Welcome HIPACC council members!

Below is an email sent to the UC-HIPACC Council (on 2/1/10) summarizing a webconference held on 1/26/10.

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Dear HIPACC campus representatives,

The web conference last week was attended by Eliot Quataert (Berkeley),
Mike Norman (San Diego), Peter Nugent (LBNL), Peng Oh (Santa Barbara),
James Bullock (Irvine), Nina McCurdy (respondible for the new HIPACC web
pages), and me (as HIPACC director). Steve Furlanetto was unable to
attend at the last minute. The EVO web conferencing system (which also
allows telephone participation) seemed to work ok. I filled in Sandy
Faber (Santa Cruz) afterward.

I asked whether people want to consider renaming our new center, but
everyone seemed happy to keep the name on our proposal, High-Performance
Astro-Computing Center, possibly adding UC in front: UC-HIPACC.

Everyone also seemed happy with the plans for the 2010 Astro-Computing
summer school on galaxy simulations. For this and other aspects of
HIPACC see http://hipacc.ucsc.edu ; the current version of the web page
for the school is http://hipacc.ucsc.edu/html/2010SummerSchool.html .
We are finishing getting our online summer school application system
working, and hope to start advertising the school this week. As I said
in my previous email, we expect to be able to subsidize ~15 UC
participants from our HIPACC funds, and we have been advised to apply to
NSF and possibly DOE for funding for additional participants. Please
tell relevant grad students, postdocs, and faculty about the school and
encourage them to apply.

We discussed the program of small grants for travel and lodging for
collaborative research involving two or more UC campuses or lab groups,
and everyone seemed happy to follow the plans in our successful HIPACC
proposal (which is at
http://physics.ucsc.edu/~joel/MRPI-HIPACC-Proposal.pdf -- see
Accountability): "Small travel grants enable Center scientists, grads,
and postdocs to travel easily and spontaneously between Center nodes.
We propose to grant all travel grants up to $1000 per person on a first
come-first-served basis simply by submitting a brief letter to the
Director describing the plan and purpose of the travel. Grants above
this amount and group travel grants to support larger working groups
will be evaluated by the Executive Committee via email or electronic
meetings. Starting in Year 2, applicants must state whether they have
previously received travel funds and the benefits that were realized."
The proposal made clear that HIPACC will not support salaries or
computing hardware. Mike Norman asked about ~$5K for UC participants in
an Enzo simulation code training session, Eliot Quatert asked about
funding for a ~months visit to another UC campus for research, and I
asked about funding for UC participants in the annual galaxy workshop at
UCSC, and everyone agreed that all of these would be appropriate. I
have started the process to hire the HIPACC Administrator, and I will
work with that person to develop a simple HIPACC grants application system.

We need to appoint a HIPACC Executive Committee, which according to the
proposal will consist of the Director, Associate Director, and two
Coordinators, one each from northern and southern California. Mike
Norman and Peter Nugent have volunteered. Please let me know if you are
willing to serve.

Please also send me astro-computing images and (links to) videos for our
web pages, and information on people and projects at your campus or
lab. I would also welcome any additional comments or advice from you.

Thanks,

Joel
--
Prof. Joel Primack, HIPACC Director
Physics Department
University of California
Santa Cruz, CA 95060 USA
office: 831 459 2580
cell: 831 345 8960