Hi everyone,

The Department of Biological Sciences has asked me to get the word out that they are hosting an Open House for their Applied Molecular Biology (AMB) Master's Degree program.

While the Open House is geared for juniors and seniors as they begin the graduate school application process, freshmen and sophomores who would like to know more about this program are certainly welcome!

The AMB program is a 9-month (two semester) program designed to be an intensive training in laboratory methods in molecular biology.  UMBC undergraduates have the additional advantage of being able to take up to 9 credits of coursework (typically, two classes) that can be applied to BOTH their Bachelor's Degree and Master's Degree requirements.

For more information about the AMB program, visit the Open House on 2/22, or follow the link to the Biological Sciences web site!

Have a good week!

Michelle

A Scalable, Fault Tolerant Programming Model for
Developing Data Intensive Parallel Applications

Tyler A. Simon
Faculty Research Scientist
UMBC Center for Hybrid Multicore Productivity Research

1:00pm Friday 17 February 2012, ITE 325b

Future exascale computing systems will have to execute a single program on the order of 10^8-10^9 individual, low powered processing elements. These processors need to be fed data efficiently and reliably through the duration of a parallel computation. The current methods for explicit message passing between processors provide little in terms of fault tolerance support and the overheads of system level and application checkpoint/restart incur unreasonable overheads for exascale class computing systems.

We propose the development of novel autonomic execution model and an Adaptive Runtime Resource for Intensive Applications (RRIA), which improves application reliability, scalability and performance while freeing the programmer from explicit message passing. Experiments were conducted to 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 our approach, we focus on managing data movement both on a compute node and across a cluster of nodes for the application during runtime. We use a hybrid "threaded data parallel" model in which message passing is hidden entirely from the programmer and parallel tasks are bundled and farmed to a dynamic resource pool for execution.

Tyler Simon is a Faculty Research Assistant and PhD student working for the Center for Hybrid Multicore Productivity Research in the Computer Science and Electrical Engineering Department at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. He is also a computational scientist at the NASA Center for Climate Simulation at Goddard Space Flight Center. Tyler is interested in the theoretical and practical aspects of concurrency and parallel computation in general. His research is focused on what can be done with the effective application of distributed, parallel algorithms in high performance computing environments, particularly in parallel numerical methods and data movement.

Host: Yelena Yesha

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Photo from: http://abcnews.go.com/images/Politics/ap_mitt_romney_cpac_jt_120210_main.jpg

We recently reported of future President Willard “Mitt” Romney’s  recent troubles with dog lovers.

But how is Mitt holding up with the rest of Republicans? We mean . . . how is he really? It’s hard to tell sometimes because, you know, he might be a robot.

Turns out, “Oven” Mitt Romney is doing pretty okay, thanks for asking.

After winning the votes of Mainers (or are they Mainiacs?) and the confidence of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC – or are they maniacs?) over the weekend, he’s prepared to move onwards and upwards with confidence and even a little modesty.

“I hope to become our nominee, but I am not clairvoyant,” he told National Review Online.

Well, we knew that; this from the man who reckoned the Tea Party would find in him an “ideal candidate.” Smart move getting rid of that crystal ball . . .

We can also expect his campaign to place more emphasis on his own family and personal background in the coming months, he said, which will surely keep the carnival from leaving town for some time.

In his speech at CPAC Romney tried to allay concerns that he is a “Massachusetts moderate,” as Newt Gingrich is fond of calling him, by stressing his own personal development as a conservative on a path that “came from my family, my faith, and my life’s work.”

At least two of those things have, so far stood as impediments to Romney’s appeal. It should be interesting to see how he assimilates them into a narrative that will melt the hearts of his most frigid skeptics on the right.

The most memorable part of his address to CPAC was, of course, a gaffe: Romney described himself as having been a “severely conservative” governor of Massachusetts – language that raised a few eyebrows among the afflicted and gave Paul Krugman plenty of jollies in Monday’s New York Times.

So: Noodle “Mitt” Ramen wants to be our boy. He knows he’s still the man to beat, but he’s also been talking like someone who has a reasonable estimate of the weight of that crown.

We’re still presuming that Romney will be the Republican nominee ( then again, we presumed President Obama would close Guantanamo as he promised).  We wonder how wise is it for him to build up his image as an ultraconservative when that might distance moderate voters in the general election…a delicate balancing act for a robot.

Google is holding a contest to encourage students in the US and Canada to use Google Map Maker to improve the maps of their campus areas. You can add  2.5D and 3D models of building and interior floor plans. Registration started on Monday February 13 and the contest runs through March 9.

"Be a part of a university mapping contest open for US and Canadian students who currently study at a university in these two countries! From February 13, 2012 to March 9, 2012, improving the maps of your campus can give you a chance to be a local hero and the highest scoring entries will win prizes like Samsung Galaxy tablets, Samsung Android phones, Google Map Maker messenger bags, and more!

Submit your entry for a chance to win and help your university at the same time! Join together with up to three other student mappers to add high quality edits like university buildings, walking paths, public spaces, or restaurant hangouts near your campus using Google Map Maker, and your efforts could win a grand prize package worth more than $5,000 USD for your team."

Google maps and Google Earth now support Web GL, "a software library that extends the capability of the JavaScript programming language to allow it to generate interactive 3D graphics within any compatible web browser." The new interface requires Chrome 14 or Firefox 8 (beta), Windows Vista/7 or Mac OS 10.6+ or Linux and a graphics card that supports WebGL.

See the contest site for the full details.