Intel Software Network at Supercomputing 09!  Visit Intel at Booth #1935, and the Intel Academic Program in the SC Education Booth (Lobby C).

Please Join Intel and the Intel Academic Community at Supercomputing 09 in Portland Oregon.  We are sponsoring keynotes, talks, and sessions.  Many of our events will be available live and on line, see below, and of course, if you are attending,  please visit us in person.

Intel Academic Community Sponsored Talks

Teach Parallel! - Intel Academic Community & Supercomputing Education

Join us live in Person - All broadcasts will take place in Supercomputing Education Booth (Lobby C).
Teach Parallel is a cooperative production of Supercomputing Education and the Intel Academic Community
Questions and discussion from the audience will be encouraged.

It's been an exciting month for the Academic Community, with the Intel Developer Forum at the center of it.  Both Intel CEO, Paul Ottelini and VP and General Manager of the Software and Solutions Group, Renee James highlighted the importance of Academia and this community specifically in their keynote addresses. With so much positive attention there has never been a better time to get more involved.  Share your experience, participate in our forums, or join a working group to help define the future of parallelism.  Visit us online to find out more.

In this Bulletin:

•       Moodle Updates

•        SW Tools Licenses: Renew/Subscribe now

•        Academic Community Highlights from IDF

•        Academic Blogs

•        Member Contributions

•        Teach Parallel! Discussion Series

•        PhD Fellowship Awards

•        Trainings and Events

-- New Course material

The Programming Fundamentals category is now one of the most active areas on the Intel Academic Community Moodle. Take a look for course modules to use in your classes. 

 You can now upload your own materials to share with the rest of the community, download modules for your own use, AND you can review and rate both Intel and community content. Please check it out and send us feedback on the new structure.

 -- Are your Tools Licenses up to date?

Don't let your licenses expire, take two minutes to fill out the demographic survey portion of your profile. This will automatically renew or subscribe you for the Intel Software Development Tools you need to teach Parallelism in the classroom, including the new Intel Parallel Studio license.  

 Update your information now (including suggestions for the best resources to help professors teach parallelism to undergraduates) and you'll be eligible to win a copy of The Art of Concurrency and a grand prize of a MyPocket XP*.  This promotion is for a limited time only so don't delay.  Update your profile now.

 -- Intel Academic Community at IDF 09

The Academic Community was out in force during the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco. Many of the classes, talks and panels were either taped or slides made available. Find the full list of IDF activities here.

 You can also find a series of special Teach Parallel interviews on the Academic Community's IDF show page.  Topics include Justin Rattner, Intel CTO, on future technologies and academia, Anwar Ghuloum on CT, Kathe Knobe on Intel® Concurrent Collections for parallelism and more.

 The first two Intel Software Network Black Belts were awarded at IDF to Dr. Matt Wolf and Professor Tom Murphy.  See a short interview with them here.

 -- New Blogs

The acquisition of Rapid Mind brought some people and technology to Intel. Check out the new blog by Michael McCool, formerly Chief Scientist and co-founder of RapidMind.  And of course, I encourage everyone to go to the Academic Community Blogs.  Of particular interest this month are the contributions of our own Dr. Clay Breshears and Dr. Michael Wrinn.

 -- Parallelism at the University of Southern California

Academic Community Member, Professor Jose Villeta describes how he was able to use the resources available on the Academic Community website to build a course for both the Computer Science and Electrical Engineering departments of USC.  Read about it here.  Do you have an experience using the parallelism course materials or in setting up your own courses that you can share?  Let us know!

 -- Teach Parallel!

Don't miss the next Teach Parallel! Episode: Developing a Curriculum for Parallelism with Walter F. Tichy, Professor of Computer Science at the University Karlsruhe, Germany. Oct, 20, 2009 10 AM PDT. More info on all Teach parallel shows is available here.

 -- Rising Stars in Technology
Nine Fellowships in Software Technology and Design have been awarded by the Intel Ph.D. Fellowship program to some of best students from top universities around the world. Find out about their research topics.  Read more about the program and this year's winners.

 Training and Events

November 16-20, 2009, SuperComputing 2009, Portland, OR, USA.  Academic Community Members can get FREE passes.  Contact Paul Steinberg. 

All the best,

Paul Steinberg

Intel Academic Community Manager

www.intel.com/software/academic

Call for Poster Participation, IDF 2009, San Francisco, California, USA

On September 22-24^th in San Francisco over 100 senior academic technologists from Parallel Computing, Multi-core Programming, Open Innovation and Collaborative Communities will get together at the Intel Developer Forum for an Academic Summit Track. This will be hosted by Pat Gelsinger, Executive Vice President of the Digital Enterprise Group, and Andrew Chien, Vice President of Research, Intel Labs, Vice President and Director of Future Technologies Research with responsibility for academic collaborations.

The Academic Track will feature a poster session on September 23^rd in the late afternoon . You are invited to submit a proposal to present your work at this poster session. The goal of the poster session will be to paint a comprehensive picture of what tools and methods are being used, some early results, and the main technological and business challenges in delivering new advanced topics in the academic environment, especially those related to:

• Parallel Computing
• Multi-core programming
• Collaborative Communities
• Open Innovation

We encourage you to send in your poster proposal to innovation@intel.com by August 11^th with the following information:

• Names of Poster Presenters
• Topic of the Poster
• Three key messages on the poster - What will the audience learn or be interested in hearing more about?
• Research findings
• Contact information

This is an invitation-only event and poster presenters will receive a complimentary pass to IDF that is valued at up to $1,595. Participants need to cover their own transportation and lodging to the event. For more information see www.intel.com/idf

Can 15 technical high school students solve complex parallel programming challenges, typically reserved for advanced university courses? A three-day boot-camp hosted by the Intel® Academic Community and the Brooklyn Technical High School with industry experts and executives will put top programming students in New York City to the challenge through real-life experiences and interactive exercises.  32-core server technology will be provided by IBM and networking by BLADE Network Technologies.

Jeffrey M. Birnbaum, Managing Director, Global Head of Platform Solutions at Bank of America, has spent a considerable time exploring and implementing lock-free and parallel programming techniques for low latency high throughput messaging systems used in financial services applications, and knows there are not enough skilled programmers to meet industry demand. As a participant on the US Council on Competitiveness High Performance Computing Initiative, he noted the U.S. is falling behind in computer programming education, impacting U.S. competitiveness in the technology sector. Upon reading Threading Building Blocks by James Reinders, the idea of developers needing to change their mental approach to ‘think parallel’ resonated with Jeffrey. Shortly thereafter, he met with a talented high school student interested in software development who took an immediate interest to parallel programming concepts. From this, Jeffrey had the idea to introduce complex parallel programming techniques  -- typically reserved for advanced college or graduate coursework -- to high school students.

"If students start thinking parallel when they are first introduced to software development, it opens the door to new creative solutions that more experienced programmers might not attempt. In essence, the student minds have not been spoiled by old serial programming methodologies and experimentation when multi-core multi-socket systems did not exist," says Mr. Birnbaum.  “We are at the beginning of a new age in programming where the exploitation of advanced multi socket multicore systems to solve new and interesting problems requires developers who combine a "think parallel" mindset with the skill to execute."

Parallel processing is the simultaneous execution of the same task (split up and specially adapted) on multiple processors in order to obtain faster results. The parallel nature can come from a single machine with multiple processors or multiple machines connected together to form a cluster. Intel, IBM and BLADE have teamed up to demonstrate the power of parallel processing through single computers with multiple processors – or cores.  Parallel processing is used in a wide variety of applications, including space exploration, calculating business risk, molecular modeling, weather forecasting, galaxy modeling, oil and gas operations, evaluating financial derivatives, designing wireless networks, and in games.

Mr. Birnbaum asked Intel for help in implementing his vision.

Bob Chesebrough, Senior Course Architect with the Intel Academic Community built a collaborative team, with Jeffrey M. Birnbaum, and Randy Asher, Principal of the Brooklyn Technical High School and Vice President of the National Consortium for Specialized Secondary Schools of Math, Science & Technology to implement the clubhouse with top technical high school students in New York.

The 3-day boot-camp kicks off with interactive exercises using real world experiences (such as standing in lines at a store) to introduce students to parallel programming concepts including race conditions and for loops (see video guide to these challenges). Each day, students will also be given a Parallel Programming Puzzle to ponder, and discuss a real-world software developer solution the following day.

Instruction for the boot camp is being provided by Intel engineers and executives, using the latest software development tools, including Intel® Parallel Studio; and concludes with Jeffrey M. Birnbaum presenting on advanced lock-free programming techniques showcasing database applications running on a 32-core server system on loan from IBM, with high-performance Ethernet connectivity provided by BLADE Network Technologies. BLADE is hosting the servers in its world-class data center networking lab in Silicon Valley.

The curriculum is adapted from undergraduate and graduate materials created by the Intel Academic Community currently being implemented by professors at 1350 universities in 72 countries. This is the first time the curriculum has been adapted to the high school level.

“The coursework for this bootcamp is very challenging. We are giving the students exposure to real industry challenges, to plant the seed on how to approach programming in the future,” says Jeffrey M. Birnbaum.

Today’s high performance desktop computers are empowering a new generation of developers to employ parallel processing to solve complex problems without the need for multi-million dollar supercomputers or having to divide tasks across PC clusters. The confluence of lower cost, high performance computers and networks is a paradigm change in parallel processing engineering.

Fifteen students were hand selected by Randy Asher, Principal of the Brooklyn Technical High School -- the largest technical high School in the US -- based on the student's software programming focus and high achievement at the school. An additional student from Hunter Science High School will participate, as well as 6 selected teachers.

"There is a high level of enthusiasm and excitement from students who are participating in the Clubhouse. They are hungry for this type of training to give them a competitive advantage over their peers and a jump start at new programming techniques and developer tools. Our hope is these students will challenge university professors and old software development methodologies by developing scalable coding techniques and breakthrough parallel patterns," says Randy Asher.

• Intel in Education: http://intel.com/thinkparallel
• Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/intelsoftwarenetwork or http://bit.ly/ISNonFB
• Twitter:  @intelsoftware, @intelevents and @intelswblog
• YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/user/intelswnetwork
• Intel Software Network TV:  http://www.intel.com/software/tv or http://bit.ly/isntv
• Academic Videos: http://software.intel.com/en-us/videos/category/academic/1/1/
• Intel Academic Community: http://intel.com/software/academic
• Intel Parallel Programming & Multicore Community: http://intel.com/software/multicore

LINKS:

• Blade Network Technologies: http://www.bladenetwork.net
• Brooklyn Technical High School: http://www.bths.edu
• IBM: http://www.ibm.com
• Intel Academic Community: http://www.intel.com/thinkparallel
• National Consortium for Specialized Secondary Schools of Math, Science and Technology: http://www.ncsssmst.org/
• US Council on Competitiveness, High Performance Initiative: http://www.compete.org/about-us/initiatives/hpc

• Intel Smoke Demo: http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/smoke-game-technology-demo
• Intel Thread Like Wildfire Contest: http://www.intel.com/software/thread-like-wildfire
• Intel® Parallel Studio: http://software.intel.com/en-us/intel-parallel-studio-home/
• Networking for High Performance Computing (HPC): http://www.bladenetwork.net/hpc

Unlike with other industries, the most justified approach to measure a supercomputer market would be to assess the total performance of HPC installations in a region rather than the sales volumes of system providers. In supercomputing, a successful project means more computing power for less money, and it is the ability to deliver better price/performance which makes a system developer competitive. Therefore, to estimate a vendor's market share correctly one should look at the total performance of its deliveries rather than at its customers' spendings.

T-Platforms has summed up the results of the year 2008 estimating vendors share of the Russia&CIS supercomputer market. The market share volumes were assessed by the combined peak performance of HPC installations deployed by a vendor in the region during the year*. As only original system manufacturers, or vendors, were rated, the HPC projects implemented by integrators and based on a known vendor's supercomputing platform were attributed to the respective vendors.

The information for analysis was provided by the Supercomputers.ru Web project which collects data on the supercomputer market of Russia and the CIS countries. The project maintained by the Research Computing Center of the Moscow State University hosts the list of the Top 50 most powerful HPC systems in the region, and today is recognized as the most complete and reliable source of information on the local supercomputer market. It should be noted that strictly classified systems upon which no information is available to either Supercomputers.ru or anyone else could not have possibly been taken into account while performing this analysis.

Read the full articel at HPC-Wire >>