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Annual Report

University of California High-Performance AstroComputing Center(UC-HIPACC) 2010 Annual Report

In 2010 UC-HIPACC organized an International AstroComputing School on Galaxy Simulations at UCSC in August and a major conference on the Future of AstroComputing at the San Diego Supercomputer Center at UCSD in December.  In addition, UC-HIPACC provided partial support for the Enzo workshop at UCSD in spring 2010 and the UCSC Galaxy Workshop in summer 2010, and there were two funding cycles for small grants in support of collaborations between UC campuses and the affiliated DOE labs.  UC-HIPACC also helped provide content from cosmological simulations for the planetarium show “LIFE: A Cosmic Story” at the Morrison Planetarium of the California Academy of Sciences (which opened in November) and for the opening show at the new Sky Theater of the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, which will be the most advanced digital planetarium in the world.

The 2010 UC-HIPACC Astro-Computing Summer School on Galaxy Simulations took place at UCSC from Monday July 26 through Friday August 13.  The six main and six additional lecturers at the school included many of the world leaders in galaxy simulations. The applicants were well qualified, since they were required to list relevant background and astrophysics computational experience, and to arrange for recommendation letters from their references.  We accepted 60 applicants with special consideration being given to underrepresented minorities, women, and persons with disabilities.   HIPACC director Primack submitted proposals for support of this school to NSF and DOE; NSF Astronomy supported our proposal with $20,000 for participant expenses.  With the help of this NSF funding, we supported a total of 39 participants’ lodging and a portion of their travel expenses.  We provided supercomputer accounts on the Triton system at the SDSC for all the students, and the relevant codes and outputs were made available to all the students on this system.  All the lectures were video-recorded, and the slides and videos are available on the web (http://hipacc.ucsc.edu/html/2010SummerSchool_archive.html).

Two Funding Cycles:

Summer 2010 funding Cycle
Four individuals were funded with small travel grants.

Winter 2010 funding cycle
Six individuals were funded with small travel grants.

2010 Conferences and the International AstroComputing Summer School

UC-HIPACC funded $5000 for the Enzo conference at UCSD in spring 2010.  UC-HIPACC also provided about $6000 toward the annual UCSC Galaxy Workshop, August 16 through 20, which participants in the Galaxy Simulation school were invited to attend. 

The Future of AstroComputing Conference sponsored by UC-HIPACC was held in December 16 - 17, 2010 at San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), San Diego, CA. The goal of this conference was to clarify the big issues for the next ~5 years in astrophysical computation and data, and to bring leaders in the field together to meet with key computational astrophysicists, especially from the University of California and other West Coast institutions including Stanford. All of the lectures at this very successful conference were recorded, and slides and videos are on the web (http://hipacc.ucsc.edu/FOA2010.html).