MICROSOFT KICKS OFF THE APP CHALLENGE AT UMBC

Students actively enrolled at an accredited educational institution that grants high-school or college/university or equivalent degrees including home schools between September 5^th 2012 and Oct 26^th 2012 can submit up to 3 Windows 8 applications to become eligible for $25 gift certificate. Students (up to 3 in a team) are required to work with an MSP to envision, build and submit an App to the Windows Store.

Join your campus Microsoft Student Partner at The App Challenge Kickoff on Friday, September 14^th during 12-1pm in ITE 459 for details on the challenge and how to sign up. 

Kickoff Facebook Event

Sign up for competition

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.

CSEE Colloquium

Computational Brain Connectivity Using Diffusion MRI

Ҫağatay Demiralp
Brown University

1:30pm Tuesday, 18 September 2012, ITE 325B

In my talk, I’ll present examples from modeling, visualization, and analysis of diffusion-derived structural brain connectivity. I’ll first introduce two interactive visual analysis tools that use novel planar representations of the brain. I’ll show that two-dimensional map representations that are viewed, interacted with, and enriched like online geographical maps result in faster and more accurate exploration of brain connectivity.

Second, I’ll introduce neural tract-based probability density functions, including joint densities of tract arc length and scalar diffusivity measures, as biomarkers. I’ll demonstrate their simple and effective use in detecting individual and group differences. I’ll also describe a new coherence measure for neural tract clusters based on geometric slicing. I’ll show that a refinement of neural tract clustering based on this measure leads to a significant improvement in clustering results that is not possible directly using standard methods.

Third, I’ll describe a new coloring method for three-dimensional line fields based on Boy's real projective plane immersion. This coloring method is smooth and one-to-one, except on a set of measure zero. I’ll demonstrate its use in visualization of neural tracts and cross-sectional diffusion MRI brain images.

Çağatay Demiralp is a PhD candidate in computer science at Brown University. His research interests are in characterizing patterned structures in data both qualitatively and quantitatively using topological, geometric as well as statistical approaches. While computational brain connectivity using diffusion MRI has been the focus of his thesis research, he has published on a diverse set of topics ranging from surface deformation to semantic segmentation. He received Brown University’s Brain Sciences Research award, IEEE Vis Best Poster award, and ASSH Best Layout and Best Scientific Presentation awards.

The following part-time positions have been posted within the past week to UMBCworks. Login to your account (via the link in the Jobs & Internships topic in myUMBC) and find details and application instructions as well as hundreds of other job postings!

9253567 - Bussers/Hostess/Food Runners - Aida Bistro
9253551 - Part-Time Teacher - C2 Education Centers
9253673 - Associate Producer - WBAL-TV
9253668 - QA Test Designer - eOriginal, Inc.

The following full-time positions have been posted within the past week to UMBCworks. Login to your account (via the link in the Jobs & Internships topic in myUMBC) and find details and application instructions as well as hundreds of other job postings!

9253592 - Statistical Consultant - Dun & Bradstreet
9253581 - Project Administrator - eDaptive Systems
9253603 - CBS Radio - Daypart Manager
9253663 - Acquisitions Assistant - Brookes Publishing Co, Inc.
9253599 - Copy/Scan Operator - Courthouse Copy Service

On-Campus Interviews offer students a chance to conveniently interview for professional positions on campus.  Employers travel to our campus for the specific purpose of interviewing preselected students for currently open positions.  This is a great opportunity to interview with employers specifically interested in UMBC students and offers the advantage of a smaller applicant pool.  Interviews take place during the fall and spring. The logistics (viewing positions, applying, signing up for interview time slots, etc.) are all handled via UMBCworks.

Don't miss out on employers coming to UMBC to recruit YOU this fall! The following is a list of employers coming to conduct on-campus interviews with application deadlines in the next month.

**United Space Alliance
Interviewing on 09/21/12 (Deadline to apply via UMBCworks: 9/7/12)
Positions: Engineering Staff I - ADCO, CRONUS, ETHOS and SPARTAN Flight Controllers
Majors: Physics, Mathematics, Computer Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering

**Dupont
Interviewing on 10/1/12 (Deadline to apply via UMBCworks:  9/17/12)
Positions:  Associate Investigators - R&D Engineers; Associate Investigators - R&D Scientists
Majors:  Chemistry, Biochemistry, Engineering

**ARINC Incorporated
Interviewing on 10/5/12 (Deadline to apply via UMBCworks: 9/21/12)
Positions:   Junior Software Engineer, Junior Integration Engineer, Junior Communication Analyst, Junior Network Engineer
Majors:  Information Systems, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, Electrical Engineering

**Carrier Corporation
Interviewing on 10/9/12 (Deadline to apply via UMBCworks:  9/25/12)
Positions:  Carrier Commercial Sales Engineer/Technician)
Majors:  Chemical Engineering, Civil Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering

A full list of On-Campus Interviews scheduled this fall is available on our website calendar and on UMBCworks, please check regularly for any updates or changes that may occur.