TeraGrid ’08

CALL FOR PARTICIPATION

When: June 9-13, 2008
Where: Las Vegas, NV, USA
Website: http://www.tacc.utexas.edu/tg08

The TeraGrid has emerged as a leading comprehensive cyberinfrastructure enabling world-class open computational research. The 3rd annual TeraGrid Conference, TeraGrid ’08, will showcase the capabilities, achievements, and impact of TeraGrid in research and education through presented papers, demonstrations, posters, and visualizations. TG08 will foster collaborations among leading researchers, developers, and educators that build on the growing TeraGrid infrastructure. TG08 will also provide information and training to enable both current and future users to achieve maximum impact in using TeraGrid resources and services.

All interested individuals and organizations are invited to participate. Attendees will include: researchers, developers, faculty, and postdocs; graduate students, undergraduate students, and high school teachers; program managers, directors, and liaisons from federal agencies; representatives of companies who use or develop advanced computing technologies; and staff from the TeraGrid partner institutions.

PAPERS

Proposals for papers on original, innovative work will be received and reviewed in three tracks: Science, Technology, and Education.

Science track papers should demonstrate the impact of the TeraGrid in scientific research, through specific results attained or through emergence of new communities in cyberinfrastructure. The TeraGrid scientific user community includes leading researchers spanning essentially all disciplines of science and engineering. Therefore, papers should: articulate the scientific problem; describe the scientific and computational methods (algorithms, techniques, software, resources, support) and TeraGrid resources used; and present the results achieved, TeraGrid impact, and future plans.

Technology track papers should present technology developments and capabilities that can enable increased performance, capability, productivity, and/or reliability of TeraGrid users, applications, and resources. Papers may describe new developments, new levels of performance attained in existing technologies, or the delivery of release-quality software. Papers should describe the technology and the achieved or potential impact, and future plans.

Education track papers should show new educational content and technologies that stimulate interest and prepare students for further studies in academic programs leading to careers in computational science. Papers may discuss education techniques, projects, and programs that promote participation and enhance skills, but must provide a clear case for the activity and must describe the achieved, or projected, results.

TeraGrid ’08 will recognize outstanding achievements through four computational challenges in these tracks:

  1. Capability Computing Challenge: Science Track papers may request to be considered for the TeraGrid Capability Award, which will recognize the scientific application making efficient and justifiable use of the greatest computational power. All scientific applications that utilize at least 5000 processing cores concurrently will be recognized with a TeraGrid 5K Club certificate.
  2. Transformational Science Challenge: Science Track papers that utilize the distributed TeraGrid infrastructure, and possibly additional software technologies, in modalities beyond the submission of jobs to single HPC systems may request to be considered for the TeraGrid Transformational Science Award.
  3. Performance Challenge: Technology Track papers that achieve new levels of performance in any dimension of value to TeraGrid users (WAN bandwidth, file transfer performance, visualization display size, etc.) may request to be considered for the TeraGrid Performance Award.
  4. Student Computing Competition: The Education track will also sponsor a Student Computing Competition. More information about this will be available on the TG08 web site in February 2008.

Papers should be 7-10 pages in length. All papers will be peer-reviewed, and accepted papers will be expected to address reviewer comments for final publication. Full paper submissions are due February 29, 2008. Authors will be notified of papers acceptance by March 17, 2008. Final papers for publication will be due April 11, 2008, for the conference proceedings. Submissions competing in the TG08 Challenges will be allowed to submit final data and arguments just before the conference. For further information on submitting papers, see the conference website.

DEMONSTRATIONS

TeraGrid includes a tremendous number of technologies for integrating and supporting diverse, distributed resources, and for enabling users to use them effectively. Proposals for demonstrations will be accepted in all areas of current or potential relevance to the TeraGrid user community. Demonstrations are intended to be live, interactive presentations of software that has reached the status of public release, and can be submitted alone or in addition to corresponding technology track paper submissions. We encourage all areas of interest to the TeraGrid community to submit innovative proposals for live demonstrations. For more information about demonstrations, see the conference website.

POSTERS

A poster session for science and technology posters will be held during the evening of the first day of the conference. Posters should present very recent results in using TeraGrid for scientific research and/or developing new technologies. Proposals for posters are being solicited in all areas of relevance to the TeraGrid. For more information about posters, see the conference website.

VISUALIZATION GALLERY

Scientific visualization is an important data analysis technique in computational science. TeraGrid HPC resources enable simulations to generate terascale, and soon petascale, data sets, and data of similar scales is brought to TeraGrid from scientific instruments and sensors. TeraGrid provides high-end remote visualization resources as well as expert visualization consulting to enable users to develop insight from these massive data. A Visualization Gallery showcasing effective, compelling visualizations prepared by TeraGrid users and/or staff will be held during the second evening of the conference. For more information about demonstration proposals and for deadlines, see the conference website.

IMPORTANT DATES

  • Submissions Accepted: February 8, 2008
  • Full Paper Submissions, Demonstration Abstracts Due: February 29, 2008
  • Registration Open: Early March 2008
  • Notice of Papers, Demonstrations Acceptance: March 17, 2008
  • Final Accepted Papers for Publication Due: April 11, 2008
  • Poster and Visualization Abstracts Due: April 19, 2008
  • Notifications of Posters and Visualizations: May 3, 2008
  • Challenge Competition Updates Due: May 30, 2008

ABOUT THE TERAGRID

TeraGrid is an open scientific discovery infrastructure funded by the National Science Foundation. TeraGrid provides high-end computing, visualization, and storage resources at eleven partner sites as an integrated, persistent computational resource. TeraGrid provides a petaflop of computing power, tens of petabytes of disk and tape storage, remote visualization services, over a hundred scientific data collections, specialized data analysis tools, more than 20 science gateways, and a portal to simplify access to these valuable resources, all interconnected via a high-speed dedicated national network.

The TeraGrid is comprised of the following partner sites:

  • Indiana University (IU)
  • Louisiana Optical Network Initiative (LONI)
  • National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR)
  • National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at UIUC
  • National Institute for Computational Science (NICS) at UT Knoxville
  • Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL)
  • Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) at CMU
  • Purdue University (PU)
  • San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at UCSD
  • Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at UT Austin
  • University of Chicago, Argonne National Laboratory (UC/ANL)

For more information about the TeraGrid, see http://www.teragrid.org.