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FollowNERSC’s First ‘Data Day’ Showcases HPC Tools for Data-Intensive Science
August 24, 2016
More than 100 HPC enthusiasts attended NERSC’s first-ever “Data Day,” a two-day event designed to bring together researchers who use, or are interested in using, NERSC systems for data-intensive science.
Held August 22-23 at Berkeley Lab, Data Day featured a series of talks and tutorials on the latest data-focused tools for scientific computing. Training sessions on machine learning, Python, Spark, visualization tools, the Cori Burst Buffer and data management were complemented by presentations from scientists already taking advantage of these tools in their own research. A poster session highlighted work and work-in-progress that uses NERSC resources for experimental and observational science, while a half-day “hackathon” gave attendees the chance to put their new knowledge to work creating a custom workflow.
“We were extremely pleased to see the strong turnout for Data Day, not only in numbers--both in person and via live streaming--but also in enthusiasm,” said Annette Greiner, a web application developer in NERSC’s Data and Analytics Services (DAS) group who co-organized the event with Debbie Bard, a big data architect also in the DAS group. “You never know when you're creating a first-of-its-kind event how it will be received, so it's been very gratifying to see such deep engagement between speakers and attendees. Our speakers bravely gave a surprisingly high number of live demos, which made the move to the hackathon on day two easy and logical. The attendees didn't skip a beat, and during the hackathon we again had lively discussions with presenters as well as collaborative hacking.”
Videos of all the talks are available on the Data Day webpage.
About NERSC and Berkeley Lab
The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) is a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science User Facility that serves as the primary high performance computing center for scientific research sponsored by the Office of Science. Located at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, NERSC serves almost 10,000 scientists at national laboratories and universities researching a wide range of problems in climate, fusion energy, materials science, physics, chemistry, computational biology, and other disciplines. Berkeley Lab is a DOE national laboratory located in Berkeley, California. It conducts unclassified scientific research and is managed by the University of California for the U.S. Department of Energy. »Learn more about computing sciences at Berkeley Lab.
