This coming weekend, dozens of developers, designers, makers, students and creative problem solvers will gather in Baltimore’s Betamore for Power the Future, a 36-hour hackathon focused on building apps and tools to better all forms of energy creation and consumption. There is $5,000 in cash and other prizes up for grabs.

It’s a great opportunity for students to engage in Baltimore’s hackathon and startup community. To make it even more attractive, Betamore CEO and co-founder Mike Brenner has set up a discount code that UMBC students can use to register for free. Send email from your umbc address to Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address. to get the code.

The event, sponsored by Constellation Energy, will be held from 9:00am Saturday November 2 to 6:00pm Sunday November 3 at the Betamore campus in the Federal Hill neighborhood of downtown Baltimore at 1111 Light Street. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner on both Saturday and Sunday will be provided.

Get more information and register here.

The hackathon’s agenda includes concept pitches, team formation, around the clock working, and finally product demos on Sunday to a panel of judges that will be doling out more than $5,000 in cash and other energy-related prizes like Nest thermostats, Philips Hue light bulbs, and even free membership at Betamore to help usher a potential team’s weekend idea into a newly formed company. Designed to spotlight the creation of apps and tools that better all forms of energy creation and consumption, the hackathon will give a voice to those who want to see change and are willing to roll up their sleeves to contribute.

See more at http://betamore.com/power-the-future/.

The University of Maryland School of Pharmacy is seeking an enthusiastic and motivated individual who wants hands-on writing and editing experience, primarily for organizational websites. This individual will assist with the development of content for the School’s website (www.pharmacy.umaryland.edu), an upcoming transition to a new content management system (CMS), and other communication and marketing tasks as assigned. He or she will report to the Assistant Dean of Communications and Marketing.

Although this is an unpaid internship, credit may be offered by the applicant’s college or university commiserate with the number of intern hours performed. Interns are guaranteed published bylines.

Intern Responsibilities:

·         Write stories for the School of Pharmacy website following appropriate grammar, style, and brand guidelines.

·         Interface with faculty, staff, and students in the reporting of stories for the website. Attend relevant events and activities.

·         Create, edit, and update web pages using CMS (currently SiteExecutive and WordPress).

·         Assist with content migration  to new CMS (will be Terminal4).

·         Create and use email marketing software to send out department newsletters, event announcements, and other communications from the School.

·         Other related responsibilities as assigned.

Qualifications:

 ·         Strong writing and proofreading ability.

·         Basic understanding and experience with a CMS (i.e., WordPress).

·         Basic understanding of HTML.

·         Basic knowledge of photo editing software (i.e., PhotoShop).

·         Experience with Microsoft Office programs (i.e., Word and Excel).

·         Strong attention to detail.

·         Strong interpersonal skills and experience collaborating in a team environment.

 How to Apply:

 To apply for this internship, please submit your resume and 2-3 writing samples to Becky Ceraul, assistant dean of communications and marketing, at rceraul@rx.umaryland.edu.

On Monday, November 4^th, UMB is hosting Nobel Prize Laureate Dr. Craig Mello for a lecture followed by a Q&A session.  Dr. Mello is the Blais University Chair in Molecular Medicine and Co-Director of the RNA Therapeutics Institute at the University of Massachusetts Medical School.  He has been a Howard Hughes Medical Investigator since 2000.  His pioneering research on RNA interference, in collaboration with Dr. Andrew Fire, has been recognized with numerous awards culminating with the prestigious 2006 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

When:                  November 4^th, 2013 @ 9:30 am – 11:00 am

Where:                 Medical School Teaching Facility Auditorium

                              685 West Baltimore Street

                              Baltimore, MD 21201

 

The lecture is being sponsored by The Nobel Prize Inspiration Initiative, AstraZeneca/MedImmune, and the University of Maryland, Baltimore.  This interactive session will be filmed by The Nobel Prize Inspiration Initiative as part of its global program to help Nobel Laureates share their inspirational stories and insights. 

Computer Science and Electrical Engineering
University of Maryland, Baltimore County

Ph.D. Dissertation Defense

Multiple Objective Task Scheduling
for Scalable High Performance Computing

Tyler A. Simon

12:30-2:30 Friday, 8 November 2013, ITE 325b

Individual processor frequencies have reached an upper physical and practical limit. Processor designs now involve adding multiple processing elements to a single chip to enable increased performance. It is expected that all future processor designs will have multiple cores with a focus on reducing frequencies and adding more individual processing elements (cores) while having to balance power consumption, reliability and maintain high performance.

Due to the increased complexity as well as increased heterogeneity of parallel architectures, petascale and future exascale systems, with the number of processors on the order of 10^8-10^9, must incorporate more intelligent software tools that help manage parallel execution for the user. I demonstrate that by managing the parallel execution environment at runtime, we can satisfy performance tradeoffs for a particular application or application domain for a set of common HPC architectures. It is expected that future exascale computing systems will have to execute programs on many individual and potentially low powered processing elements. These processors need to be fed data efficiently and reliably through the duration of a parallel computation.

In this thesis I provide a performance analysis of two common graph algorithms for finding a minimum spanning tree and evaluate the multicore performance of a common high performance computing (HPC) benchmark on multicore processors. I also develop a novel autonomic execution model and adaptive runtime system (ARRIA) Adaptive Runtime Resource for Intensive Applications. ARRIA is designed with the intent of improving application programmability, scalability and performance while freeing the programmer from explicit message passing and thread management. Experiments are conducted that evaluate ARRIA’s capabilities on data intensive applications, those where the majority of execution time is spent reading and writing either to local or remote memory locations. In my approach, I focus on developing task schedules that satisfy multiple objectives for clusters of compute nodes during runtime. This approach is novel in that it can control application performance and satisfy constraints that are solved using multi objective optimization techniques as the program runs. The development and implementation of the ARRIA runtime system and subsequent optimization criteria likely provide reasonable models for the exascale computing era.

The results of this dissertation demonstrate, experimentally, that for high performance computing systems, a dynamic, task based, parallel programming environment and scheduler can provide lower total workload runtimes and high utilization compared with commonly used static scheduling policies.