Project Description and Goals

The objective of this PASI is to introduce young researchers to Methods in Computation-Based Discovery (CBD). In quest of solutions to major problems (e.g., biodiversity, modeling of natural systems, water ecology, and so on), researchers across the natural and social sciences as well as the humanities and arts are generating massive and/or highly complex data sets that extend well-beyond humans’ capacities to perceive or analyze without sophisticated technological augmentation. CBD allows researchers to gather, transform and analyze data from a range of sources, including, for example, sensors, video archives, telescopes, and supercomputers. Researchers today need both access to advanced computational resources and sophisticated skills in data acquisition, management, transformation, visualization, analytics, and preservation. For example, sophisticated visualization tools and techniques enhance human understanding of extreme, complex and/or abstract data sets, making it easier to see patterns and relationships and to form or test hypotheses.

The Institute will be offered over a ten-day period at the Universidad del Valle de Guatemala, East of Guatemala City, from July 15 through July 26, 2013 through a joint effort of five umbrella organizations: (1) the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE); (2) the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), including the Blue Waters Petascale Supercomputer project, the Institute for Computing in Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences (I-CHASS), and the Advanced Visualization Lab (AVL); (3) the Advanced Research and Technology Collaboratory for the Americas (ARTCA); (4) the Latin American Cooperation of Advanced Networks (RedCLARA); and (5) the Organization of American States (OAS). These organizations believe collaboration to be essential to build strong international partnerships that will be fostered by course presenters and participants. OAS, ARTCA, NCSA and XSEDE have already made a commitment to establish a strong Latin America-US partnership with RedCLARA. This summer course is among the key elements in building a partnership that reflects growing interest in international, collaborative research between Latin American and US research teams, as well as among high performance computing centers.

The Institute will focus on CBD technical and analytical methods and help about 40 researchersapply these to their own research. Our key goals are to (1) expand participants’ knowledge of high performance computing (HPC) and specialized tools and techniques that support CBD involving massive or complex data sets; (2) provide hands-on experience in exploring large and complex data sets using easily accessible desktop open source tools; (3) bring researchers from underrepresented populations into the CBD field; and (4) foster new collegial friendships that stimulate both national and international co-operative partnerships among the presenters and attendees.

Selected participants will have their round trip airfare, accommodation, meals and workshop expenses fully covered for the length of the PASI, thanks to a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF).