Core Facilities proudly announces that Research Computing has been awarded the NSF funded Jetstream 2 award as well as a grant from the Humans Advancing Research in Cloud (HARC) program: 

Jetstream 2

ASU will be one of five national sites operating the advanced computing systems that make up the NSF-funded Jetstream 2, a national cloud computing system designed to enable new research, discovery, and innovation across a broad range of disciplines. The “signature innovation” of Jetstream 2 is that it makes advanced computational resources easily accessible by researchers and students across all disciplines. ASU will be the recipient of a $400K subaward, with ASU Research Computing leading these efforts. Learn More.

Learn more about this award: 

https://news.iu.edu/stories/2020/06/iub/releases/01-jetstream-cloud-computing-awarded-nsf-grant.html

HARC

ASU Research Computing is one of four US institutions receiving a grant from the Humans Advancing Research in the Cloud (HARC) program, which is a national effort led by Indiana University’s Pervasive Technology Institute to advance the use of cloud-based computing. ASU researcher, Dr. Jay Oswald, SEMTE, will explore computationally assisted materials design in the development of plastic materials to increase their useful lifespan and simplify recycling efforts. The project is supported by Research Computing, and the funding will enable ASU’s contributions to the broader cloud research community, including code, documentation, and best practices for the set-up and maintenance of cloud systems.

Learn more about this award: 

https://itnews.iu.edu/articles/2020/HARC-project-announces-four-awards-.php

Imagine a Mars that isn’t a deserted wasteland. Picture a patchwork of rivers crisscrossing the planet, perhaps emptying into a large freshwater lake. Or glaciers, flowing across the surface and carving channels into the rock.

And now the big question: Did Mars ever have the environmental conditions to support life?

Did Mars ever support microbial life? The DAN tool on the back of the Mars Curiosity Rover measures hydrogen in Mars’ soil, which could indicate the presence of water—and the means to support life. Courtesy NASA. Launched on November 26, 2011, the Curiosity Rover’s mission is to discover evidence that could suggest Mars was capable of supporting microbial life. Equipped with more than a dozen instruments, Curiosity acquires rock, soil, and air samples for onboard analysis. The Dynamic Albedo of Neutrons (DAN) tool mounted on the back of the Rover measures hydrogen in Mars’ soil. Subsurface hydrogen, which can be detected by DAN up to one meter below the planet’s surface, might reveal the presence of water in the soil. And water could indicate the means to support life.

https://sciencenode.org/feature/A%20history%20of%20Mars.php

Even in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, ASU Core Facilities remains dedicated to our customers and their important work.  Core Facilities staff and researchers are engaged in a variety of projects that are directly supporting the fight against coronavirus. 

In addition to taking safety measures, Core Facilities staff and researchers are engaged in a variety of projects that are directly supporting the fight against coronavirus. 

ASU NanoFab is prototyping devices structures for researchers that may be used to detect the coronavirus, while Instrument Design & Fabrication is designing and rapidly producing equipment and enclosures for safe testing.

Over in the Biosciences Core, the ASU Genomics Facility is performing Next Generation sequencing on virus samples, while the Bioinformatics Facility is lending their analytical expertise. In addition, the Flow Cytometry Facility is working directly with principal investigators in the Biodesign Institute on coronavirus research projects. As many members of the Biosciences Core have experience with Biosafety Level 2 and 3 research, they are contributing to sample testing as well as assisting with sample collection and processing.

ASU Research Computing is participating in numerous coronavirus-related projects on both national and local levels. Staff are creating a secure, multitenant, easily administered computational infrastructure that is both HIPAA compliant and scalable. This holds promise for supporting personalized data projects and predictive epidemiological modeling. 

Nationally, Research Computing is allocating idle time on their computing systems to Folding at Home, a distributed computing project that is searching for potential pharmaceutical treatments for COVID-19. Research Computing also applied to the COVID-19 HPC Consortium, a public-private effort led by the White House and various federal agencies that will provide free computational resources to researchers working on COVID-19 scientific research or projects.

Our commitment to the research community remains steadfast.

This workshop will focus on approaches to porting Matlab applications to a cluster environment such as that of ASU's Agave cluster. This is not an intro to Matlab course. The intended audience member will have developed Matlab code that runs on a desktop machine but now would like to run this code in a parallel environment. This may be implemented through either:
1) Batch submission of multiple single-threaded instances (e.g. parameter sweep) 
2) Multithreading m file using "parfor" command 
3) Confronting large datasets using distributed arrays or tall arrays
4) Exploiting Matlab functions ported to GPU
5) Multithreading C-code using OpenMP or writing cuda kernels and compiling with mex compiler to be called by Matlab 
6) Parallel C code implemented with MPI invoking the Matlab engine on multiple nodes. 
All of these approaches will be discussed. In preparation for the workshop all attendees are encouraged to obtain an account on Agave if they do not already have one: https://cores.research.asu.edu/research-computing/get-started/create-an-account

Date: March 23rd, 2:00 - 4:00 PM
Location: Zoom https://asu.zoom.us/j/566944398
 

For more information about Research Computing, please visit researchcomputing.asu.edu

Questions:  Gil Speyer, Lead Scientific Software Engineer, Research Computing, speyer@asu.edu

The alarm is sounding to warn that the structural foundations that have long enabled major cities to function productively in the past won’t provide a reliable template for the future. This is most evident when it comes to public infrastructure, said Mikhail Chester, an associate professor of civil, environmental and sustainable engineering in the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering at Arizona State University.

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