UC-HiPACC—The First Four-Plus Years: 2010–2014

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1UC-HiPACC: The First Four+ Years 20102014

UniversityofCalifornia

HighPerformanceAstroCompungCenter

TheFirstThreeYears20102012

UniversityofCalifornia

HighPerformanceAstroCompungCenter

TheFirstFour+Years:20102014

The University of California High-Performance AstroComputing Center (UC-HiPACC),

based at the University of California, Santa Cruz,is a consortium of all the University of California campusesplus three Department of Energy laboratories:Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory,Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory,and Los Alamos National Laboratory.

UC-HiPACC supports or co-sponsors activities in computational astronomyto further collaborations in fundamental research.It also raises awareness of computational astronomyespecially the pioneering research throughout the UC systemthrough education and public outreach.

UC-HiPACC was founded in January 2010

with a five-year grant from the University of California.

This report summarizes the Centers principal programs, activities, and achievements

during its first four-plus years, 20102013 and into 2014.


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Collectively, the faculty and laboratoriesthroughout the University of California systemarguably comprise the largest and most powerfulcomputational astrophysics group in the world.The purpose of the University of California High-Performance AstroComputing Center (UC-HiPACC) is to realize the full potential of UCs world-leading computational astrophysics system-wide.

UC-HiPACC accomplishes that purpose in four ways.First, it is multidisciplinary: it links theoretical and obser-vational astrophysicists, physicists, earth and planetaryscientists, applied mathematicians, and computer scien-tists across all UC campuses and three DOE national la-boratories, to take advantage of Californias leadership incomputers and related fields. Second, UC-HiPACC iscollaborative: it fosters researchers interaction both withone another and with rapidly increasing observationaldata, through mini-grants for travel, support for workinggroups and meetings, and other mechanisms. Third, UC-HiPACC is enabling: it empowers researchers to utilizeefficiently new supercomputers with hundreds of thou-sands of processorsboth to understand astrophysical

processes through simulation, and to analyze thepetabytes (and soon exabytes) of data that will flow fromthe new telescopes and supercomputers. Finally, as partof a public state institution, UC-HiPACC isfully aware of

an obligation to return valueto California and tothe public: Its outreach activities include develop-ing educational materials made available throughwebsites, planetarium shows, videos, popular mag-azines, and other media, and distributing visualiza-tions from astrophysical simulations that are bothbeautiful and educational.

Support for UC-HiPACC, totaling $350,000 per year for

five years, comes from the office of the University ofCalifornia Vice President for Research and GraduateStudies, Steven Beckwith, through the Multicampus Re-search Programs and Initiatives (MRPI) competition.

UC-HiPACCs Key ActivitiesIn its first four-plus years, UC-HiPACCs has created andfunded two major, important, and original activities.

One, in education, is the annual advanced InternationalSummer School on AstroComputing (ISSAC) for grad-uate students and postdoctoral fellows. Held every yearsince 2010 and focusing on various special topics in com-putational astronomy, the schools have attracted many ofthe best young astrophysicists from the UC system, theUnited States generally, and leading foreign centers.

The other, in research, is the major international Assem-bling Galaxies of Resolved Anatomy (AGORA) pro-

ject to ensure reproducibility among the leadinghigh-resolution galaxy simulation codes (computerprograms), and to help improve the codes so thatsimulated galaxies look and act increasingly like

Plenty of time is allotted for formal and informal collaborations at working meetings supported by UC-HiPACC. Discussion images are from 2013AGORA workshop, 2013 Institute for the Philosophy of Cosmology, and 2011 Galaxy Workshop; group photo is from 2013 Galaxy Workshop.ONCOVER (clockwise): Images from 2012 Computational Astronomy Journalism Boot Camp, 2013 AGORA workshop, 2011 advanced InternationalSummer School on AstroComputing, and 2013 Galaxy Workshop (at a session of the American Institute of Physics Division of Particles and Fields).

AllphotosinthisreportarebyTrudyE.

Bellex

ceptasnoted

University of California

High-Performance AstroComputing CenterThe First Four+ Years: 20102014


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the annual Santa Cruz Galaxy Workshop at UCSC eachAugust, co-organized by Primack and Hebrew UniversityProfessor of Physics Avishai Dekel. In 2013, the five-day

Galaxy Workshop attracted 90 participants from morethan two dozen institutions worldwide, including fromfour UC campuses. As usual, slides and video recordingsof all the talks were posted on the UC-HiPACC website.The 2014 Galaxy Workshop will be August 1115.

UC-HiPACC has also sponsored or co-sponsored specialtopical conferences. Most recently, in February 2014, itco-sponsored with the UC Southern California Center forGalaxy Evolution (CGE) a conference at the BeckmanCenter of the National Academies at UC Irvine, entitledTheNear-Field, Deep-Field Connection. In March2014, it cosponsored with Lawrence Berkeley NationalLaboratory a conference Computational Astrophysics2014-2020: Approaching Exascale; the twin goals ofthis meeting were to discuss the future of astrophysics ingeneral and the future of UC-HiPACC specifically.

In 2013, UC-HiPACC provided staff support for a three-week Institute for the Philosophy of CosmologyatUCSC, with funding from a Templeton Foundation grantto Rutgers University. Participants included 28 advancedgraduate students and postdocs (two-thirds having back-grounds mainly in philosophy of science and the rest inphysics/astrophysics) and 20 faculty lecturers.

Previously, in 2012, UC-HiPACC co-sponsored the Bar-yon Cycle Conference with the CGE at the BeckmanCenter at UC Irvine. In the three-day conference, 130

theorists and observers (including ones from seven UCcampuses) focused on the cycle of gas through galaxiesand the intergalactic medium across cosmic time. In De-cember 2010, UC-HiPACC organized a major conferenceon The Future of AstroComputingat UC San Diegoand the San Diego Supercomputer Center, for two majorpurposes: to clarify the big issues for the next five yearsin astrophysical computation and data, and to bring lead-ers in the field together to meet with key computationalastrophysicists, especially from the University of Califor-nia and other West Coast institutions including Stanford

University. Earlier that year, UC-HiPACC co-sponsoredan Enzo User Workshopat UC San Diego on the cos-mology simulation code Enzo.

Shaping CareersIn 2013, for the fourth year, UC-HiPACC sponsored twofunding cycles for small grants in support of computa-tional astrophysics research that includes collaborationsamong two or more UC campuses and/or the affiliatedDOE labs. For grad students, such travel and collabora-tions can be a career-shaping opportunity: they can learnfrom other leading faculty members, master skills nottaught on their own campuses, line up writers for crucialletters of recommendation, and form other contacts andalliances that can powerfully influence their futures. In2013, UC-HiPACC funded six collaborative researcheffortslinking six campuses and one DOE lab, and co-

funded equipmentwith matching funds at one campus.In 2013 UC-HiPACC also supported use of the SeeVoghscientific web conference platform for computationalastrophysics research on the UC campuses and affiliatedDOE laboratories.

In the first eight funding cycles from early 2010 throughlate 2013, 33 small grants (grants under $10,000) wereawarded to researchers at seven UC campuses and twoDOE labs, total-ing over$125,000. Someof these grantshelped supporttravel between

campuses andlabs, includingmini-conferences.Small grantshave also sup-ported UC un-dergraduateresearch pro-jects in compu-tational astro-

As shown by these images from UC-HiPACCs2013 advanced International Summer Schoolon AstroComputing (ISSAC) at UC Santa Cruz,tours of visualization laboratories, formal

presentations, hands-on instruction, informalcoaching, stimulating discussions, and relaxa-tion with fellow grad students and postdocsand with faculty are all part of the ISSACexperience. The 2014 ISSAC will be at UC San

Diego/San Diego Supercomputer Center.

PhotobyAdlerPlanetarium

As part of its outreach efforts to K-12 studentsand the general public, UC-HiPACC providesdramatic astrocomputing visualizations to major

planetariums, such as the Bolshoi cosmologicalsimulation, shown on the dome of the GraingerSky Theater of the Adler Planetarium in Chicago.


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physics or provided matching funds for purchases ofcomputational hardware.

OutreachUC-HiPACC has helped provide content from cosmologi-cal simulations to several major planetariums. In 2010, itcontributed to the showLIFE: A Cosmic Storyat theMorrison Planetarium of the California Academy of Sci-ences in San Francisco. In 2011, simulation outputs ofblack holes (from UCSC astronomy professor EnricoRamirez-Ruiz) and cosmology (from Joel Primack) wereprominently featured in The Searcher, the inaugural showof the Adler Planetariums new Grainger Sky Theater,with 20 advanced projectors creating an image in thedome 8000 pixels across. UC-HiPACC worked closelywith the scientific staff of both planetariums. UC-HiPACC Public Outreach and Scientific VisualizationCoordinator Nina McCurdy connected the computationand visualization team at NASA Ames Research Centerwith the Morrison and Adler Planetariums and with visu-alization experts at the National Center for Supercompu-ting Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois. In

2013 Primack was an advisor to the American Museumof Natural History on their Hayden Planetarium showDark Universe, which opened in March 2014 in SanFrancisco at the Morrison Planetarium of the CaliforniaAcademy of Sciences and will be seen at planetariumsaround the world.

In the summers of 2011 and 2012, UC-HiPACC support-ed UCSC Education graduate student Zoe Buck (advisedby UCSC Prof. Doris Ash) to conduct pre- and post-showinterviews with Adler viewers on the effectiveness of TheSearcher. In August 2012, Buck presented her findings atthe Astronomical Society of the Pacifics annual educa-tion and public outreach conference Communicating Sci-

ence in Tucson, Arizona.

Since 2010, UC-HiPACCs site http://hipacc.ucsc.edu/has posted meeting announcements plus photographs,videos, and slides from speakers and presenters at UC-HiPACC events. One innovative program that debutedin 2012 was a series called AstroShorts: free approxi-mately semi-monthly one-page features on research incomputational astronomy specifically designed to be re-printed in the monthly newsletters of amateur astronomi-cal societies; they immediately proved to be popular withastronomy clubs around the country.

In January 2014, Steve Zaslaw was hired as webmaster tomanage the websites archives of lectures, visualizationsand reference material, succeeding webmaster EricMaciel. He is also focused on increasing the visibility ofUC-HiPACC on the internet and through Facebook, Twit-ter, and other social media. Other accomplishments in-cluded the creation and publication of two comprehen-sive Wikipedia articles on the Bolshoi CosmologicalSimulation and UC-HiPACC.

Significant for both research and outreach, AstroVizthe UC-HiPACC Visualization Gallerydebuted on thewebsite in late 2012, making astrocomputing simulationimages and videos more easily accessible to the scientificcommunity, educators, journalists, and the general public.AstroViz is hosting many of the best astronomical visual-izations developed anywhere over the past two decades.

Also in 2012, Ramirez-Ruiz and Primack created a 3DAstronomical Visualization Laboratory (nicknamed the3D VizLab) with partial support from UC-HiPACC. The3D VizLab is developing and testing innovative new 2Dand 3D scientific visualization software, which will bemade publicly available. Nvidia Corp. donated their newQuadro K6000 GPU to the 3D VizLab, and zSpace, Inc.,

The 20 participants accepted to UC-HiPACCs June 2012 boot campComputational Astronomy: From Planets toCosmos (group photo also shows several ofthe faculty members) included magazine feature writers, online writers and new media specialists, several public information officers from majoruniversities, an Emmy Award-winning documentary filmmaker, and several international journalists. The boot camp offered two days of intensemini-courses at UC Santa Cruz and an on-campus field trip to the UC Observatories instrument labs; a third day featured field trips to visualiza-tion facilities at NASA Ames Research Center and California Academy of Sciences. Seven of the at least 10 resulting online and radio stories and

print features (in English, Czech, German, and Spanish) are shown, along with a poster (top left) announcing the boot camp.

PosterbyNinaMcCurdy


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donated their new holographic 3D visualization productzSpace. Previously, 3D VizLab director Nina McCurdy

represented Primacks group and UC-HiPACC in theNASA exhibit at Supercomputing 2010 (the annual inter-national conference for high-performance computing,networking, storage, and analysis) in New Orleans, LA;at Supercomputing 2011 and at the Astro-Viz Workshop2011 (both in Seattle, WA, but in different months); andat Supercomputing 2012 in Salt Lake City, UT. In 2012,McCurdy presented astro-visualizations at a Goethe Insti-tut art/science symposium in San Francisco.

Alex Bogert, who became 3D VizLab director in June2013, has developed a portable visualization softwarepackage called pyRGBA, with the help of two computerscience undergraduates, John Holdener and Nicholas

Smith, who helped build major components. The softwareincludes a hardware volume renderer that can easily beattached to a remote web browser. It generates 2D or 3Dsimulation output visualization videos in real time on thelatest GPUs, including supporting remote streaming, tomake it possible for more people in the scientific commu-nity to create visualizations. Using pyRGBA, Bogert hasmade visualizations of the large scale structure of darkmatter from the Bolshoi simulations, which can be seen inreal-time 3D on the VizLab hardware, output as a highdefinition video, or streamed to a remote users browser.This software is being used in the AGORA galaxy simu-lation comparison project, and will be made public.

As a major outreach initiative, in June 2012, UC-HiPACC sponsored the first science/engineering journal-ism boot camp to be held on the West Coast in astrono-my, and the first ever held anywhere on astrocomputing.The boot camp, called Computational Astronomy:From Planets to Cosmos, consisted of two full days offormal sessions at UC Santa Cruz, in which 15 facultyfrom six UC campuses and DOE labs presented one-hourmini-courses on key topics in computational astronomy.A third day featured field trips to the Hyperwall of NASAAmes Research Center and the visualization facilities of

the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco.The 20 science and engineering journalists in all mediarepresented publications and productions that collectivelyreach over 10 million readers andviewers worldwide. At least 10feature stories resulting from sub-jects introduced in the boot camp

appeared in 2012 and 2013.

In 2012, Primack wrote a featurearticle on the Bolshoi cosmologicalsimulation for the semi-popularIEEE Spectrum magazine. Sincejoining UC-HiPACC in June 2011,Senior Writer Trudy E. Bell haswritten or coauthored five featurearticles on aspects of computation-al astronomy for other semi-popular magazines. In 2012, oneon big data was published in TheBentand oneon the Bolshoi cos-mological simulation co-authored

with Primack was the July coverstory in Sky & Telescope). An ac-count of the journalism boot campappeared as a feature in the winter2013 issue of ScienceWriters, thequarterly magazine of the profes-sional National Association of Sci-ence Writers. Now in press forpublication in 2014 is another cov-er story for Sky & Telescope, thisone on CANDELS, the largest-everHubble Space Telescope survey, co-authored with Primack, University of California Ob-servatories director Sandra M. Faber, CANDELS co-

leader Henry C. Ferguson, and David Koo (UCSC). Justsubmitted to Scientific American is a feature on the extra-galactic background light, coauthored with Primack andAlberto Dominguez from UC Riverside. Bell has alsowritten six UC-HiPACC press releases on computationalastronomy around the UC campuses (one of which led toa 2012 feature story A Box of Universe, by BrianHayes inAmerican Scientist) and written and designed adozen AstroShorts. She also regularly aggregates pressreleases about astronomy research around the UC-HiPACC consortium.

UC-HiPACCs website home page (upper left) is appealing to studentsand educators. In 2012, UC-HiPACC debuted one-page AstroShorts(upper right), which describe research in computational astronomy at oneof UC-HiPACCs 12 consortium sites, for reprinting in astronomicalsociety newsletters. UC-HiPACC staff also were involved in the publica-tion of feature articles for the general public (column at lower right).


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Joel R. PrimackDistinguished Professor of Physics

DirectorOffice: Room 318 Interdisciplinary Science Building (ISB), UCSC, Santa Cruz, CA 95064Phone: (831) 459-2580 Fax: (831) 459-3043 e-mail: [email protected]://scipp.ucsc.edu/personnel/profiles/primack.htmlJoel R. Primack specializes in the formation and evolution of galaxies and the nature of dark matter,which makes up most of the matter in the universe. He is one of the principal originators and devel-opers of the theory of Cold Dark Matter, the basis for the standard modern picture of structure for-mation in the universe. With support from the National Science Foundation, NASA, and the Depart-

ment of Energy, he uses supercomputers to simulate and visualize the evolution of the universe and the formation ofgalaxies, comparing the predictions of theories to the latest observational data. He is the author, with Nancy E.Abrams, of popular books on modern cosmology: The View from the Center of the Universe (2006) and The New Uni-verse and the Human Future (2011).

Trudy E. Bell, M.A., Senior Writer

(567) 623-6233 e-mail: [email protected] or [email protected] Twitter: @trudyebellhttp://www.trudyebell.comTrudy E. Bell (M.A., history of science/American intellectual history) is a science /technology jour-nalist whose 19 top awards include the David N. Schramm Award of the American AstronomicalSociety (2006). A former editor for Scientific American andIEEE Spectrum magazines, she is now acontributing editor for Sky & Telescope magazine. She has written or co-authored a dozen books,including a picture history The Great Dayton Flood of 1913 (2008), the Smithsonian Science 101volume Weather(2007), the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers millennium bookEngi-neering Tomorrow (2000), four books for middle-school ages about the solar system, and five books

on bicycling. She has observed five total solar eclipses.

F. Alex Bogert, Scientific Visualization CoordinatorDirector of 3D Astronomical Visualization Laboratory(831) 708-8759 e-mail: [email protected]

Office: Room 332 Interdisciplinary Sciences Building, UCSC, Santa Cruz, CA 95064Alex Bogert (B.S., physics) creates scientific visualizations and acts as a liaison between the aca-demic and high tech communities; his 2013 senior thesis focused on particle physics simulation andanalysis. He is focused on creating interactive tools for scientists to display their data, including re-mote interactive display of visualizations and animations. He built and administered the UCSC com-puter cluster used to process Large Hadron Collider data, and worked at CERN in Geneva perform-ing particle physics simulation analysis.

Sue Grasso, M.A., AdministratorOffice: Room 339 Natural Sciences II, 1156 High Street, UCSC, Santa Cruz, CA 95064(831) 459-1531 e-mail: [email protected] Grasso (M.A., education) manages and supervises the operations of UC-HiPACC. She serves asliaison with collaborating institutions, coordinates events, and handles purchases, payments, and trav-el reimbursements. Her previous experience includes marketing for the University Press at both Yaleand UC Berkeley, teaching at the junior high and high school levels, and coordinating GATE (GiftedAnd Talented Education) and professional development programs for Santa Cruz City Schools.

Steve Zaslaw, M.S., Webmaster

(831) 295-6636 e-mail: [email protected]

Steve Zaslaw (A.B., physics, M.S., computer science) is focusing on increasing the visibility of UC-

HiPACC on the internet and through Facebook, Twitter, and other social media. A 25-year veteran of

the computer industry, including ten years in Unix system management, for several years he has been

webmaster and editor at Watsonville Wetlands Watch and Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at

UCSC.

UC-HiPACC Director and Staff

Reporttextandlayout:TrudyE.

Bell,

[email protected]

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UC-HiPACC—The First Four-Plus Years: 2010–2014

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