CERN openlab - Intel

Board of Sponsors meeting launches CERN openlab's next phase

Morag Hickman — Tue, 08 May 2012 08:08:31 +0000

Wednesday, 9 May, 2012

On the 8^th and 9^th of May, the CERN openlab Board of Sponsors gathered at CERN to officially close phase III of the collaboration, and to launch its fourth phase, which will run through 2012 to the end of 2014.

Welcomed by the Head of CERN openlab, Bob Jones, delegates from industry member companies and CERN management joined CERN openlab staff to review the third phase. Various talks highlighted key achievements, and celebrated the positive impact on the development of Grid and computing services which underpin the LHC. They also looked forward to future plans for development.

The fourth phase of CERN openlab will address topics critical to the continued growth of the CERN scientific programme, such as cloud computing, business analytics, the next generation of hardware, and security for myriads of network devices. The industry investment over the three years of the fourth phase represents more than eight million Swiss Francs.

Rolf Heuer, CERN Director General chaired a Round-Table discussion at the end of the day with the heads of delegations from the openlab partner companies, HP, Intel, Oracle, Intel, and Huawei as a contributor for a year, and thanked all CERN openlab partners and contributors for their continued support. He emphasized that the fourth phase of CERN openlab will be instrumental in addressing the growing computing challenges posed by increases in LHC luminosity and energy in future.

The second day brought an opportunity to widen the scope of the meeting, showcasing the scientific diversity of CERN, future needs of the experiments, and exploring how CERN openlab fits into the broader picture.

CERN Research Director Sergio Bertolluci spoke on the scientific programme of CERN, Pierre Vande Vyvre, Project Leader of the ALICE Data Acquisition Project, gave an experiment’s-eye-view of CERN’s computing needs and how they will change as the LHC’s energy and luminosity increase. A key development in processing data from the LHC and its experiments will be the creation of the CERN' s remote data centre, plans for which were outlined in a talk by Wayne Salter, Computing Facilities Group Leader in the CERN IT Department.

Bernd Panzer-Steindel, CTO and resource manager in the CERN computer centre, turned the focus towards strategic direction outilining how CERN is moving towards an agile infrastructure making sure of reasoned virtualisation. This presentation was followed-up by a discussion and wrap-up session. Bob Jones concluded: “CERN openlab has established itself as a reference thanks to the excellent relationship and on-going commitment of all partners and contributors during the past 11 years. The combined knowledge and dedication of the engineers from CERN and the companies have produced remarkable results. The launch of this fourth phase is an exciting time for CERN openlab and I am confident that we will be equally successful in the future.”

The press release is available to you, as well as a video presenting the CERN openlab activities and the group picture taken at the occasion of this first CERN openlab IV annual Board of Sponsors meeting, in the presence of the CERN Director-General, the partners, and the openlab team members.

Details of the event are available to delegates on Indico.

Earth Observation Open Science and Innovation

Orestis Galanis — Tue, 30 Jan 2018 08:28:47 +0000

Date published:

30 Jan 2018

Outlet:

link.springer.com

Over the past decades, rapid developments in digital and sensing technologies, such as the Cloud, Web and Internet of Things, have dramatically changed the way we live and work. The digital transformation is revolutionizing our ability to monitor our planet and transforming the way we access, process and exploit Earth Observation data from satellites. This book reviews these megatrends and their implications for the Earth Observation community as well as the wider data economy. It provides insight into new paradigms of Open Science and Innovation applied to space data, which are characterized by openness, access to large volume of complex data, wide availability of new community tools, new techniques for big data analytics such as Artificial Intelligence, unprecedented level of computing power, and new types of collaboration among researchers, innovators, entrepreneurs and citizen scientists. In addition, this book aims to provide readers with some reflections on the future of Earth Observation, highlighting through a series of use cases not just the new opportunities created by the New Space revolution, but also the new challenges that must be addressed in order to make the most of the large volume of complex and diverse data delivered by the new generation of satellites.

Link:

link.springer.com

Winners Announced! Highly Talented CERN Student Researchers Innovate on HPC, AI & IOT in the Modern Code Developer Challenge

Orestis Galanis — Fri, 17 Nov 2017 12:43:21 +0000

Intel

Link:

Winners Announced! Highly Talented CERN Student Researchers Innovate on HPC, AI & IOT in the Modern Code Developer Challenge

Wednesday, 15 November, 2017

CERN openlab and Intel are pleased to announce the winners of the Intel® Modern Code Developer Challenge! The announcement was made today at ‘SC17’, the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis, in Denver, Colorado, USA. Two winners were selected: Elena Orlova, for her work on improving particle collision simulation algorithms, and Konstantinos Kanellis, for his work on cloud-based biological simulations.

Winners Announced! Highly Talented CERN Student Researchers Innovate on HPC, AI & IOT in the Modern Code Developer Challenge _ Intel® Software.pdf

Phase:

openlab phase V

Technical area:

Data Acquisition (online)

Computing Platforms (offline)

Students at the Intel HPC Developer Conference

Orestis Galanis — Thu, 09 Nov 2017 14:19:06 +0000

Date published:

24 Oct 2017

Outlet:

digit.in

We are making an investment in the next generation of developers. Amazing individuals with diverse interests are our future. From SnapChat* to CERN,* to SONAR,* young developers are already changing the world.

Link:

Article on digit.in

Copy of the coverage:

Students at the Intel HPC Developer Conference _ Digit.pdf

Openlab summer students 2017

Orestis Galanis — Wed, 08 Nov 2017 15:49:05 +0000

Date Published:

Wednesday, 25 October, 2017

CERN openlab is a unique public-private partnership. It works to accelerates the development of cutting-edge ICT solutions for the worldwide LHC community, as well as wider scientific research. As part of its educational mission, CERN openlab runs a nine-week summer-student programme, with around 40 young researchers selected each year. The students attend a series of lectures, participate in research excursions, and work on ICT projects, gaining hands-on experience with the latest technologies. Together with partner-company Intel, CERN openlab established the Modern Code Developer Challenge. Through this, five of the 2017 summer students were invited to share their work. One lucky winner will be chosen to present their work at the Intel HPC Developer Conference and the SC17 conference, in November.

Smash-simulation software: Teaching algorithms to be faster at simulating particle-collision events

Orestis Galanis — Wed, 08 Nov 2017 15:47:09 +0000

Date Published:

Wednesday, 25 October, 2017

Physicists widely use a software toolkit called GEANT4 to simulate what will happen when a particular kind of particle hits a particular kind of material in a particle detector. In fact, this toolkit is so popular that it is also used by researchers in other fields who want to predict how particles will interact with other matter: it’s used to assess radiation hazards in space, for commercial air travel, in medical imaging, and even to optimise scanning systems for cargo security. An international team, led by researchers at CERN, is now working to develop a new version of this simulation toolkit, called GeantV. This work is supported by a CERN openlab project with Intel on code modernisation. GeantV will improve physics accuracy and boost performance on modern computing architectures. The team behind GeantV is currently implementing a ‘deep-learning' tool that will be used to make simulation faster. The goal of this project is to write a flexible mini-application that can be used to support the efforts to train the deep neural network on distributed computing systems.

IoT at the LHC: Integrating ‘internet-of-things’ devices into the control systems for the Large Hadron Collider

Orestis Galanis — Wed, 08 Nov 2017 15:42:16 +0000

Date Published:

Wednesday, 25 October, 2017

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) accelerates particles to over 99.9999% of the speed of light. It is the most complex machine ever built, relying on a wide range industrial control systems for proper functioning. This project will focus on integrating modern ‘systems-on-a-chip’ devices into the LHC control systems. The new, embedded ‘systems-on-a-chip’ available on the market are sufficiently powerful to run fully-fledged operating systems and complex algorithms. Such devices can also be easily enriched with a wide range of different sensors and communication controllers. The ‘systems-on-a-chip’ devices will be integrated into the LHC control systems in line with the ‘internet of things’ (IoT) paradigm, meaning they will be able to communicate via an overlaying cloud-computing service. It should also be possible to perform simple analyses on the devices themselves, such as filtering, pre-processing, conditioning, monitoring, etc. By exploiting the IoT devices’ processing power in this manner, the goal is to reduce the network load within the entire control infrastructure and ensure that applications are not disrupted in case of limited or intermittent network connectivity.

Connecting the dots: Using machine learning to better identify the particles produced by collision events

Orestis Galanis — Wed, 08 Nov 2017 15:37:07 +0000

Date Published:

Wednesday, 25 October, 2017

The particle detectors at CERN are like cathedral-sized 3D digital cameras, capable of recording hundreds of millions of collision events per second. The detectors consist of multiple ‘layers’ of detecting equipment, designed to recognise different types of charged particles produced by the collisions at the heart of the detector. As the charged particles fly outwards through the various layers of the detector, they leave traces, or ‘hits’. Tracking is the art of connecting the hits to recreate trajectories, thus helping researchers to understand more about and identify the particles. The algorithms used to reconstruct the collision events by identifying which dots belong to which charged particles can be very computationally expensive.

Disaster relief: Helping computers to get better at recognising objects in satellite maps created by a UN agency

Orestis Galanis — Wed, 08 Nov 2017 15:33:59 +0000

Date Published:

Wednesday, 25 October, 2017

Disaster relief: Helping computers to get better at recognising objects in satellite maps created by a UN agency Student: Muhammad Abu Bakr UNOSAT is part of the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR). It provides a rapid front-line service to turn satellite imagery into information that can aid disaster-response teams. By delivering imagery analysis and satellite solutions to relief and development organizations — both within and outside the UN system — UNOSAT helps to make a difference in critical areas such as humanitarian relief, human security, and development planning.

Cells in the cloud: Running biological simulations more efficiently with cloud computing

Orestis Galanis — Wed, 08 Nov 2017 15:21:19 +0000

Date Published:

Wednesday, 25 October, 2017

BioDynaMo is one of CERN openlab s knowledge-sharing projects. It is part of CERN openlab s collaboration with Intel on code modernisation, working on methods to ensure that scientific software makes full use of the computing potential offered by today s cutting-edge hardware technologies.

CERN openlab / Intel workshop on TBB

Orestis Galanis — Wed, 25 Oct 2017 07:20:54 +0000

Date:

Wednesday, 29 November, 2017 (All day) to Thursday, 30 November, 2017 (All day)

Location:

593-R-010 - Salle 11 (CERN Technical Training Center).

Due to energy constraints, high performance computing platforms are becoming increasingly heterogeneous, achieving greater performance per watt through the use of hardware that is tuned to specific computational kernels or application domains. It can be challenging for developers to match computations to accelerators, choose models for targeting those accelerators, and then coordinate the use of those accelerators in the context of their larger applications. This tutorial starts with a survey of heterogeneous architectures and programming models, and discusses how to determine if a computation is suitable for a particular accelerator. Next, Intel® Threading Building Blocks (Intel® TBB), a widely used, portable C++ template library for parallel programming is introduced. TBB is available as both a commercial product and as a permissively licensed open-source project at http://www.threadingbuildingblocks.org . The library provides generic parallel algorithms, concurrent containers, a work-stealing task scheduler, a data flow programming abstraction, low-level primitives for synchronization, thread local storage and a scalable memory allocator. The generic algorithms in TBB capture many of the common design patterns used in parallel programming. While TBB was first introduced in 2006 as a shared-memory parallel programming library, it has recently been extended to support heterogeneous programming. These new extensions allow developers more easily to coordinate the use of accelerators such as integrated and discrete GPUs, or devices such as FPGAs into their parallel C++ applications. This tutorial will introduce students to the TBB library and provide a hands-on opportunity to use some of its features for shared-memory programming. The students will then be given an overview of the new features included in the library for heterogeneous programming and have a hands-on opportunity to convert an example they developed for shared-memory into one that performs hybrid execution on both the CPU and an accelerator. Finally, students will be provided with an overview of the TBB Flow Graph Analyzer tool and shown how it can be used to understand application inefficiencies related to utilization of system resources.

Indico or other event webpage:

For more information about the event:

Calendar

Announcing the Intel Modern Code Developer Challenge from CERN openlab

Orestis Galanis — Thu, 24 Aug 2017 12:54:25 +0000

Intel

Link:

Announcing the Intel Modern Code Developer Challenge from CERN openlab

Wednesday, 26 July, 2017

It is always an exciting time when I get to announce a Modern Code Developer Challenge from my friends at Intel, but it is even more special when I get to announce a collaboration with the brilliant minds at CERN. Beginning this month (July 2017), and running for nine weeks, five exceptional students participating in the CERN openlab Summer Student Programme are working to research and develop solutions for five modern-code-centered challenges.

Announcing the Intel Modern Code Developer Challenge from CERN openlab _ Intel® Software.pdf

Phase:

openlab phase V

Technical area:

Data Acquisition (online)

Computing Platforms (offline)

Brain Development Simulation, 300x Faster

Orestis Galanis — Thu, 27 Jul 2017 15:32:38 +0000

Intel

Link:

Brain Development Simulation, 300x Faster

Thursday, 6 July, 2017

All human beings start their life as a single cell. As this cell divides, daughter cells can move and produce substances. These processes guide future generations of cells into differentiation and tissue formation. Out come the beating heart, the restless legs, the dextrous hands, and the inquisitive brain. The processes of cell division, proliferation, metabolism, differentiation, and clustering are complex. If something goes wrong due to genetic or biochemical factors, neurodevelopmental disorders arise. To quantify these processes is to get closer to treating diseases such as epilepsy, autism, and schizophrenia.

Brain Development Simulation, 300x Faster _ Intel® Software.pdf

Phase:

openlab phase V

Technical area:

Data Acquisition (online)

Computing Platforms (offline)

Colliders, containers, dark matter: The CERN atom smasher's careful cloud revolution

Orestis Galanis — Wed, 26 Apr 2017 14:09:24 +0000

Date published:

25 Apr 2017

Outlet:

theregister.co.uk

CERN made headlines with the discovery by physicists in 2012 of the Higgs boson, paving the way to a breakthrough in our understanding of how fundamental particles interact.

Link:

Article on theregister.co.uk

Copy of the coverage:

Colliders, containers, dark matter_ The CERN atom smasher's careful cloud revolution • The Register.pdf

CERN openlab Explores New CPU/FPGA Processing Solutions

Orestis Galanis — Wed, 19 Apr 2017 10:00:30 +0000

Date published:

13 Apr 2017

Outlet:

rc.colorado.edu

At CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, physicists and engineers are probing the fundamental structure of the universe. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which began working in 2008, is the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator; it is housed in an underground tunnel at CERN. Niko Neufeld is a deputy project leader at CERN who works on the Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) experiment, which explores what happened after the Big Bang that allowed matter to survive and build the Universe we inhabit today.

Link:

Article on rc.colorado.edu

Copy of the coverage: