Members from CRACS visit the United States

Members from CRACS visit the United States

A Delegation of four researchers from CRACS (Fernando Silva, Vítor Santos Costa, Inês Dutra and Álvaro Figueira) met between 3 and 7 March with researchers in charge of the collaboration programmes between Portuguese and American researchers.

20th April 2008

On 3 and 4 March, the Delegation visited the Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), seeking to establish partnerships with the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department (ECE) and the School of Computer Science (CS). This visit immediately resulted in a co-supervision by Vítor Santos Costa (CRACS) and Markus Pueschel (ECE) of the doctoral studies of an American student. There were also conversations with Frank Pfenning and Manuela Veloso, both from CS, with the aim of establishing more partnerships.

The visit ended after an important meeting with José Moura from ECE and Director of the collaboration Programme with CMU (http://www.cmuportugal.org/). During the meeting, it was possible to discuss some of the programme’s guidelines, its implementation and efficiency.

Between 5 and 7 March 2008, the Delegation, together with the Directors of the “Portugal UTAustin CoLab” project (http://www.utaustinportugal.org/), and also with reporters from the Portuguese press (Público and Expresso newspapers), visited the several units of the University of Texas at Austin.

The agenda started with a meeting with Ray Mooney and his students from the Department of Computer Science, followed by a one-hour lecture on Statistical Relational Learning carried out by Vítor Santos Costa from the University of Porto.

During the afternoon, Álvaro Figueira and Fernando Silva, aided by Prentiss Riddle, met with Miles Efrom and Don Turnbull from the School of Information in order to exchange opinions and ideas regarding the establishment of joint projects in the area of “Semantic Digital Libraries”.

On the morning of 6 March (Thursday), all delegations met with David Gibson at IC2, where the professor presented the history of the Institute and explained its purpose. Afterwards, he guided the guests on a tour. Throughout this meeting, it was possible to discuss the use of the expression “Advanced Computing”, in the context of this collaboration area of the CoLab programme.

According to the Programme’s director on the Portuguese side, Alberto Proença, “Advanced Computing” should be defined as “High performance Computing and distributed/grid methodologies and techniques to solve computational engineering and science problems”. Since this definition is incomplete in the Portuguese context, it was decided that efforts should be made in order to find a more flexible definition where the industry and other communities are included as well.

For that, David Gibson highlighted that, on the Portuguese side, this project’s main goal is to improve the capacity of Portuguese institutions and create job positions. Therefore, it is also necessary to create measures to assess the programme’s results.

Also during the morning, there was a meeting with Keshav Pingali who presented ICES (Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences) – a multidisciplinary institute that gathers researchers from several departments of UTAustin. Several subjects related to research proposals (information, forms, deadlines), graduate students and reports were discussed. At the same time, the group was informed of the TACC (“Texas Austin Computer Center”) and of the FOCS programme (“Friends of Computer Science” – from IBM and Dell, for instance) in order to help raise funds. The possibilities of creating grants for Portuguese students in American companies were also discussed.

Afterwards there was a visit to ICES, to the Department of Computer Sciences and to the Visualization Group. The visits were followed by a lunch at the UT Club where the postdoctoral students from UTAustin met with Marta Vieira, representative of Ydreams in Texas.

In the afternoon, the Delegation met with Tinsley, director of ICES, Bill Beckner from the Department of Mathematics, and Chandrajit Bajaj from the Department of Computer Sciences. Chandrajit Bajaj is responsible for research in visualisation, an area that combines multidisciplinary projects involving Chemistry, Engineering, Fluid Dynamics and Mathematics, among others.

Also during the afternoon, the Board of the “Advanced Computing” programme, set up by Alberto Proença (University of Minho and Director of the Programme), Pedro Medeiros (UNL, and co-director of the programme), Luís Silva (University of Coimbra, and co-director of the programme) on the Portuguese side, and David Gibson, Prentiss Riddle and Keshav Pingali, on the American side, held a meeting in order to define essential guidelines for the Programme’s operation.

On the morning of 7 March (Friday), they had the opportunity to visit the Austin Technology Incubator (ATI), where they were welcome by the Director, Isaac Barchas, who carried out a lecture on ATI’s economic and procedural model for business incubation, based on work subsidisation (thus replacing capital subsidisation). This subsidy comes from students and professors from UT, generally in the areas of economics and marketing, in the form of project teams. Thus, ATI becomes a laboratory in the area of business leveraging.

ATI’s main areas for business incubation are IT, wireless networks, “clean technologies” and biosciences. Currently, ATI is accepting proposals from two types of companies: the companies that are already established and the companies that want to be located in Austin. Admissions are based on an assessment of the answers to a form and on a presentation.

During the afternoon, they had the opportunity to meet TACC (Texas Advanced Computing Center). The visit started after a presentation carried out by TACC’s director, Jay Boisseau, regarding the services provided by the centre (services provided at a national level and research). It was highlighted that, although there are researchers with an office in the building, there are no classes being taught there. The main research activities carried out in TACC are HPC (namely computational biomedicine), data analysis and data mining, distributed and collaborative computing (portals and gateways, middleware for scheduling, workflows, job orchestration), with special emphasis on “computational science”.

It is important to observe that, in order to open the doors to a wide range of researchers, UTAustin has adapted some of its CS courses in order to allow students with different backgrounds to have the necessary know-how to handle the system. Thus, introduction courses to computing, visualisation and parallel computing, for instance, were reformatted and they now exist in two versions – one for CS and Engineering, and another one for students with other backgrounds).

After that, there was a visit to the (currently) largest computer in the world – the RANGER –, which includes more than 60 000 CPUs and 123 TBytes of primary storage.

Álvaro Figueira – Center for Research in Advanced Computing Systems (CRACS)

BIP, April 2008