The Fellows program partners Campus Champions with Extended Collaborative Support Services (ECSS) staff and research teams to work side-by-side on research projects. The Fellows develop a high level of expertise within a particular aspect of what XSEDE has to offer for them to then share with the students, administrators, staff and faculty on their respective campuses. The Fellows are: Hadrian Djohari (Case Western), Justin Oelgoetz (Austin Peay State), Brian Couger (Oklahoma State) and Neranjan Edirisinghe (Georgia State). For more information on the Fellows and the projects on which they are working, please visit: https://www.xsede.org/ccfellows/projects/2014.

ACM Application Deadline – August 16, 2014 SIGHPC Application Deadline - September 7, 2014 There are two travel grant opportunities available for students (undergraduates through doctoral) for attending SC14. These grants will provide up to $600US for students in North America and up to $1200US for students outside of North America towards attending this year’s conference in New Orleans, Louisiana. Up to 3 grants may be awarded to female students by ACM-W and up to 5 grants will be awarded by SIGHPC. SIGHPC grants require student membership in SIGHPC; this is not a requirement for ACM-W grants. Additional information and links to the application sites are available at www.sighpc.org/resources/travel. Please address questions concerning these grants to students@sighpc.org.

New York Times

At Carnegie Mellon University, 40 percent of incoming freshmen to the School of Computer Science are women, the largest group ever. At the University of Washington, another technology powerhouse, women earned 30 percent of computer science degrees this year. At Harvey Mudd College, 40 percent of computer science majors are women, and this year, women represented more than half of the engineering graduates for the first time. These examples provide a road map for how colleges can help produce a more diverse group of computer science graduates. They also help answer a controversial question: Does the substance of computer science instruction need to be adjusted to attract women, or does recruitment and mentorship? To read further, please visit http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/18/upshot/some-universities-crack-code-in-drawing-women-to-computer-science.html?emc=eta1&_r=0.

TIME Magazine

Google has promised to do all it can to recruit more women into Silicon Valley, and now the company is launching a $50 million initiative to teach young girls how to code. In May, Google announced that only 17% of its tech employees are women. There will be 1.4 million computing jobs available in 2020, but only 400,000 computer-science graduates from U.S. universities to fill them. Part of the problem is that only 12% of computer-science degrees go to women, and in order for Silicon Valley to survive and thrive, it must be able to recruit more engineering talent from the other 50% of the population. Realizing the extent of the problem, Google is launching Made With Code, a website that includes coding projects, stories from female technology role models and resources for parents. Google has invested a lot more than just money in the project. The company conducted research to determine why girls are opting out of learning how to code: the number of female computer-science majors has dropped dramatically since 1984, when 37% of computer-science degrees went to women. To read further, please visit http://time.com/2901899/google-made-with-code-girls-in-tech/.

IDG News Service

IBM researchers are developing handheld computers with the power of today's supercomputers. The researchers recently demonstrated a smartphone-size prototype microcomputer that integrates central-processing units and circuitry typically spread out over large motherboards. In addition, they plan to develop a "datacenter in a box" holding several of these computers, which could lead to even smaller computers, says IBM researcher Ronald Luijten. Eventually, IBM wants to build a version of its Watson supercomputer the size of a pizza box, containing a series of these microcomputers. IBM also is developing a system combining 128 computers into an application-size server that can deliver the same level of performance as servers that are four to 10 times larger. To read further, please visit http://cacm.acm.org/news/176496-ibm-wants-to-make-its-watson-supercomputer-as-small-as-a-pizza-box/fulltext.

HIV/AIDS has caused an estimated 36 million deaths, according to the World Health Organization, and remains a major menace worldwide. Today approximately 35 million people are living with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), including more than 1 million individuals in the United States. The tendency of HIV to mutate and resist drugs has made it particularly difficult to eradicate. Some treatments have shown progress in slowing or even stopping the progress of the virus, but no cure or vaccine has been discovered that can truly stamp out the disease. To read further, please visit http://www.huffingtonpost.com/aaron-dubrow/computing-a-cure-for-hiv-_b_5512311.html.

In the era of “Big Data,” the challenge of moving the vastly expanded data volumes created and needed by today’s researchers has become central. The old network—the equivalent of an overcrowded two-lane road—is giving way to a more flexible, software-defined network that manages itself and talks with users to help them work smarter. PSC has contributed to expanding and managing the hardware “lanes” and “merges” so that large-scale users can avoid the traffic jams—and just as importantly, avoid creating them. The Web10G collaboration between PSC and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications won an NSF grant to create a “dashboard” for networking users. Employing network data extracted by earlier Web10G work, the tool will allow nontechnical users to spot network slowdowns and report them to system administrators for repair. To read further, please visit http://www.psc.edu/index.php/biannual/934-building-a-21st-centry-data-highway.

For all the money and effort poured into supercomputers, their life spans can be brutally short – on average about four years. So, what happens to one of the world's greatest supercomputers when it reaches retirement age?  If it's the Texas Advanced Computer Center's (TACC) Ranger supercomputer, it continues making an impact in the world. If the system could talk, it might proclaim, "There is life after retirement!" "Ranger was the first supercomputer in open science to approach the petascale mark," said Happy Sithole (pronounced ‘see-toll-yah'), director of the Center for High Performance Computing (CHPC) in Cape Town, South Africa. "Now, it is starting projects that are important in building high performance computing in Africa."  To read further, please visit https://www.tacc.utexas.edu/news/feature-stories/2014/ranger-begins-new-life-in-africa.

ComputerWeekly.com

ComputerWeekly.com has named University of Southampton computer sciences professor Wendy Hall, a former president of ACM and an ACM Fellow, its Most Influential Woman in UK IT 2014. With more than 30 years in the academic side of information technology, Hall has a long list of accomplishments, including being part of the team that invented the Mirocosm hypermedia systems. Hall was the University of Southampton's first female professor of engineering, served as head of its School of Electronics and Computer Science, and was appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2009. In an interview, Hall says she feels the underrepresentation of women in IT needs to be treated as an industry issue, rather than simply as a women's issue. To read further, please visit http://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240223891/Interview-with-the-Most-Influential-Woman-in-UK-IT-2014-Dame-Wendy-Hall.

CCC Blog

We often hear about the dearth of women in computer science and engineering fields. Many organizations are working hard to attract and retain women in these fields. In an article titled 22 Most Powerful Women Engineers In the World, Business Insider showcases powerful women engineers.  From the article: “There’s a huge push these days to encourage more girls to learn to code and to hire more women engineers once they graduate. The tech industry knows it can’t fill all the jobs it has while discouraging half the population from joining the industry. It also knows that it can’t do a good job of designing new tech products for women if women aren’t part of the design process.” To read further, please visit http://www.cccblog.org/2014/07/10/22-of-the-most-powerful-women-engineers-in-the-world/.

August 25-26, 2014 – Stillwater, Oklahoma

This two-day in-person training will cover all aspects of visualizing data from a broad variety of domains. The training kicks off with an introduction to visualization followed by best practices when dealing with diverse data (abstract and spatial), demonstrating a variety of methods and techniques on those data sets and demonstrating a range of freely available software. For more information, please visit https://www.xsede.org/web/xup/course-calendar/-/training-user/class/290/session/443. For more information on VSCSE, please visit http://www.vscse.org/.