HPCS 2012 and BCNET have opened registration and launched the event website for this year's conference in Vancouver, BC. Co-hosted by WestGrid, Compute Canada and BCNET, the event is themed Connect. Compute. Collaborate. and will take place May 1 - 3, 2012. The three-day program is expected to draw nearly 500 delegates from post-secondary instutitutions, research organizations and technology-driven industries from across Canada. Two keynotes have been confirmed so far:

• Leonard Brody, Entrepreneur, Venture Capitalist & Best-Selling Author
• Michael Wesch, Cultural Anthropologist specializing in new media's effect on society and culture

Early-bird registrants to the event will save 15% and be entered to win an iPad2. The HPCS Call for Papers will be issued shortly, as will a French website and French registration. If you have any questions or would like more information about HPCS 2012, please contact the event organizers.

A message was sent to all users registered on the Compute Canada Database (CCDB) on January 9, 2012. This message was intended to inform all users that over the course of this year, everyone who has registered with CCDB will be required to renew his or her account. Please note that each user will receive a separate email providing the instructions for renewal. To ensure a smooth transition, Compute Canada will be staggering the requests to renew over the course of the year. Please do not log into CCDB to renew your account until you receive the follow up email with this request and the detailed instructions. If you have any questions please email accounts@westgrid.ca.

The 2012 Resource Allocation Committee (RAC) allocation notifications have been sent to all Principal Investigators. All Compute Canada resources will be updated with allocations for 2012 as of Monday, January 9 at 11:00 am (Pacific). Final allocations will be posted to the Compute Canada and WestGrid websites shortly. If you have any questions regarding the 2012 allocations, please contact support@westgrid.ca.

WestGrid staff will be on holidays in alignment with our institutions from December 23, 2011 to January 2, 2012. Emails and inquiries will be answered on a best-effort basis during this period.

From everyone at WestGrid, we wish you a warm and happy holiday season and a prosperous new year!

Since September, there have been a number of software packages installed or updated on WestGrid systems. Most of these installations are listed below. 

If you are looking for software on WestGrid systems, first check the main software page (Hint: Using the "find" function of your browser will help, as some of the tables are lengthy). If the software you want is not listed, or an appropriate version of it is not on a machine you would like to use, please email us. For more information on commercial software requests, click here.

Bioinformatics Packages

Join us Wednesday, Nov 30 at 1:00 pm MST for the WestGrid and Compute Canada Seminar

Installing Software Packages on WestGrid Systems
Presented by Belaid Moa, HPC Specialist, University Systems, University of Victoria

TOPICS COVERED:

• Global software installation on a WestGrid system
• User-based software installation: When, where and how?
• Specific software package customization
• Software installation challenges faced by WestGrid users
• Effective guidelines to address these challenges

Researchers are invited to attend in person at a WestGrid Access Grid site. If your institution is not listed as a WestGrid accessible site and you would like to attend, please contact us for more information.

The WestGrid Seminar Series is shared live with researchers at participating WestGrid institutions via videoconference. The series explores how WestGrid and Compute Canada resources are being used to advance research investigations in the sciences, engineering, medicine and humanities. There are two types of seminars: resource training seminars and research-based seminars. The series is open to all users and researchers in Canada.

DOWNLOAD POSTER

This spring, WestGrid and Compute Canada will be hosting HPCS 2012 as a joint conference with BCNET. On May 1-3, 2012, the conference, themed Connect. Compute. Collaborate, will focus on advancing higher education and research by promoting innovative and smart ways to use and share information technology.

Compute Canada will bring together Canada's HPC community in Vancouver for their annual High Performance Computing Symposium (HPCS). HPCS is a multidisciplinary conference that focuses on research involving High Performance Computing and its application.

Attended by Canadian and international experts and renowned researchers in the sciences, all areas of engineering, the applied sciences, medicine and life sciences, mathematics, the humanities and social sciences, it is Canada’s pre-eminent forum for HPC. The three-day conference will be held at Simon Fraser University Harbour Centre in Vancouver, B.C.

The website will go live the first week of January. In the meantime, follow us on twitter @BCNET_HPCS12.

To sponsor the event, please email us at sponsorship@bc.net or download the sponsorship package here (406KB).

The Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory (CWRC) is launching the CWRC infrastructure project to support collaborative online research in Canadian writing. Thursday, September 29 will launch the project and workshop, which is free and open to anyone with an interest in CWRC, featuring writers Shawna Lemay and Aritha Van Herk at the Alumni House at the University of Alberta from 3:30 - 5:30 p.m., with a reception to follow.

The rest of the workshop will take place September 30 to October 1 at the University of Alberta, in Room 112 of the Arts Building, with keynote speaker Dr. Laura Mandell presenting her topic of "D3: Digital Media, Distant Reading, and Discipline". The full schedule for the workshop can be found here and for more information, email cwrc@ualberta.ca.

Compute Canada is calling for proposals to all Principal Investigators (PIs) at Canadian academic institutions, to obtain access to Compute Canada’s High Performance Computing (HPC) resources. In addition to offering access to computing resources with an aggregate peak of more than 1 PetaFlops of compute power and 5 Petabytes of storage, Compute Canada also offers applications-enabling assistance from HPC experts at the regional consortia.

Allocations will be valid for one year, beginning January 2012. Proposals must be submitted electronically to Compute Canada on or before October 18, 2011 at 3pm. Please complete the online application form here. If you have any questions, contact Susan Baldwin, Executive Director, Compute Canada or visit the Compute Canada website.

The Coast to Coast Seminar Series are hour-long presentations given on scientific topics and made accessible to audiences at a number of remote sites through collaboration technology. The first in this series is Tuesday, September 20 with Dr. Martin A. Andresen, from the School of Criminology at Simon Fraser University. His topic, titled “The importance of spatial analysis when modeling social systems", will be explaining modeling complex social systems and the need for space, or geography, to be one of the necessary dimensions considered when doing so. 

Start Time:

PDT: 11:30
MDT: 12:30
CST: 12:30
CDT: 13:30 
EDT: 14:30
ADT: 15:30
NDT: 16:00

Location: Via video-conference at one of many post-secondary institutions across Canada. Please click here to find the location closest to you.