News

ICIAM 2011 will feature many CSC talks

The 7th International Congress on Industrial and Applied Mathematics (ICIAM 2011) will take place July 18--22, 2011, in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. At the Congress, CSCAPES members and their colleagues are organizing several minisymposia (comprising 16 talks) covering a wide spectrum of topics in Combinatorial Scientific Computing.

SciDAC 2011 Conference to take place in Denver, Colorado in July 2011

The next annual conference around the Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing Program (SciDAC) of the US Department of Energy will take place July 10--14, 2011, in Denver, Colorado. For details see the conference website.

CSC11 scheduled to take place in Germany in May 2011

The Fifth SIAM Workshop on Combinatorial Scientific Computing (CSC11) will be held May 19--21, 2011, in Dramstadt, Germany. The Workshop is co-located with the SIAM Conference on Optimization (OP11).

The program for CSC11 is expected to feature 3 Plenary Talks, 26 Contributed Talks and 16 Posters. Several CSCAPES members are scheduled to hold oral or poster presentations at the Workshop. Uwe Naumann (RWTH Aachen University, Germany) and Ali Pinar (Sandia National Laboratories, USA) are serving as Co-Chairs of the Organizing Committee for CSC11.

Many CSC-type talks presented at SIAM CSE11

The SIAM Conference on Computational Science and Engineering (CSE11) , held February 28--March4, 2011 in Reno, Nevada, featured a fairly large number of minisymposia on topics related to Combinatorial Scientific Computing (CSC), Parallel Computing on Emerging Architectures, and Automatic Differentiation, research areas in which CSCAPES is engaged. Examples include:

  • CSC:
    • MS11, Combinatorial Methods in Applications of CSE.
    • MS13, Fast Structured Matrix Algorithms and Their Applications, Part I of III.
      See MS32 for Part II, and MS37 for Part III.
    • MS30, Spectral Theory and Graphs.
    • MS39, Model Order Reduction using Graph Theory and Numerical Linear Algebra.
    • MS43, Spectral Calculations on Complex Networks.
    • MS86, Multilevel Methods for Graphs and Hypergraphs.
    • MS135, Sparse Matrix Techniques in Large-Scale Scientific Computation.
  • Parallel Scientific Computing on Emerging Architectures:
    • MS50, Hybrid Programming Models--Development and Deployment, Part I of II.
      See MS60 for Part II.
    • MS71, Recent Advances in Scientific Computing on Multicore and Multithreaded Architectures, Part I of II.
      See MS81 for Part II.
    • MS104, Parallel Programming Models and Algorithms for Scalable Manycore Systems, Part I of III.
      See MS115 for Part II, and MS125 for Part III.
  • Automatic Differentiation:
    • MS64, Algorithmic Differentiation in CSE, Part I of II.
      See MS75 for Part II.

Zoltan tutorial at the 11th ACTS Workshop

The CSCAPES load-balancing team will give a Zoltan tutorial at the 11th ACTS Workshop at NERSC/LBL Aug. 17-20. For details, see http://acts.nersc.gov/events/Workshop2010/

Strout's Career Grant

Professor Michelle Mills Strout, a member of the CSCAPES Insitute, is one of 69 winners of DOE's Early Career Research grants in 2010. Her project is titled, Separating Algorithm and Implementation via Program Model Injection.

The Fourth SIAM Workshop on CSC was held in Oct 2009 in Monterey, CA.

The fourth SIAM Workshop on Combinatorial Scientific Computing (CSC09) was held October 29-31, 2009 in Monterey, CA. The meeting, which was co-located with the SIAM Conference on Linear Algebra, attracted more than 70 attendees. The workshop featured three invited talks (Dan Spielman, Yale University; Kevin McCurley, Google; and Andreas Griewank, Humboldt-Universitat, Berlin), more than twenty contributed talks and ten posters. CSCAPES members presented six of the contributed talks and two of the posters. The workshop was co-chaired by CSCAPES member Erik Boman and Sivan Toledo of Tel Aviv University. The entire workshop program and abstarcts of the talk is available here.

CSCAPES participation at Supercomputing 09.

Here are some of the ways in which CSCAPES members will be participating at Supercomputing 2009:

  • An electronic poster titled Combinatorial Algorithms Enabling Scientific Computing: Petascale algorithms for Graph Coloring and Matching will be presented at the conference's poster session. Read here for more info.
  • The Purdue Booth at the SC Exhibits will feature posters on CSCAPES activities. Read here for more info.

Hovland to serve as group leader for LANS at Argonne.

Paul Hovland has recently been promoted as the group leader for LANS (Laboratory for Advanced Numerical Simulations) at Argonne National Lab.

Pothen Named Distinguished Alum

Prof. Alex Pothen was given the 2009 Distinguished Alumnus of the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi (IITD) Award. IITD recognized Pothen with this distinction for his achievements which have brought acclaim to their institution. They commend his outstanding contributions as a researcher, scientist and educator. Pothen was one of four recipients of this prestigious award. He was presented with plaques and a scroll in August to commemorate this honor. Read more.

Hendrickson Recognized as Distinguished ACM Member.

Bruce Hendrickson has been recoginzed as a Distinguished Member of the ACM for the year 2009. See here for a complete list of recipients of this award.

A tutorial on OpenAD/F is planned to be offered at SciDAC 2009.

CSCAPES members are planning to offer a tutorial titled "OpenAD/F: Advanced Derivative Computation" in conjuction with the SciDAC 2009 Conference on June 19, 2009 at the San Diego Supercomputer Center. For further information and registration, visit the website https://outreach.scidac.gov/scidac09/tutorials/

Michael Wolf defended his PhD Dissertation at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Michael Wolf defended his PhD Dissertation titled "Hypergraph-based combinatorial optimization of matrix-vector multiplication" at the Department of Computer Science of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign on April 16, 2009. Wolf's thesis advisor is Michael Heath. As a PhD student, Wolf spent the summers of 2007 and 2008 at Sandia National Labs (SNL) and both visits were funded by CSCAPES. Erik Boman of SNL served on the thesis committee of Wolf. The CSCAPES team congratulates Michael on this occasion.

Minisymosia on CSC and AD to take place at SIAM CSE09.

Three minisymposia are being organized by CSCAPES members at the upcoming SIAM Conference on Computational Science and Engineering, to be held March 2--6, 2009 in Miami, Florida.

Mahantesh Halappanavar defended his PhD Dissertation at ODU.

CSCAPES member Mahantesh Halappanavar successfully defended his PhD Dissertation at the Department of Computer Science at Old Dominion University on January 23, 2009. Mahantesh's thesis work is on algorithms for vertex weighted matching, and his advisor is Alex Pothen (currently at Purdue). Bruce Hendrickson of Sandia National Labs was an external member of the thesis committee. The CSCAPES team congratulates Mahantesh on this occasion.

Doruk Bozdag defended his PhD at Ohio State.

Doruk Bozdag, a CSCAPES member, defended his PhD Dissertation titled "Graph Coloring and Clustering Algorithms for Science and Engineering Applications" at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering of The Ohio State University on December 8, 2008. Doruk's thesis advisors are Umit Catalyurek and Fusun Ozguner. The CSCAPES team congratulates Doruk on the successful completion of his PhD work.

First version of ColPack released in October 2008.

The first version of ColPack, our software package consisting of C++ implementations of serial algorithms for a variety of graph coloring and related problems in sparse derivative matrix computation, has been released in October 2008. Visit http://www.cscapes.org/coloringpage/ for more information.
Parallel implementations of some of the coloring algorithms in ColPack are made available in Zoltan 3.1.

Hendrickson promoted to a Senior Manager position at SNL.

Bruce Hendrickson was promoted to Senior Manager of the Computer Science and Mathematics Group (which consists of six research departments) at Sandia National Labs, starting September 26, 2008.

Zoltan v3.1 Released in Sept 2008.

The Zoltan Team is pleased to announce the release of Zoltan v3.1. Zoltan enables more efficient parallel computing for dynamic, unstructured applications by providing tools such as dynamic load balancing, partitioning, data migration, graph coloring, distributed data directories, and unstructured communication primitives, as well as interfaces to the popular PT-Scotch, PaToH and ParMETIS libraries.
New Features in Zoltan v3.1 include:

  • Graph/Matrix ordering interface to PT-Scotch, a high-quality graph ordering and partitioning library from LaBRI/INRIA-Bordeaux.
  • New matrix ordering interface that returns ordering information such as permutations and separators to the application.
  • New hypergraph partitioning options for inexpensively refining partitions.
  • Robustness improvements to Zoltan's parallel hypergraph partitioner and repartitioner.
  • New Autotools build environment.
  • Tight integration with the Trilinos project, including Trilinos package Isorropia, a matrix-based interface to Zoltan.
  • Serial, non-MPI builds are now available.

For more information, please see the Zoltan web page: http://www.cs.sandia.gov/Zoltan

A Dagstuhl seminar on Combinatorial Scientific Computing is being organized and will take place from Feb 1 through 6, 2009 in Germany.

Schloss Dagstuhl, where this seminar is hosted, is one of the primary international venues for informatics. The seminar is being organized by Uwe Naumann (RWTH Aachen, Germany), Olaf Schenk (Universitat Basel, Switzerland), Horst Simon (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, USA), and Sivan Toledo (Tel Aviv University, Israel). Several CSCAPES members will be speaking at the seminar. Read more at the seminar website.

The 5th International Conference on Automatic Differentiation, is being organized and will take place Aug 11--15, 2008 in Bonn, Germany.

The organizing committee for this event consists of CSCAPES members Paul Hovland and Jean Utke, and Christian Bischhof, Martin Bucker, Oliver Fortmeier, and Uwe Naumann from RWTCH Aachen University. A total of six invited or contributed talks will be delivered by CSCAPES members at this conference. The proceedings of the conference, edited by memebrs of the organizing committee, will be published in a volume of the Springer series Lecture Notes in Computational Science and Engineering. Read more at the conference website.

CSCAPES will host a SciDAC-oriented workshop on combinatorial scientific computing in Santa Fe, June 10-13 2008.

Dr. Michelle Strout Awarded NSF CAREER Grant (CS Department News, Colorado State University).

Another CSCAPES member has been awarded an NSF CAREER grant. Dr. Michelle Strout, Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department at Colorado State University, has won this prestigious award for her project "Parallelization using Inspector/Executor Strategies (PIES)."

Tutorial at HPCSW.

Erik Boman and Karen Devine of the CSCAPES institute and Mike Heroux (TOPS) are co-organizing a tutorial on "Scalable Tools for Scientific Simulation" on April 3, 2008, at the High Performance Computer Science Week in Denver, CO. http://www.hpcsw.org/symposium_agenda.shtml

Minisymposium on Combinatorial Scientific Computing, 6th International Congress on Industrial and Applied Mathematics (ICIAM 07). Jul 16th 2007.

Organized by: Alex Pothen (Old Dominion University, USA)
Part 1
Part 2

SciDAC 2007 Conference.

SciDAC (Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing) 2007 Conference , took place in Boston, MA from June 24th to June 28th, has brought together computational scientists from around the world to celebrate new advancements in different areas of computational science. In this conference, CSCAPES researchers has contributed 2 talks and a poster:

  • Alex Pothen (Old Dominion): Enabling Petascale Computational Science through Combinatorial Algorithms (Invited Talks). Slides.
  • Karen Devine (Sandia): Partitioning and Dynamic Load Balancing for Petascale Applications (Invited Talks). Slides. Abstract.
  • Paul Hovland (Argonne): Computing Jacobians and Hessians for Nonlinear PDEs (Poster).

    • Also, our paper Enabling Petascale Computational Science through Combinatorial Algorithms has just been published online as volume 78 of the Journal of Physics: Conference Series (JPCS).

    Zoltan 3.0 was released in May 2007.

    It contains several new features, including hypergraph repartitioning for dynamic load balancing.
    See www.cs.sandia.gov/Zoltan for more information.
    Click here for a tutorial (given at SciDAC 2007 conference).

    Student training.

    As part of CSCAPES's commitment to training and outreach, Duc Nguyen, a Junior in the Computer Science Department at Old Dominion University will be spending this summer at Argonne National Lab working on a research project under the supervision of Dr. Paul Hovland of the Lab's Mathematics and Computer Science Division. Duc's summer visit is made possible thanks to Argonne's Student Research Participation Program. Duc will work on parts of SparsLinC, a library for computing linear combinations of sparse vectors, in the context of the OpenAD project for the development of automatic differentiation tools.

    Researchers from Sandia National Laboratories and the Ohio State University were awarded the Best Paper award in the Algorithms track of the 2007 International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS).

    Their paper, "Hypergraph-based Dynamic Load Balancing for Adaptive Scientific Computations," presents a novel algorithm for redistributing data in adaptive parallel simulations. As an adaptive simulation's computational requirements change, the algorithm rebalances processor workloads while keeping interprocessor communication costs and data redistribution costs low. The new method exploits the robust and accurate hypergraph partitioning model to reduce average total communication costs by roughly 20% compared to traditional graph repartitioning methods. The algorithm will be released this winter in the Zoltan Parallel Data Management Toolkit, open-source software available at http://www.cs.sandia.gov/Zoltan. Authors of the paper are Umit Catalyurek and Doruk Bozdag of the Ohio State University, and Erik Boman, Karen Devine, Robert Heaphy, and Lee Ann Fisk Riesen of Sandia National Laboratories.

    IPDPS is a highly competitive international conference (sponsored by IEEE) covering all aspects of parallel computation, including algorithms, applications, architectures, and system software. Only 109 out of 419 total submissions were accepted and the award-winning paper was judged best of the submissions to the Algorithms track. The award will be presented March 28, 2007, in Long Beach, CA.

    Dr. Umit Catalyurek, a member of the CSCAPES Institute, has been awarded an NSF CAREER Grant

    Dr. Umit Catalyurek, Assistant Professor in the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Ohio State University, has won this prestigious award for his project "Scalable Combinatorial Scientific Computing". Read more in OSU Resarch News