CENTER FOR COMPUTATION & TECHNOLOGY

The LSU Center for Computation & Technology is hosting the 17th annual Mardi Gras Conference, February 11-14, 2010, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The Mardi Gras conferences take place annually, concentrating each year on a different computational theme of current relevance. The 17th annual Mardi Gras Conference will bring together individuals working on one specific broad area of Computational Science: Computational Materials and Methods. The audience and cast of individual speakers will be a mix of computational material scientists and applied mathematicians.

The goal is to promote the cross-fertilization of ideas, foster information exchange, enable community building and expose graduate students and postdocs to the newest methods and advances. The conference will feature tutorial presentations, posters, in-depth discussions, and demonstrations in addition to several invited speakers. As always, the conference concludes with an afternoon trip to New Orleans for one of the city's largest Mardi Gras parades, Endymion.

NEWS

Conference lodging is now open for reservations.

Registration Closed

Submissions Closed

SCOPE

Solids with strong electronic correlations and materials with complex structure have the potential to produce novel devices and materials to fuel technological growth. Understanding these materials is a substantial challenge, since the paradigms of mean field properties, such as Fermi liquid theory and BCS superconductivity in the case of electronic materials, fail to describe the behavior of these materials. Also, understanding how complex structure predicts the material behavior, such as the case of protein structure or nanoparticles, is a challenge since these show unique sensitivity to form and size that cannot be understood from bulk properties. We have seen tremendous strides in computing power that have lead to far more accurate calculations of the properties of these classes of materials.

Large scale computation has been a major contributor to theoretical understanding of these systems, which in part is due to improvements in computing hardware. Far more important than the growth in raw computing power are the advances in computational algorithms that have enabled us to reorder the calculations to take advantage of the inherent speedups of parallel or distributed computing. A beginning graduate student or postdoc in computational materials science must learn not only about the physics of these materials, but also the computational algorithms that permit him or her to calculate their properties. Unfortunately, often the experts in each field do not interact as much as they could, and so advances in one area are not broadcast to workers in other disciplines.

For more information or questions about the conference, email: mardi_gras_10(at)cct(dot)lsu(dot)edu.

Mardi Gras Conference 2009

Virtual Worlds: New Realms for Culture, Creativity, Commerce, Computation and Communication

February 19-21, 2009

Sheraton Conference Center Baton Rouge, Louisiana, USA

The LSU Center for Computation & Technology's 16th annual Mardi Gras Conference will bring together individuals working with virtual worlds in diverse areas such as computer science, information systems, accounting, management, psychology, sociology, philosophy, music, mass communication and many others. This conference will mark the first occasion where people working in this broad and far-reaching area will have a chance to collaborate and hear about what others in business and academia are working on. The conference will feature workshops, panel sessions, posters and papers in addition to several invited speakers.

News

Registration is open!

Conference lodging is now open for reservations.

Registration Fees are set: Earlybird student registration (before January 9), $120.00 USD; Earlybird registration (before January 9), $180.00 USD; Late/on-site registration, $280.00 USD; Late/on-site student registration, $180.00 USD.

Keynote Speakers Announced: Noshir Contractor, Tony O'Driscoll, Benjamin Duranske, and Eric Call.

Early-bird registration has been extended to January 16th.

Book your lodging before January 19th to ensure receiving special conference room rate.

Tentative Schedule is now on-line!

Scope

The LSU Center for Computation & Technology , in cooperation with the LSU Arts, Visualization, Advanced Technologies and Research (AVATAR) Initiative , is hosting the 16th annual Mardi Gras Conference, February 19-21, 2009, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The Mardi Gras conferences take place annually, concentrating each year on a different computational theme of current relevance. This year's theme will be: “Virtual Worlds: New Realms for Culture, Creativity, Commerce, Computation and Communication.” As always, the conference concludes with an afternoon trip to New Orleans for one of the city’s largest Mardi Gras parades, Endymion.

Although the concept of virtual worlds has deep roots within the world of networked computing, it is only within the past few years that virtual worlds have captured the imagination of so many in such diverse fields as art, music, business, philosophy, psychology, sociology and mass communication. Moreover, there have been very few events that have tried to organize a broad interdisciplinary perspective around virtual worlds, their adoption by various constituencies, and their use by artists, musicians, historians, designers, educators, archivists, computer scientists, gamers, businesses and entrepreneurs.

The 2009 Mardi Gras Conference will bring together individuals working in this broad area in an attempt to foster information exchange, enable community building and project future trends across the multitude of disciplines that have engaged this technology. This event can be seen as a follow-on to the Emory University workshop in February 2008 on “Virtual Worlds and New Realities in Commerce, Politics, and Society.” The 2009 Mardi Gras Conference will feature workshops on the various technologies, panels, posters and papers in addition to several invited keynote speakers.

For more information or questions about the conference, email: mardi_gras_09@cct.lsu.edu

Mardi Gras Conference 2008

The Center for Computation & Technology at LSU, in cooperation with ACM SIGAPP, is hosting the 15th Mardi Gras Conference, 30 January - 2 February 2008, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The Mardi Gras conferences take place annually, concentrating each year on a different computational theme of current relevance. This year's theme will be: from lightweight mash-ups to lambda grids: Understanding the spectrum of distributed computing requirements, applications, tools, infrastructures, interoperability, and the incremental adoption of key capabilities.

News

Photos now on-line.

Scope

The field of distributed computing has been recognized for decades but only in the last few years has there been a vast expansion of distribute. computing approaches and tools that are gaining serious, wide-spread use. This wide-spread use goes far beyond computational science and engineering, to include business, government, art, and popular culture. While the fundamental requirements of distributed computing are generally understood, the ubiquitous availability of networks and servers has enabled the development of many different tools to suit the needs of different communities. Besides what have become traditional grids, there is growing use of lambda grids, enterprise service buses, service-oriented architectures, and Web 2.0. All of these approaches enable the sharing of resources in "virtual organizations" but with widely differing support for discoverability, reliability, security, management, quality-of-service, etc. In all cases, interoperability at the infrastructure level and at the application domain level is a critical issue.

While network connectivity has become ubiquitous, and has enabled the creation of virtual organizations, it is still an open issue how tightly coupled these organizations can be. Bandwidth and latency determine how interactive and collaborative distributed participants can work together. Hence, advanced networks such as lambda networks (dedicated optical networks) have the potential for enhancing interactiveness on a large-scale, and actually being an enabling technology for application domains that require tight coupling.

The goal of Mardi Gras 2008 is to improve our understanding of the drivers for all of these technologies, how they relate to one another, and how user communities can transition from simpler approaches, like Web 2.0 mash-ups, to more full-service grids, when better discovery, reliability, security, etc., are needed -- while achieving sufficient interoperability -- and how tightly coupled virtual organizations can be.

To this end, we are seeking the best, most insightful papers on all of these technologies, and the application domains that are driving their requirements and development.

Topics include, but are not limited to:

• Application case studies in all areas, e.g., geospatial, disaster response/management, science, engineering, commerce, finance, art, etc.
• Innovative and advanced scenarios, e.g., dynamic data-driven, interactive, collaborative, tele-immersive, adaptive, etc.
• Tools for developing and deploying applications, e.g., middleware, toolkits, portals, problem solving environments, production environments, virtual organizations, etc.
• Application APIs and programming models
• High speed and optical networks
• Distributed algorithms
• Workflow management
• Resource management and scheduling
• Education

Schedule

Workshops will be held on Wednesday, 30 January. Tutorials will be held on the morning of Thursday, 31 January. Conference sessions, including a poster session, will be held on the afternoon of Thursday, 31 January, all day Friday, 1 February, and on the morning of Saturday, 2 February. On Saturday afternoon an optional excursion will take participants to join in the celebrations for Mardi Gras in New Orleans, returning to Baton Rouge on Sunday morning at approximately 2 a.m.