Over at the Cray Blog, Jay Gould writes that Indiana University’s new Big Red II supercomputer is 25 times faster than its predecessor. Utilizing the world’s fastest university-owned supercomputer, IU will now be able to address new science and technology challenges, addressing much larger and vastly more complex problems. Building on the success of the original Big Red 1 system, the Big Red II supercomputer was dedicated and opened for discovery in April of this year. The University is using Big Red II to arm its smartest computational science minds with the tools they need to lead us into the next wave of technical exploration.

HPC luminary Jack Dongarra has been selected to receive an ACM-IEEE Computer Society Ken Kennedy Award for "his leadership in designing and promoting standards for mathematical software used to solve numerical problems common to high performance computing (HPC)." Dongarra is a Distinguished University Professor at the University of Tennessee, where he is the founder and director of the Innovative Computing Laboratory. He also holds positions at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the University of Manchester.

With Google Translate's new handwriting tool, users can draw an unfamiliar word or character on their Android smartphone or tablet and immediately get a translation. The application is especially useful when encountering words that use alphabets not based on the Latin alphabet, such as Chinese, Russian, or Arabic. Google initially acquired the first phase of the handwriting tool for Android in January 2012 and has been developing the technology for the past year. In February, it updated the input features by adding new virtual keyboards and transliteration tools. The handwriting tool now supports 45 languages, including Arabic, Chinese, Greek, Lao, and Yiddish.

Self-driving cars will come with a wide range of sensors, creating machine-to-machine data at the rate of 1GB per second, according to BigData-Startups.com founder Mark van Rijmenam. He also notes the sensors will provide greater opportunities to spot mechanical problems before they happen. "With the amount of cars worldwide to surpass one billion, it is almost unimaginable how much data will be created when Google's self-driving car will become common on the streets," Rijmenam says. By 2020, there will be several autonomous vehicle offerings that consumers can buy at a reasonable price point, according to Gartner analyst Thilo Koslowski. If the 1GB per second prediction is accurate, self-driving cars would, on average, create about two petabytes of data per year.

Researchers at the LSU Center for Computation & Technology, or CCT, have received a $4 million Major Research Instrumentation, or MRI, award from the National Science Foundation, or NSF, for the acquisition of SuperMIC, a new supercomputer cluster. This is the largest NSF MRI award LSU has ever received. The instrumentation, which will be harnessed for a variety of research projects involving discovery of new drugs, modeling coastal processes and forecasting hurricane-generated waves and storm surges, will bring Louisiana to the next level in supercomputing. It will also allow LSU to prepare students and faculty for the next generation of high-performance supercomputers.

Parallel computing expert Marc Snir, a major contributor to the Message Passing Interface, has been named the recipient of this year's IEEE Computer Society Seymour Cray Computer Engineering Award. Snir is director of the Mathematics and Computer Science Division at Argonne National Laboratory and the Michael Faiman and Saburo Muroga Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), where he headed the Computer Science Department from 2001 to 2007. He is currently pursuing research in programming environments for high-performance computing.

Chancellor Pradeep K. Khosla will today announce a five-year, $20 million award from the National Science Foundation to support an innovative program of research and education on how interactions between air and sea alter the chemistry of the atmosphere to influence climate. The grant will support the Center for Aerosol Impacts on Climate and the Environment (CAICE), led by the University of California, San Diego, which will leverage the expertise of top scientists from nine universities to understand how particles released from the ocean influence the environment—from local water supplies to global climate.

David E. Hudak, Ph.D., has joined XSEDE as the new Industry Relations Manager. Hudak earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics from Bowling Green State University and holds a master's and doctoral degrees in Computer Engineering from the University of Michigan. His doctoral work was on compilation of parallel loops to reduce interprocessor communication, using machines like an nCube, an Encore Multimax, and BBN TC2000. Currently, he is the program director for Cyberinfrastructure and Software Development at the Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC) working on various aspects of HPC parallel application development - technologies, techniques and tools. Hudak can be reached at dhudak@osc.edu.

Between 2000 and 2009, there was a 79 percent drop in the number of first-year undergraduate women considering computer science.The greatest technology companies of our time -- Apple, Google, and Facebook -- have been successfully founded and run by men. And they seem to be doing a pretty good job. she++: The Documentary (12 min: TV-14 DL) energetically proclaims 'Hello, World' after following smart, creative, and trailblazing technologists hard at work in hi-tech. This short documentary collects research and inspirational pieces of Silicon Valley's unsung heroes to galvanize us to explore our potential as 'femgineers'.

The National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) today announced two new Expeditions in Computing awards, providing each selected project team $10 million in funding over five years, representing the single largest investments made by the directorate in basic computing research. Established in 2008, Expeditions awards provide, “the CISE research and education community with the opportunity to pursue ambitious, fundamental research agendas that promise to define the future of computing and information.”

HPC University’s goal is to help you and your team prepare for upcoming programming competitions, such as those offered by SC, the XSEDE national conference, Google and Intel’s yearly hackathon competitions and much more. These challenges will sharpen your critical thinking skills and give you an idea of what to expect come competition day. On the first and third Monday of each month, a new challenge will be added that will both perplex and puzzle you. HPCU is confident, that as you work on your own or together as a team, finding a solution will be no problem at all. If you run into unexpected trouble while trying to solve each problem, we will be posting solutions as well.

IBM's Watson impressed people all over the world in 2011 when the machine beat all contenders in a game of Jeopardy! Since then, IBM has kept the Power7-based technology busy, with gigs in financial analysis, healthcare, and customer service, among others. But now that IBM is gearing up to ship its Power8 processors, we could see a newer and more powerful Watson emerge. BM unveiled details of the forthcoming Power8 processor this week at the Hot Chips conference at Stanford University.

The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at The University of Texas at Austin has expanded its ecosystem of hardware resources to further support data driven science. In September, the center will deploy a DataDirect Networks (DDN) high-performance, scalable global file system (GFS) that will be accessible to all of TACC's computing and visualization systems and easily expandable in the coming years. Data driven science is emerging alongside modeling and simulation as another important computational methodology that uses high-end computing and storage systems.

Last month, Dr. Farnam Jahanian, Assistant Director of the National Science Foundation (NSF), announced the appointment of Dr. Rao Kosaraju as the new Division Director for the Computing and Communications Foundations (CCF) Division within the Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Directorate. Prof. Kosaraju will be joining the National Science Foundation (NSF) from the Johns Hopkins University (JHU), where he is currently the Edward J. Schaefer Professor of Computer Science. Prof. Kosaraju has made significant contributions to the design and analysis of parallel and sequential algorithms.

William G. Griswold, a computer scientist at the University of California, San Diego, along with a team of colleagues, has been awarded the 2013 Impact Paper Award from ACM’s Special Interest Group on Software Engineering. Griswold shares the award with colleagues Michael D. Ernst and David Notkin, of the University of Washington, and Jake Cockrell of AOL, for the paper they co-authored, “Dynamically Discovering Likely Program Invariants to Support Program Evolution,” published in the proceedings of ICSE ‘99— the 21st International Conference on Software Engineering (Los Angeles, Calif., May 16 to 22, 1999).

Rayid Ghani, chief scientist for President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign, recently created the Data Science for Social Good fellowship program at the University of Chicago to give young data scientists an opportunity to address real-world social problems. The program was financed by the Schmidt Family Foundation, an educational charity led by Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt and his wife, Wendy. "This is a small way to help that might have a bigger impact than we think," says Schmidt, who notes that urban social problems are a fresh challenge for sophisticated data tools. "Almost all of the interesting jobs will be related to big data in the future," he says.

The Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s High Performance Computing Innovation Center (HPCIC) in the USA will collaborate to expand industry’s use of supercomputing to boost economic competitiveness in the two countries. Chief Executive, John Womersley, of STFC and Lawrence Livermore (LLNL) Director, Parney Albright, signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) at a ceremony in Livermore’s high performance computing center that provides a vehicle for technical and business development exchanges between the HPCIC and the STFC’s Hartree Centre, which is dedicated to making HPC more accessible to British industry and academia.

Purdue University recently unveiled Conte, the highest-ranking campus supercomputer on the latest Top500 list of international supercomputers. Conte surpasses the U.S.'s previous fastest university-owned leading machine, Carter, which was built in 2011 and is still in operation at Purdue. "The reason we do this is because our faculty have a constantly growing need for more and faster computational resources," says Purdue professor Gerry McCartney. Conte recorded a sustained, measured maximum speed of 943.38 teraflops and a peak performance of 1.342 petaflops. Conte will be used for several different research projects, including one on atmospheric gases that contribute to global warming.

Stanford University recently launched the Cookie Clearinghouse, an online privacy initiative designed to complement the Do Not Track Internet privacy development effort. The Cookie Clearinghouse is expected to improve browser reliability in determining whether a cookie planted by a site is meant only for tracking. The goal behind Do Not Track is to give users the option of not having their movements on the Web logged by a Web site or ad network. The clearinghouse will create an "allow" list and a "block" list that browsers can incorporate to more accurately distinguish between cookies, according to Stanford's Center for Internet and Society director of privacy Aleecia M. McDonald.

As in previous years, the Broader Engagement (BE) Program’s goal is to increase the participation of individuals from groups that have been traditionally under-represented in HPC. In 2013, SC is enhancing our program activities to strengthen our intent for BE to be an “On Ramp” for the Technical Program. Consistent with these ideas, SC is organizing their funded participants into two tracks: On-Ramp (formerly known as the "standard" track) and Superhighway (formerly known as the "advanced track"). Competitive grants will be awarded to participants in both tracks.

Australian anthropologist and researcher Genevieve Bell will give the keynote at SC13. Recently named one of the top 50 most creative people in Business (Fast Company), Genevieve Bell is an Intel Fellow and director of the Interaction and Experience Research Group within the Intel Labs. Bell joined Intel in 1998 and has come to lead an R&D team of social scientists, interaction designers and human factors engineers to drive human-centric product innovation in Intel's consumer electronics business. Prior to joining Intel, Bell was a lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at Stanford University

Popular Android apps have security flaws that could expose private information or allow forged fraudulent messages to be posted, according to University of California, Davis researchers. The researchers determined that the victim would first have to download a piece of malicious code, which could be disguised as or hidden in a useful app, onto their phone; the malicious code then would invade the vulnerable programs. The programs were left vulnerable because their developers inadvertently left parts of the code public that should have been locked up, says UC Davis researcher Dennis Xu. "It's a developer error," Xu says. "This code was intended to be private but they left it public."

Energime University officially launched its crowd funding campaign yesterday! This is a “zero profit” humanitarian effort lead by a dedicated and passionate group of some of the world’s foremost scientists and educators who have come together to create an evolutionary project supporting global sustainable development. Energime University will be the world’s first completely accessible, multi-language education platform designed specifically to train and teach people throughout our population all the skills and knowledge required in order for them to re-establish balance back to their local environments.

The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) today announced the appointment of two new members and one former member to the TACC Strategic Advisory Board. Joining the Board for the first time are Victoria Stodden, assistant professor of Statistics at Columbia University, and Alex Szalay, Alumni Centennial Professor of Astronomy at The Johns Hopkins University and professor in the Department of Computer Science. Re-joining the Board for a second term is Dan Reed, vice president for Research and Economic Development and University Chair in Computational Science and Bioinformatics at the University of Iowa, who served on TACC's Board from 2009 to 2011.

Academic research institutions have experienced a significant increase in cyberinfrastructure resources since 2005, according to a new report from the National Science Foundation. In 2011, 59 percent of academic institutions reported bandwidth of at least 1 Gbps, up from 21 percent in fiscal year 2005, the report says. Doctorate-granting institutions accounted for 43 percent of institutions with bandwidth of at least 2.5 Gbps in 2011, versus 4 percent of non-doctorate-granting institutions. Forty-seven percent of institutions had dark fiber to an external network in 2011, up from 29 percent in 2005, and the percentage with dark fiber between their own buildings rose to 90 percent.