UMBC is proud to be recognized again as a national leader in innovation and undergraduate teaching in U.S. News & World Report’s Best Colleges guide.

For the fourth year in a row, UMBC tops the U.S. News ranking of “Up-and-Coming” national universities — a designation recognizing universities that consistently find innovative ways to improve students’ educational experiences. We share the top spot with George Mason University.

U.S. News also ranks UMBC eighth on a list of the top national universities “where the faculty has an unusual commitment to undergraduate teaching.” UMBC is tied with Duke University, the University of California-Berkeley, the University of Chicago, and the University of Notre Dame.

“We are delighted to be recognized as one of America’s most innovative universities and a national leader in undergraduate education,” says President Freeman A. Hrabowski, III. “As Americans consider the costs and value of a college degree, this recognition is a reminder that public universities can be exceptional.”

This year, for example, UMBC is launching a competition that will encourage faculty to reimagine what it means to teach and learn; challenge students to take an active role in their educations; fuel creativity and entrepreneurship; and transform classrooms into laboratories of the mind. The work will be supported by grants from the new Hrabowski Fund for Innovation and will build on our longstanding commitment to combining the best of research and teaching.

UMBC offers the personal attention of a liberal arts college within the setting of a major research institution. Our 13,000 students come from more than 150 countries and take full advantage of the educational, business, cultural and recreational resources of Baltimore and Washington, D.C.

Congratulations to our faculty, staff, students, alumni and supporters who make UMBC a leading university!

This article originally appeared on UMBC’s website.

UMBC is proud to be recognized again as a national leader in innovation and undergraduate teaching in U.S. News & World Report’s Best Colleges guide.

For the fourth year in a row, UMBC tops the U.S. News ranking of “Up-and-Coming” national universities — a designation recognizing universities that consistently find innovative ways to improve students’ educational experiences. We share the top spot with George Mason University.

U.S. News also ranks UMBC eighth on a list of the top national universities “where the faculty has an unusual commitment to undergraduate teaching.” UMBC is tied with Duke University, the University of California-Berkeley, the University of Chicago, and the University of Notre Dame.

“We are delighted to be recognized as one of America’s most innovative universities and a national leader in undergraduate education,” says President Freeman A. Hrabowski, III. “As Americans consider the costs and value of a college degree, this recognition is a reminder that public universities can be exceptional.”

This year, for example, UMBC is launching a competition that will encourage faculty to reimagine what it means to teach and learn; challenge students to take an active role in their educations; fuel creativity and entrepreneurship; and transform classrooms into laboratories of the mind. The work will be supported by grants from the new Hrabowski Fund for Innovation and will build on our longstanding commitment to combining the best of research and teaching.

UMBC offers the personal attention of a liberal arts college within the setting of a major research institution. Our 13,000 students come from more than 150 countries and take full advantage of the educational, business, cultural and recreational resources of Baltimore and Washington, D.C.

Congratulations to our faculty, staff, students, alumni and supporters who make UMBC a leading university!

This article originally appeared on UMBC’s website.

Ocean City Bus Trip

(seb)

Saturday, September 15, 2012

Bus departs The Commons Circle @ 8:30am

All Guests = $15

Ticket #: SOLD OUT!

Humanities Without Apology

Office of Institutional Advancement

Wednesday, September 19, 2012

7:00pmm

Performing Arts & Humanities Building, Proscenium Theater

All Guests = FREE

(No ticket numbers available)

New York City Bus Trip

(seb)

Saturday, September 22, 2012

Bus departs The Commons Circle @ 8:00am

All Guests = $30

Ticket #: 56 of 106

King's Dominion Bus Trip

(seb)

Saturday, September 29, 2012

Bus departs The Commons Circle @ 11:00am

All Guests = $35

Ticket #: 8 of 49

Renaissance Festival Bus Trip

(seb)

Saturday, October 6, 2012

Bus departs The Commons Circle @ 10:30am 

All Guests = $20

Ticket #: 4 of 49

Homecoming Comedy Show: BJ Novak

(seb)

Saturday, October 13, 2012

8:00pm

RAC

All Guests = $10

Ticket #: 113 of 2000

Midnight Premiere: Paranormal Activity

(seb)

Thursday, October 18, 2012

Bus departs The Commons Circle @ 11:00pm

All Guests = $5

Ticket #: 1 of 260

Hershey Park Bus Trip

(seb)

Saturday, October 20, 2012

Bus departs The Commons Circle @ 12:00pm

All Guests = $35

Ticket #: 4 of 48

CSEE Colloquium

A Novel Dynamic Task Scheduling Environment
for High Performance Distributed Systems

Tyler Simon

Faculty Research Assistant, UMBC

1:00pm Friday, 21 September 2012, ITE 227, UMBC

The number of concurrently executing tasks required for a single application to perform at the petascale is on the order of hundreds of thousands. Given current manycore hardware trends, future peta- and exa-scale class systems will require applications to run tasks on the order of hundreds of millions to billions. To address the problem of creating, running and managing jobs of this scale, both from a system user and administration perspective we have developed, ARRIA, an Autonomic Runtime for Resource Intensive Applications. ARRIA uses a decentralized bag of tasks and workload scheduler that increases individual job priorities based on weighed factors that are of interest to the application programmer or the system administrator. ARRIA is designed to run millions of independent tasks reliably and efficiently without explicit message passing from the user. In previous work, using the ARRIA scheduler for scientific MapReduce workloads, we have shown a 2.1x speedup over the Hadoop Fair Share scheduler. We investigate novel scheduling parameters and strategies that guarantee efficient job execution for a wide range of realistic and simulated workloads with both user and administrator objectives, such as increased throughput and maximized utilization with minimal wait times for specific job classes. Finally our experiments investigate the long tail phenomenon for mixed workloads and the overheads incurred for increased system size.

Mr. Simon has undergraduate degrees in Computer Science and Philosophy with a Master of Science in Computer Science from the University of Mississippi, he is currently pursuing a PhD in Computer Science at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. Mr. Simon has worked professionally in the high performance computing (HPC) field for over a decade. In 2005 he earned a Department of Energy graduate research fellowship at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where he worked for in the Computer Science and Mathematics Division developing and implementing the Freeloader distributed storage system. Mr. Simon has worked as a computational scientist for the Department of Defense High Performance Computing Modernization Office based at the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center in Vicksburg, MS, evaluating both current and future HPC system requirements for applications of interest to the Department of Defense. Since 2009 Mr. Simon has been a computational scientist and manager of HPC user services at the NASA Center for Climate Simulation at Goddard Space Flight Center and is currently a Faculty Research Assistant at the University of Maryland Baltimore County working at the NSF Center for Hybrid Multicore Productivity Research. Mr. Simon’s research involves the study of dynamic distributed runtime environments, parallelization strategies and scheduling of large scale scientific applications for current petascale and future HPC architectures.

For more information and directions see http://bit.ly/UMBCtalks.