Statewide Users Group conference highlights OSC resources, client research

Research using Ohio Supercomputer Center resources continues to break new ground, and OSC clients continue to gain more high performance computer power and a better experience.

Thursday’s Statewide Users Group (SUG) spring conference once again brought OSC representatives face-to-face with clients and the research being done on their supercomputer clusters. SUG is a volunteer group composed of the scientists and engineers who provide OSC’s executive director with program and policy advice and direction to ensure a productive environment for research.

Nearly 100 attendees gathered at the Ohio Technology Consortium building for the conference, which featured a keynote address from NVIDIA’s Jonathan Bentz, breakout sessions on a variety of topics and the ever-popular poster and flash talk competitions. Participants presented 24 posters and 10 flash talks with winners receiving 5,000 resource units of time on OSC systems while runners-up gained 2,500 resource units.

 “I thought the conference was terrific. It just keeps growing,” said Brian Guilfoos, HPC client services manager at OSC. “We had great participation, people seemed very engaged and excited about what we’re talking about. We had a lot of interesting things to share.”

OSC staff delivered presentations that touched on a new client portal project, hardware and software updates and the new graphic processing units (GPUs) recently made available to clients. GPUs are specialized processors based on technology developed for game consoles. They are an especially efficient option when doing simple operations on a huge amount of data at the same time, as is done to create screen graphics.

The 160 new NVIDIA Tesla P100 GPUs, based on the Pascal architecture, were a topic throughout the conference. Bentz—senior solutions architect with NVIDIA—discussed current advances in GPU hardware and software. According to Bentz, these advances directly impact accelerated applications in HPC and have been a catalyst in the rapid advancement of deep learning technologies.

“If you’re using AI (artificial intelligence), you’re participating in deep learning,” Bentz said. “AI and HPC (high performance computing) have a lot to offer each other.”

The breakout sessions also included a workshop on the GPUs, which were recently installed on the Dell/Intel Owens Cluster.

Later in the day, OSC gave clients a snapshot of its client portal project, which is expected to go live in October.

“The client portal project is probably one of the more important projects this year,” Guilfoos said. “It will allow clients to get better quality of service. We’re going to be able to automate a lot of the things we do so we get faster turnaround on requests. And clients will be able to go in and look at their data and better understand how they’re using the services.”

The flash talk and poster sessions continued to be an incredibly popular feature of the SUG conference.

The Ohio State University’s Ryan Lundgreen won the poster competition for his presentation, titled “Heat Transfer and Deposition in Gas Turbine Engines.”

“Our lab does a lot of work with gas turbine engines, both experimental and CFD (computational fluid dynamics),” Lundgreen said. “I wanted to highlight all the efforts we’re doing with CFD. We couldn’t do this work without OSC. Experiments are great but a lot of the time we just see the before and after and we don’t get the detailed physics.”

Ohio State’s Melanie Aprahamian claimed runner-up for her poster, titled “Incorporation of Mass Spectrometry Covalent Labeling Data into Rosetta Protein Structure Prediction.”

Sandip Mazumder, from The Ohio State University, took first place for his flash talk titled “Phonon Boltzman Transport Equation-Based Modeling of Time Domain Thermo-Reflectance Experiments.” In Mazumder’s study, the experiments are simulated using large-scale parallel computations of the phonon BTE in a two-dimensional computational domain, according to his abstract.

Ohio State’s Gregory Wheeler was the runner-up for his flash talk, titled “Identification of Carnivory in Plants via Genomic Functional Annotation.”

The fall SUG conference is being planned for October.

Flash Talks Participants:

• Chengyu Li, The Ohio State University, Computational Investigation of Fruit Fly Aerodynamics in Forward Flight
• Josquin Daron, The Ohio State University, EpiTEome: Simultaneous Detection of Transposable Element Insertion Sites and their DNA Methylation Levels
• Xiao Fang, The Ohio State University, Measuring the University with WFIRST
• Xiche Hu, University of Toledo, Theoretical Study of Molecular Determinants for ATP-Binding in Proteins - A High Level Quantum Chemical Analysis
• Sandip Mazumder, The Ohio State University, Phonon Boltzmann Transport Equation Based Modeling of Time Domain Thermo-Reflectance Experiments
• Chi-Ta Yang, The Ohio State University, Atomistic Understandings of Nanoporous Materials for Energy-Related Applications

• Gregory Wheeler, The Ohio State University, Identification of Carnivory in Plants via Genomic Functional Annotation
• Zhenlu Li, Case Western Reserve University, eComputational Modeling Reveals that Signaling Lipids Modulate the Orientation of K-Ras4A at the Membrane
• Madashanka Manathunga, Bowling Green State University, Modeling the Photodynamics of 11-cis Retinal Chromophore in Solution
• Jeremy Phifer, Miami University, Prediction of Solubility of Non-Electrolyte Solutes using MOSCED Parameterized by SMD and SM8

Poster Participants:

• Yoelvis Orozco-Gonzalez, Bowling Green State University, QM/MM Geometry Optimization of Chromophore-Protein Complexes Using the ASEC Free Energy Gradient
• Xuchun Yang, Bowling Green State University, Probing the Vibrational Phase Isotope Effect on the Photochemistry of Vision
• Keshab Bashyal, Bowling Green State University, Role of Bond Ionicity in Correcting the Band Gap of ZnO Using DFT+U
• Sajjad Afroosheh, Bowling Green State University, Molecular Recognition Using Surface Raman Spectroscopy: DFT Study
• Zhenlu Li, Case Western Reserve University, eComputational Modeling Reveals that Signaling Lipids Modulate the Orientation of K-Ras4A at the Membrane
• Chi-Ta Yang, The Ohio State University, Atomistic Understandings of Nanoporous Materials for Energy-Related Applications
• Xiaofeng Zhuang, The Ohio State University, Construction and Application of the Draft Genome of Taraxacum kok-saghyz, an Alternative Natural Rubber Resource
• Pratik Dhakal, Miami University, Calculation of Infinite Dilution Activity Coefficient Using MOSCED: Expansion of the MOSCED Solvent Database to Amides
• Jeremy Phifer, Miami University, Prediction of Solubility of Non-Electrolyte Solutes Using MOSCED Parameterized by SMD and SM8
• Chung Hyun Lee, The Ohio State University, The Analysis of Time-Harmonic Electromagnetic Interactions with Large-Scale Complex Platforms
• Ryan Lundgreen, The Ohio State University, Heat Transfer and Deposition in Gas Turbine Engines
• Akshay Paropkari, The Ohio State University, Stability of Salivary Microbiome
• Se-Woon Hong, The Ohio State University, CFD Simulations of Fate and Transport of Pesticide Droplets Discharged from Air-assisted Sprayers in Orchards
• Jacob Bowman, The Ohio State University, Using Molecular Dynamics to Investigate Troponin C Evolution
• Zhongqiu Wang, The Ohio State University, A Speech Enhancement Alogrithm by Iterating Single- and Multi-Microphone Processing and its Application to Robust ASR
• Melanie Aprahamian, The Ohio State University, Incorporation of Mass Spectrometry Covalent Labeling Data into Rosetta Protein Structure Prediction
• Jian Ren Lim, The Ohio State University, Atomistic Understandings of the Effects of Force Fields on their Predictions of CO2 Adsorption Properties in All-Silica Zeolites
• Jeffrey Ethier, The Ohio State University, Analyzing the Structure and Entanglements in Absorbed Pairs of Hairy Nanoparticles Using Molecular Dynamics Simulations
• Justin Seffernick, The Ohio State University, Modeling Surface Induced Dissociation to Improve Protein-Protein Docking
• Kevin Krymowski, The Ohio State University, Engineering 2D Materials with Functional Molecules
• You Rao, The Ohio State University, First Principle Study of Twinning Formation in Ni3Al
• Veronica Balatti, The Ohio State University, tsRNA Profiling in Cancer
• Xiaojin Wang, The Ohio State University, Big Data in Food Marketing: Prospects and Challenges
• Elan Weiss, The Ohio State University, Ab-Initio Study of Point Defects in Hexagonal Boron Nitride