Monday, October 27, 2014

Date: Nov 3, 2014. Steve Lantz: Parallel MATLAB: the Parallel Computing Toolbox, MDCS, and Red Cloud

Steve Lantz is a Senior Research Associate working at the Cornell Center for Advanced Computing with research interests in numerical modeling, fluid dynamics and parallel computing.

MATLAB can be very useful as a tool for data analysis and interaction. In the typical scenario, you simply run it on a single-user computing resource like a laptop, controlling it through some convenient combination of scripts, commands, and the GUI. But what happens when your intended analysis starts to take days to run, instead of hours? Or what if your script starts crashing because you have exceeded your local memory?

The Parallel Computing Toolbox (PCT) gives you features that can help you overcome these performance and memory limitations. First, it allows you to write code that may take better advantage of the multiple cores on your local machine, or perhaps even its GPU. If that is insufficient, PCT also allows you to connect your local MATLAB client to remote resources based on the MATLAB Distributed Computing Server (MDCS) software. These remote resources become an extension of your local client, so that you can do large-scale, batch-style processing straight from your laptop. Many of the same PCT strategies that you use to enhance local execution are also able to exploit MDCS; furthermore, you can use a whole cluster’s memory in an aggregated fashion.

In this talk, Dr. Lantz will give a quick overview of the various capabilities provided by PCT. He will look at how scripts can be scaled up from your multi-core laptop all the way to cluster-scale MDCS resources. Finally, he will present CAC’s Red Cloud with MATLAB service as an on-campus source of the extra cycles and memory that you may sometimes require to get your work done. The process of connecting your client to CAC (or any similar MDCS-based service) will also be described.

Date: Nov 3, 2014
Time: 11:00 AM
Location: Weill hall, Room 121

Slides

Thursday, October 2, 2014

Date: Oct 13, 2014. Julia Goodrich: Conducting a microbiome study

Julia Goodrich is a PhD student in the lab of Dr. Ruth Ley in the Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics and the Department of Microbiology at Cornell University.

Human microbiome research is an actively developing area of inquiry, with ramifications for our lifestyles, our interactions with microbes, and how we treat disease. Bacterial and archaeal 16S rRNA gene sequence data from complex microbial communities present statistical and computational challenges. She will present some of the standard techniques currently used to characterize microbial communities.


Date: Oct 13, 2014
Time: 11:00 AM
Location: Weill hall, Room 121

Slides