an Invited Talk session on the Quadrennial Technology Review presented by the Under Secretary for Science and Energy, Dr. Lynn Orr. He outlined the US Energy infrastructure and how it has changed over the past decades. He focussed on the effects of renewables on the grid and how HPC has changed the ability of the utility companies to pin-point service disruptions for faster response times. He also showed that the reducing cost of renewables and technologies like LEDs will mean a shift in the complexion of where energy is sourced in the future.

We also sat in on a session on big data visualisation. Professor Daniel Keim, Head of the Information Visualisation and Data Analysis Group at the university of Constant, Germany took us through many different, creative and informative visualisations of very big data, often visualised in real time. This means as the data if moving through networks, it is sampled and visualised in some way. His group have placed a number of their tools and visualisations on their website, http://www.visual-analytics.eu.

We had to leave the talk on HPC in fluid dynamics for movie making a little early for a talk from SGI on their new supercomputer technologies. Water-cooled, short connect systems so well designed they've almost eliminated the need for external cabling. Smart design for better performance and better cost effectiveness.

After our SGI tour, we were all treated to an excellent Chinese lunch by Nick Comono, Queensland Regional Manager, SGI.

This evening was the SC15 Technical Program Conference Reception. Nine stories of food, music and fun at the Darrell K Royal-Texas Memorial Stadium. Home of the University of Texas Longhorns. Nachos, Enchilada, Tex Mex, Rice, Bar-B-Que Beef Brisket, Kransky with Slaw, Onion and Pickles - mmmmm. After dessert, I've decided to do a glucose tolerance test as soon as I arrive home!

There aren't any sessions tomorrow that suit our kids so we will be heading to Houston on a Greyhound Bus to visit the Space Centre. Watch our Travel blog - http://sc15travel.blogspot.com.au - for news on that adventure.
 
 

Lunch by SGI

Today we were treated to a lunch provided by SGI (Silcon Graphics International). SGI were the ones that gave us the money to make this trip a reality, and we are very grateful for that. We first were taken on a tour and a talk of their supercomputers that they sell on the market. They sell some really powerful computers to all over the world. They were kind enough to give us some tshirts and adapters. After that we went across the road to a Chinese place were we had a delicious lunch provided by SGI. We thanked them for everything afterwards.

Using supercomputers to simulate earthquakes

One of the talks we went to today was about how supercomputers are used to visualise maps of the effects of earthquakes. Thomas H. Jordan, University Professor and the W. M. Keck Foundation Professor of Earth Sciences at the University of Southern California was the speaker. He talked about how over the last few years they have increased the power of the programs and can now simulate on multiple levels, including sedimentary basins and all fault lines. The place they had simulated was the San Andreas fault line, they showed a really cool visualisation map with the waves and Richter scale. It was cool to see how supercomputers are being used to help in real life areas.

Special Effects

Today we listened to a talk about HPC in relation to movie special effects. It was all about how they need to use powerful supercomputers to model the physics that make particles in explosions or waves move realistically. It was very interesting, as the speaker mentioned that the effects for things such as liquids are not exactly life-like, and they are instead more gluggy than actual water. For truly realistic liquid effects, they tried modelling a real 3D plume of ink as it moved through water and then generated it in a simulation with Titan, the supercomputer. The result was almost identical, except that when it was played in an animation, the smoke cloud was separated into single pictures. The computer tried connecting the pictures, but as the smoke cloud had no easily identifiable points of reference the end result consisted of smoke that flickered and twisted, attempting to join the wrong parts of the 3D images with each other. The speaker concluded that until there is a technology similar to CGI used for actors that can be utilised to perfectly replicate water and the way it moves, finding a way to properly simulate realistic 'light' water will be very difficult, even with supercomputers.

Day 3: SC15

Another big day at SC15! We had a later start today as there was nothing for us in the morning. Always nice to have a sleep in.

Our first session was a discussion of Black Holes by Dr. Manuela Campanelli, professor of Mathematics and Astrophysics at Rochester Institute of Technology. She spoke about how two colliding black holes form a supermassive black hole. The process is one of the most energetic in the universe, producing more light than is normally produced by the rest of the universe.

Unfortunately, we had to cut our time in this talk short as we had a press conference to give to HPC-Wire, the official HPC news site (http://www.hpcwire.com). Jon Bashor, LBNL (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory) Computing Sciences Communications Manager interviewed the teams from FLCR, QASMT and JMSS as well as Professor David Abramson. The students spoke well as we outlined the work we've been doing in HPC club, the sensor project and the SC trips inspired and facilitated by Prof. Abramson. Watch the HPC-Wire site to see our article.

We then had a grilled-cheese sandwich and a walk around town in search of souvenirs.

After lunch, we attended a discussion of modelling disease outbreaks by Keith Bisset of the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute. He discussed how they use a number of mathematical models to predict the spread of disease, including the 2014-2015 Ebola outbreak in West Africa.

We then took a walk through the Student Cluster Competition where university students from around the US, and one Australian team from the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre in WA, build clusters of computers to process real-world data and impress learned judges.

We finished the day with dinner at the Iron Works Texas Bar-B-Que with the two other Australian teams. You can see more about that in our travel blog... http://sc15travel.blogspot.com

TACC

The Texas Advanced Computing Centre was filled with very nice looking supercomputers, and it was very interesting listening to how many cores they had and how powerful they really were. We were only able to listen for a short while though, as they are incredibly loud when you go into a room with them running!

Alan Alda

Today we were treated to an amazing speech by Alan Alda. It was so great to see my favourite TV actor! His speech in the morning was all about communication and 'Getting over a blind date with science'.
The main topics he talked about were: how we need to understand that the person we are talking to may not know what you know, and how when explaining things you need to put emotion in to help people remember. Also, one major thing he talked about was the curse of knowledge; you understand something so well that you forget what it is like to not understand it.

I think I speak for all of us when I say it was awesome to see Alan Alda, and hear his stories about how he became interested in science and communication.

Day 2: SC15

Harrison has shotgunned writing about Alan Alda so I won't steal his thunder. Suffice to say, I could not be more excited about seeing my favourite TV actor of all time! His message was so simple yet so challenging. 

After Alan's keynote we jumped a bus out to Texas University and TACC (the Texas Advanced Computing Centre). Travis has shotgunned writing about that so...

What's left for me is to tell you that this afternoon we sat in on a brilliant panel session about Post-Moore's Law. The expert panel from Intel, IBM and a number of universities discussed what happens when the digital computers of today can no longer continue to advance. The discussion covered a number of alternatives but focused on Quantum and Neuromorphic Computers. Everyone seemed to agree that these technologies are not poised to take over from digital computers but, the future holds a homogeneous hybrid of the available technologies. Some of the analysts were quite passionate about their views, especially the Intel candidate who doesn't believe we are coming to the end of Moore's Law. His view is that we will have, "More of Moore".

Afterwards we attended the invited talks where Rosa Badia, Team Leader of the Workflows and Distributed Computing Research Group from the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre, spoke about Superscalar Programming Models. A rather heady topic well explained. Next on the bill was David Wecker, Architect of Emerging Technologies at Microsoft who gave an in-depth overview of their Quantum Computer Simulator and compiler LIQui|> (Language Integrated Quantum Operations) and SoLi|> (Son of LIQui|>). Microsoft have released their technologies in the hope that people will begin to investigate and learn the programming paradigms and techniques even before the hardware is mature and available.

I think today captured the boys' imaginations. There was much discussion afterwards about these new and emerging technologies. It has been a big day!

Day 1, SC15

We started the day by sitting in on a panel session on research in HPC with academics from across the USA. Whilst post graduate studies and advanced degrees are a little over the horizon for our guys, the overall message of love what you do and have a passion for your work was not lost on us.

The students were also encouraged to have "blue-sky" ideas and to not be "code-slaves". Creativity and inspiration count for something even in the product-driven world of HPC. One professor made the statement that if you present your work to someone and they tell you it's stupid, pursue it. It may be the great idea for which you become known.

The concept that you should focus on one or two things early in your HPC career so that you gain great depth of knowledge then, once recognised in the field, quickly broaden your focus because someone in HPC with a broad understanding of all Science domains is invaluable.

The second session we attended explained the different aspects of the SC conferences and how they related to students. There was some information we found quite useful in fleshing out the rest of the conference sessions we shall attend.

We then broke for lunch and had a walk across the Colorado in search of cowboy boots for me. Unfortunately we were unsuccessful.

After our walk we settled in to another student session where Alan Sussman gave a quick overview of parallel programming - hardware, software, techniques and data partitioning. Although a whirlwind tour of HPC, the guys found it quite easy to understand and it engendered quite some discussion on parallel techniques, data partitioning and how we were going to apply this when we build our own parallel programming platform.

The last session was a plenary session with Intel Fellow Diane Bryant who discussed the next step in supercomputing - Exascale. This is some three orders of magnitude from where we are at the moment and is predicted to happen early in the 2020s. There are many challenges we need to face before this becomes a reality. Diane's talk was engaging and interesting and included a number of Intel Fellows who joined her on the stage. One of the highlights was a photograph montage of Gordon Moores, co-founder of Intel and the author of Moore's Law, a principle and perhaps self-fulfilling prophecy he developed in the 60s that relates to the number of transistors we can fit onto an Integrated Circuit (IC or chip) doubling every 2 years. Moore's Law is a foundational principle in computing and has held true for the past half-century.

The Trade Floor

The trade floor is absolutely amazing. After the presentation on HPC matters we made our way down to the floor. Upon first entry I was absolutely gobsmacked. There are booths stretching off as far as the eye can see, all about high performance computing. For the two hours we were there, we only covered about one fifth of it and filled out bags with loads of free stuff, ranging from pens to shirts to USBs. While wandering around, we were able to pick up lots of finger-food for dinner. We also entered in loads of completions, so fingers crossed we win something.

I personally can't wait to go back.

Crowds waiting

Students@SC Dinner and Poster Presentation

I could not be prouder of Travis and Harrison than I am right now. We attended the Students@SC dinner tonight with about 70 students, academics and the team from the Northrup Grummen Corporation. The dinner was for the student helpers at SC15. These are university students who do all the odd jobs around the SC conferences and, as a result, they get to sit in on the sessions and thereby get something back from the conference.


We set our poster up along the side of the dining room with the posters from QASMT and JMSS. We lamented the fact that, as we were a little nervous about trying to pass home-made electronic devices by the TSA here in the US, we didn't bring one of our sensors as the other two schools did. We then sat and enjoyed a fine dinner supplied by Northrup Grummen.

After dinner, the students from all three schools stood with their posters as the other guests circulated, keen to hear about our project and HPC and how all this could be possible at high-school level. I am certain we have inspired some research projects and perhaps Masters theses amongst the gathered university students.


The students from all three schools were nothing short of impressive as they engaged groups of people, answering questions and proving their knowledge of the projects and outcomes was thorough and their enthusiasm for what they were doing unquenchable. Jeanine Cook, chair of the Students@SC program was particularly impressed. Her focus has always been on undergraduate university students. To have senior high-school students learning about HPC and undertaking projects such as ours amazed her.


We have heard that Professor David Abramson from the University of Queensland's Research Computing Centre may be trying to get the students a time slot at the trade stand for Australian HPC on the trade floor later in the week. This will give our boys another chance to explain their work and impress people who work and study in this exciting field.

Well done boys!

We have checked in

We headed over to the convention centre this morning and checked in. We have our satchel bags and badges and got a quick peek into the trade floor. It looks vast!

Tonight we are meeting up with the teams from QASMT and JMSS along with academics and students from some US universities to talk about our sensor project and posters. We are looking forward to making international connections and showing them all the work we've been doing with "Adam" and his CO2 sensor.


We are really looking forward to this as we are quite proud of he results we've attained so quickly in our project.