This Birds of a Feather (BoF) session aims to build a community of graduate student researchers who study Computer Science Education (CSEd) during SIGCSE TS and continue beyond the conference. Given the interdisciplinary nature of CSEd research, graduate students may enter the field from varied departments such as computer science, education, information, and engineering education. Therefore, many graduate students lack a CSEd research community within their own institution. This BoF session will provide a space for SIGCSE TS graduate students to build their community across institutions, both during and after the conference. In this session, we will discuss key topics to improve graduate study experiences, including relationships with advisors, research topic selection, mentoring, and navigating conferences. The second half of the session will focus on discussing post-BoF activities to keep students engaged throughout the year, including future paper outlining and peer review sessions, as well as inviting former graduate students to share their career paths and experiences. During the BoF session, attendees will meet fellow graduate students in the same research field and brainstorm future activities. They will then have the opportunity to participate in follow-up sessions based on their ideas.

This Birds of a Feather (BoF) session serves to build a community of graduate student researchers in Computer Science Education (CSEd) at SIGCSE TS and beyond. Many graduate students lack a CSEd research community within their own institution. This BoF session will serve to provide a space for SIGCSE TS graduate students to build their community across institutions, both during and after the conference. During the session, we will discuss the successes and challenges that come with being a CSEd graduate student, including work/life balance, advisor-student relationships, and developing collaborations. Attendees will leave with an opportunity to connect with other CSEd graduate students beyond the conference through a dedicated CSEd graduate student Slack channel.

X-ray photon correlation spectroscopy (XPCS) is a unique tool to study the dynamical properties in a wide range of materials over a wide spatial and temporal range. XPCS measures the correlated changes in the speckle pattern, produced when a coherent x-ray beam is scattered from a disordered sample, over a time series of area detector images. The technique rides on “Big Data” and relies heavily on high performance computing (HPC) techniques. In this paper, we propose a highspeed data movement architecture for moving data within the Advanced Photon Source (APS) as well as between APS and the users' institutions. We describe the challenges involved in the internal data movement and a GridFTP-based solution that enables more efficient usage of the APS beam time. The implementation of GridFTP plugin as part of the data acquisition system at the Advanced Photon Source for real time data transfer to the HPC system for data analysis is discussed.

In preparation for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report, the climate community will run the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project phase 5 (CMIP-5) experiments, which are designed to answer crucial questions about future regional climate change and the results of carbon feedback for different mitigation scenarios. The CMIP-5 experiments will generate petabytes of data that must be replicated seamlessly, reliably, and quickly to hundreds of research teams around the globe. As an end-to-end test of the technologies that will be used to perform this task, a multi-disciplinary team of researchers moved a small portion (10 TB) of the multimodel Coupled Model Intercomparison Project, Phase 3 data set used in the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report from three sources---the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF), Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC)---to the 2009 Supercomputing conference (SC09) show floor in Portland, Oregon, over circuits provided by DOE's ESnet. The team achieved a sustained data rate of 15 Gb/s on a 20 Gb/s network. More important, this effort provided critical feedback on how to deploy, tune, and monitor the middleware that will be used to replicate the upcoming petascale climate datasets. We report on obstacles overcome and the key lessons learned from this successful bandwidth challenge effort.

The GridFTP extensions to the File Transfer Protocol define a general-purpose mechanism for secure, reliable, high-performance data movement. We report here on the Globus striped GridFTP framework, a set of client and server libraries designed to support the construction of data-intensive tools and applications. We describe the design of both this framework and a striped GridFTP server constructed within the framework. We show that this server is faster than other FTP servers in both single-process and striped configurations, achieving, for example, speeds of 27.3 Gbit/s memory-to-memory and 17 Gbit/s disk-to-disk over a 60 millisecond round trip time, 30 Gbit/s network. In another experiment, we show that the server can support 1800 concurrent clients without excessive load. We argue that this combination of performance and modular structure make the Globus GridFTP framework both a good foundation on which to build tools and applications, and a unique testbed for the study of innovative data management techniques and network protocols.

A theoretical analysis of the overall mean squared error (MSE) in hybrid video coding is presented for the case of error prone transmission. Our model covers the complete transmission system including the rate-distortion performance of the video encoder, forward error correction, interleaving, and the effect of error concealment and interframe error propagation at the video decoder. The channel model used is a 2-state Markov model describing burst errors on the symbol level. Reed-Solomon codes are used for forward error correction. Extensive simulation results using an H.263 video codec are provided for verification. Using the model, the optimal tradeoff between INTRA and INTER coding as well as the optimal channel code rate can be determined for given channel parameters by minimizing the expected MSE at the decoder. The main focus of this paper is to show the accuracy of the derived analytical model and its applicability to the analysis and optimization of an entire video transmission system.