U-M approves new graduate certificate in computational neuroscience

By | Educational, General Interest, Happenings, News

The new Graduate Certificate in Computational Neuroscience will help bridge the gap between experimentally focused studies and quantitative modeling and analysis, giving graduate students a chance to broaden their skill sets in the diversifying field of brain science.

“The broad, practical training provided in this certificate program will help prepare both quantitatively focused and lab-based students for the increasingly cross-disciplinary job market in neuroscience,” said Victoria Booth, Professor of Mathematics and Associate Professor of Anesthesiology, who will oversee the program.

To earn the certificate, students will be required to take core computational neuroscience courses and cross-disciplinary courses outside of their home departments; participate in a specialized interdisciplinary journal club; and complete a practicum.

Cross-discplinary courses will depend on a student’s focus: students in experimental neuroscience programs will take quantitative coursework, and students in quantitative science programs such as physics, biophysics, mathematics and engineering will take neuroscience coursework.

The certificate was approved this fall, and will be jointly administered by the Neuroscience Graduate Program (NGP) and the Michigan Institute for Computational Discovery and Engineering (MICDE).

For more information, visit micde.umich.edu/comput-neuro-certificate. Enrollment is not yet open, but information sessions will be scheduled early next year. Please register for the program’s mailing list if you’re interested.

Along with the Graduate Certificate in Computational Neuroscience, U-M offers several other graduate programs aimed at training students in computational and data-intensive science, including:

  • The Graduate Certificate in Computational Discovery and Engineering, which is focused on quantitative and computing techniques that can be applied broadly to all sciences.
  • The Graduate Certificate in Data Science, which specializes in statistical and computational methods required to analyze large data sets.
  • The Ph.D in Scientific Computing, intended for students who will make extensive use of large-scale computation, computational methods, or algorithms for advanced computer architectures in their doctoral studies. This degree is awarded jointly with an existing program, so that a student receives, for example, a Ph.D in Aerospace engineering and Scientific Computing.

 

U-M awarded a Clare Boothe Luce grant for fellowships to support women in STEM

By | Educational, General Interest, Happenings, News

The Clare Boothe Luce Program of the Henry Luce Foundation has awarded a $270,000 grant to the University of Michigan. The funding will support women PhD students through the Michigan Institute for Computational Discovery and Engineering (MICDE). The program aims to encourage women “to enter, study, graduate and teach” in science, and the funding will support women PhD students who make use of computational science in their research.

“We’re very excited to be able to promote women in scientific computing,” said Mariana Carrasco-Teja, manager of the grant and Associate Director of MICDE. “These resources generously provided by the Clare Boothe Luce program will make a huge difference in the careers of women pursuing computational science at U-M.”

For details on applying, and fellowship requirements, see the fellowship page at micde.umich.edu/academic-programs/cbl/.

The fellowships carry a $35,000 annual stipend and tuition, among other benefits. They will be awarded to students applying for PhD programs in fall 2019 in the College of Engineering, or several programs in the College of Literature, Science and the Arts (Applied and Interdisciplinary Mathematics, Applied Physics, Astronomy, Chemistry, Earth & Environmental Sciences, Mathematics, Physics, and Statistics).

The CBL program at U-M is funded by the Clare Boothe Luce Program of the Henry Luce Foundation, with additional support from the Rackham School of Graduate Studies, the College of Engineering, the College of Literature, Sciences and the Arts, and MICDE.

ARC Director Sharon Broude Geva re-elected Chair of the Coalition for Academic Scientific Computation

By | HPC, News

Dr. Sharon Broude Geva, Director of Advanced Research Computing at the University of Michigan, has been re-elected as Chair of the Coalition for Academic Scientific Computation (CASC) for 2020.

Founded in 1989, CASC advocates for the use of advanced computing technology to accelerate scientific discovery for national competitiveness, global security, and economic success. The organization’s members represent 87 institutions of higher education and national labs.

The chair position is one of four elected CASC executive officers. The officers work closely as a team with the director of CASC. The Chair is responsible for arranging and presiding over general CASC meetings and acts as an official representative of CASC.

Geva served as CASC secretary in 2015 and 2016, and vice-chair in 2017 and 2018.

 

U-M participates in SC18 conference in Dallas

By | General Interest, Happenings, News

University of Michigan researchers and IT staff wrapped up a successful Supercomputing ‘18 (SC18) in Dallas from Nov. 11-16, 2018, taking part in a number of different aspects of the conference.

SC “Perennial” Quentin Stout, U-M professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and one of only 19 people who have been to every Supercomputing conference, co-presented a tutorial titled Parallel Computing 101.

And with the recent announcement of a new HPC cluster on campus called Great Lakes, IT staff from Advanced Research Computing – Technology Services (ARC-TS) made presentations around the conference on the details of the new supercomputer.

U-M once again shared a booth with Michigan State University booth, highlighting our computational and data-intensive research as well as the comprehensive set of tools and services we provide to our researchers. Representatives from all ARC units were at the booth: ARC-TS, the Michigan Institute for Data Science (MIDAS), the Michigan Institute for Computational Discovery and Engineering (MICDE), and Consulting for Statistics, Computing and Analytics Research (CSCAR).

The booth also featured two demonstrations: one on the Open Storage Research Infrastructure or OSiRIS, the multi-institutional software-defined data storage system, and the Services Layer At The Edge (SLATE) project, both of which are supported by the NSF; the other tested conference-goers’ ability to detect “fake news” stories compared to an artificial intelligence system created by researchers supported by MIDAS.

Gallery

U-M Activities

  • Tutorial: Parallel Computing 101: Prof. Stout and Associate Professor Christiane Jablonowski of the U-M Department of Climate and Space Sciences and Engineering provided a comprehensive overview of parallel computing.
  • Introduction to Kubernetes. Presented by Bob Killen, Research Cloud Administrator, and Scott Paschke, Research Cloud Solutions Designer, both from ARC-TS. Containers have shifted the way applications are packaged and delivered. Their use in data science and machine learning is skyrocketing with the beneficial side effect of enabling reproducible research. This rise in use has necessitated the need to explore and adopt better container-centric orchestration tools. Of these tools, Kubernetes – an open-source container platform born within Google — has become the de facto standard. This half-day tutorial introduced researchers and sys admins who may already be familiar with container concepts to the architecture and fundamental concepts of Kubernetes. Attendees explored these concepts through a series of hands-on exercises and left with the leg-up in continuing their container education, and gained a better understanding of how Kubernetes may be used for research applications.
  • Brock Palen, Director of ARC-TS, spoke about the new Great Lakes HPC cluster:
    • DDN booth (3123)
    • Mellanox booth (3207)
    • Dell booth (3218)
    • SLURM booth (1242)
  • Todd Raeker, Research Technology Consultant for ARC-TS, went to the Globus booth (4201) to talk about U-M researchers’ use of the service.
  • Birds of a Feather: Meeting HPC Container Challenges as a Community. Bob Killen, Research Cloud Administrator at ARC-TS, gave a lightning talk as part of this session that presented, prioritized, and gathered input on top issues and budding solutions around containerization of HPC applications.
  • Sharon Broude Geva, Director of ARC, was live on the SC18 News Desk discussing ARC HPC services, Women in HPC, and the Coalition for Scientific Academic Computation (CASC). The stream was available from the Supercomputing Twitter account: https://twitter.com/Supercomputing
  • Birds of a Feather: Ceph Applications in HPC Environments: Ben Meekhof, HPC Storage Administrator at ARC-TS, gave a lightning talk on Ceph and OSiRIS as part of this session. More details at https://www.msi.umn.edu/ceph-hpc-environments-sc18
  • ARC was a sponsor of the Women in HPC Reception. See the event description for more details and to register. Sharon Broude Geva, Director of ARC, gave a presentation.
  • Birds of a Feather: Cloud Infrastructure Solutions to Run HPC Workloads: Bob Killen, Research Cloud Administrator at ARC-TS, presented at this session aimed at architects, administrators, software engineers, and scientists interested in designing and deploying cloud infrastructure solutions such as OpenStack, Docker, Charliecloud, Singularity, Kubernetes, and Mesos.
  • Jing Liu of the Michigan Institute for Data Science, participated in a panel discussion at the Purdue University booth.

Follow ARC on Twitter at https://twitter.com/ARC_UM for updates.