The Director of the Centre for High Performance Computing visits Wits electronics lab

The Director of the Centre for High Performance Computing (CHPC), Dr Happy Sithole and the Wits Deputy Vice-Chancellor for research, Prof. Zeblon Vilakazi have visited today the High-throughput Electronics Lab (HTEL) at the School of Physics. Some of our group members currently abroad connected via CERN's vidyo.

Dr. Sithole has shown great interest in the research activities of the students and young researchers of our team. The CHPC is interested in collaborating in the area of high-throughput computing with ARM processors and GPUs. One of the challenges that High-performance computing displays is the ability to move the high volumes of data to performant processors with low latency. The HTEL is devising solutions to this problem based on local designs. The involvement of the HTEL in the upgrade activities of the Tile Calorimeter of the ATLAS detector is a critical driver for these activities.

The function started by introducing Dr. Sithole to the group members and with a presentation about the main activities of the HTEL: FGPA-based electronics, high-throughput general purpose electronics, GPGPUs, ATCA systems, development of low cost computers and electronics radiation, high-throughput data analysis.

Below is a group picture taken at the HTEL. First row, centre, one can see Dr. Sithole, the Head of the School of Physics, Prof. John Carter and Prof. Vilakazi. Missing in the picture are Dr. Deepak Kar, Pablo Moreno, Thokozani Khumalo, Dr. Xifeng Ruan, Dr. Luis March, Shell-may Liao, Guillermo Hamity, Kehinde Tomiwa, the technical support staff and last, but far from least, Prof. Elias Sideras-Haddad.

Prof. Vilakazi addresses the students, referring to the HTEL as a "success story":

The rest of us are happy to listen:

Attended the "Big Switch On" event, the Boitumelong secondary school, the first school in School in South Africa going digital

Prof. Bea Lacquet, the Wits Deputy Vice Chancellor of Information, Knowledge and Infrastructure Management and me attended the "Big Switch On" event. The Boitumelong secondary school, in Tembisa, about 50 km north-east of Johannesburg:

http://www.boitumelong.co.za/

has become the first public school in South Africa to go digital. This was a high-profile event organised by the Member of the Executive Council (MEC) for Education of the Gauteng Province, Panyaza Lesufi and the Government of the Gauteng province. The Deputy President of South Africa, few Ministers and deputy Ministers, the  Premier of the Gauteng Government, city Majors and other personalities attended the event.

Managed to take a peak at some of the classes. One can see that each student is assigned a tablet and each class has digital boards. The school is connected to the backbone of Gauteng with a 1 Gb/s network, which is quite a bandwidth, taking into account the location of the school. This school, together with other 6 in the area will serve as models to roll over the implementation of connectivity and computers in the classroom. Gauteng has about 2100 state schools.

The tent was packed. Many enthusiastic students. Tons of fun, indeed.

MEC Lesufi opens the main event after plaque unveilings in different parts of the school and officials from central Government have taken their seats

There was even a bit of music

and some dancing

The Minister of Basic Education, Angelina Motshekga, addressing the audience and introducing the Deputy President of South Africa

The Deputy President of South Africa, Cyril Ramaphosa, addresses the audience.

Managed to grab the MEC's attention

Higgs (N)NLO MC and Tools Workshop for LHC RUN-2 at CERN

The  (N)NLO MC and Tools Workshop for LHC RUN-2 at CERN started on Wednesday, December 17th and it will run till Friday December 19th.

https://indico.cern.ch/event/345455/other-view?view=standard

The progress in MC development in the past year is impressive. Looking back 10 years ago progress is simply amazing.

Announcement of the Workshop on High Energy Particle Physics, iThemba LABS - Gauteng, February 11th - 13th, 2015.

Dear Colleagues

We are happy to announce that the Workshop on High Energy Particle Physics will take place at iThemba LABS - Gauteng, February 11th - 13th, 2015.

The goal of the workshop is to provide an opportunity for students and young researchers to give presentations and to write proceedings. A morning plenary session, followed by 15+10 minute presentations, shall be the format across our three days. Topics to be covered will be high-energy theory and phenomenology (heavy ions, pp, ep, ee, collisions), ALICE and ATLAS physics. We envision providing Honours and undergraduate students with the chance to give poster presentations.

The deadline for the submission of abstracts is January 15th, 2015. The deadline for submission of proceedings is February 28th, 2015.

The event will be catered. Funding is available for students outside the Gauteng Province for travel and accommodation arrangements. The deadline to apply for financial support is January 15th 2014.

More details are available at

http://hep.wits.ac.za/HEPPW2015.php

Best regards

The Local Organising Committee

Zinhle Buthelezi (iThemba LABS)
Alan Cornell (NITheP/Wits, Co-chair)
Andrew Hamilton (UCT)
Deepak Kar (Wits)
Bruce Mellado (Wits, Co-chair)
Elias Sideras-Haddad (Wits)
W. A. Horowitz (UCT)
Sahal Yacoob (UKZN)

Visiting iThemba Labs in Cape Town: Investigating capabilities of Single Even Upset studies with protons and neutrons

Milos Lokajicek, Ivo Polak, from the Institute of Physics of the Czech Academy of Sciences, and myself visited the beam-lines and halls of iThemba Labs in Cape Town. Siegfried Fortsch organised the visit. We met with nuclear physicists involved in single-event upset (SEU)studies for aerospace-related projects. We also met with the head of the accelerator division, Lowry Conradie. The aim of the visit is to learn about the capabilities and conditions for SEUs of electronics. In short:

Protons can be provided with energies up to 200 MeV and currents ranging between 0.5 nA and multiples of micro-A (which is far more than we need). Beams with 66 MeV can be provided on parasitic mode when ion implantation and medical physics do not use beams. Beams can be defocused to 1cm x 1cm with reasonable homogeneity.  The A-line is preferred for proton beams (see pictures below).

Monochromatic neutrons can be provided in the range between 40 and 200 MeV with fluxes that ranges between 4.7 10^4 cm^{-2} s^{-1} (at 66 MeV) and 4.6 10^{3} cm^{-2} s^{-1} (at 200 MeV). The beam size is about 10 cm x 10 cm. Dose measurements are provided by the lab. The D-line is preferred for neutron beams (see pictures below). It is important to note that the energy range provided is unique and the metrology community comes regularly to iThemba to perform measurements.

Below is a picture of the head of the accelerator division, Lowry Conradie. To the right, on the board is the schematic of the different facilities in the lab.

A close up of the facilities at iThemba - Cape. The "star" corresponds to the cyclotron.

Below is a picture of the run control

Siegfried Fortsch points to the current monitor. At the time of the picture over 200 micro-A of protons were being provided to the ion implantation folks.

Below is a picture of the A-line (preferred for proton studies). In blue is the vacuum chamber.

Quadrupole magnets in the A-line, upstream of the vacuum chamber

Below is a picture of the feedthroughs of the vacuum chamber on the A-line.

Opened the vacuum chamber in the A-line. Below is a future of the inside of the chamber. To the left is the orifice of the promo beam. At the centre is a possible location of the target. After discussion with experts placing the samples holders on one of the arms seems the preferred option.

A close-up of one of the arms where we will place the the sample holders. Siegie will pass the drawings for the workshop at Wits to design the holder.

Inside the hall of the D-line (neutron beam). Neutron flux measurements are provided by the lab.

Close-up of the table where the samples will be located on the D-line.

Below is a picture of the data acquisition system (analog) from the different halls and lines.

Many thanks to Siegie for setting this up!

Wits attending the Tile Calorimeter Upgrade week in Valencia, hands-on session

Oscar Kureba, Pablo Moreno, Robert Reed, Xifeng Ruan and myself are attending the the Tile Calorimeter Upgrade week in Valencia. Matthew Spoor had to take off back to SA due to visa restrictions and can't attend. Yesterday Oscar, Pablo, Robert and Xifeng gave a bunch of tutorials to the community, see the snapshot of the agenda. The hands-on session took place at the lab in Valencia and was attended by a number of Tile Calorimeter experts. This session was quite important to get useful feedback for future development.

Press release from the Wits Communications Office

http://www.wits.ac.za/newsroom/newsitems/201411/25213/news_item_25213.html

New Physics lab will change our world

BY ERNA VAN WYK

18 November 2014

The new state-of-the-art High-Throughput Electronics Laboratory (HTEL) in the Wits School of Physics is the exemplar for future scientific endeavours in South Africa.

The HTEL will not only play a big role in science and in developing high-end technologies, but it is also the blueprint for innovation where “like-minded scientists and colleagues who have a single-mindedness to change the world, will come together,” Professor Adam Habib, Wits Vice-Chancellor and Principal, said.

Speaking at the launch on Friday, 14 November 2014 – in the presence of leaders and representatives from the University, industry and the physics-related fields in South Africa, such as the SA-CERN Consortium, SKA SA, the CSIR, the Centre for High Performance Computing, and the Joburg Centre for Software Development, among others – Habib emphasised that the HTEL will show how scientists and universities in South Africa, and in Africa, can be “both globally competitive and nationally responsive”.

“The HTEL it is an institutional mechanism of a broader institutional community that spans nations, institutions, and sectors, and that will try to understand our world and change it,” Habib said. Listen to his address.

The new lab and facilities will be a platform for research and development of high-throughput electronics for the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Organization of Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva.

Professor John Carter, Head of the School of Physics, said with the high resurgence of interest in physics and physics-related research, and with Big Science coming to South Africa, there is a need to cope with the “explosion of data” and to develop a platform for processing huge amounts of information. Listen to his address.

The laboratory is designed to deal with the problem of Big Data related to the processing of large amounts of data needed to produce new discoveries, following the observation of the Higgs boson at the LHC, to which Wits physicists also contributed. The study of the Higgs boson will require about a 100 times more data than used for the discovery, announced in 2012 – a discovery that led to physicists François Englert and Peter Higgs being awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics. This poses new challenges to the Big Data problem and requires the development of new solutions.

One of the founding fathers of the Atlas project, Professor Peter Jenni, praised the Wits Atlas Group for the establishment of the HTEL. Speaking via a video-conferencing link from Geneva, Jenni said the lab is remarkable and will have benefits well beyond Atlas. Listen to his address.

The spin-offs will be even greater

The science and technologies being developed to deal with big data will also lead to the massive production of electronic devices by South African industries based on the designs produced in the HTEL. According to Professor Helder Marques, Dean of the Faculty of Science, the HTEL-project also shows why science and education needs more investment in South Africa. Listen to his address.

Professor Bruce Mellado from the Wits Atlas Group and the High Energy Physics Group (HEP) in the School of Physics led the way in establishing the HTEL at Wits. He is very passionate about the technologies that will be developed here: “The first direct spin-off is the development of low-cost computers for the South African educational system – both for schools and universities. We are already in touch with a number of schools that will test our first prototype hopefully starting in January or February next year.” Prototypes shown at the launch also demonstrated that they can run sophisticated applications such as running a conference facility and a 3D-printer.

Mellado, an expert on the Higgs boson and a member of the ATLAS Experiment at CERN, says Wits is helping to establish a synergy between two Big Science fields in South Africa - CERN/ATLAS SA and the SKA SA. The first project was in January this year when Wits hosted the first High Performance Signal and Data Workshop. Over a hundred scientists gathered together from the two fields, including a large student contingent. The HTEL will take this work forward. Listen to his address.

The spin-offs are not limited to the development of low-cost computers. The high-tech solutions that will come from the HTEL will be very important for science and technology. The HTEL is developing general-purpose devices that can handle the processing of very large amounts of data in a cost-effective and compact ways. These devices can be used in a wide range of industries in South Africa and abroad.

Pictures from the inauguration of the High-throughput electronics lab on November 14th

Erna Van Wyk, from the Wits Communication Team, has passed us some of the pictures that she took during the inauguration of the High-throughput electronics lab on November 14th. The lab was inaugurated by Prof. Adam Habib, Wits Vice Chancellor and Principal, who gave a smashing speech. Erna is making the audio available. Prof. John Carter, the Head of the School of Physics chaired the function. Prof. Helder Marques, the Dean of the Faculty of Sciences, also gave a great talk. Prof. Peter Jenni, former spokesperson of ATLAS and Dr. Irene Vichou, the Project Leader of the Tile Calorimeter of ATLAS attended the meeting remotely from Geneva. We were very pleased with their statements of support. The event took place at the Honours presentation room that is equipped with very a very nice conference facility.

Below some of the pictures:

Prof. John Carter opening the function:

Another view of Prof. Carter's address. One can see the at the centre of the picture, Prof. Peter Jenni, Dr. Irene Vichou connected from CERN together with some of our post-docs and close collaborators:

Prof. Adam Habib delivering his amazing speech:

Prof Helder Marques delivering another amazing speech:

We were honoured to have Prof. Justin Jonas representing the SKA:

Right before cutting the ribbon:

Right after Prof. Adam Habib cut the ribbon, students rush in to take positions for the demonstrations:

Mitch Cox talking to Prof. Adam Habib about his research in high-throughput electronics:

Prof. Adam Habbib addressing the students at the lab:

Matthew Spoor talking about his work on FPGAs to SA-CERN colleagues and a representative from Microsoft:

Harshna Jivan talking about the teams work on radiation studies:

Press release: LAUNCH OF THE NEW PHYSICS HIGH-THROUGHPUT ELECTRONICS LABORATORY

MEDIA INVITATION FOR PR NEWSWIRE FROM CLIENT WITS UNIVERSITY

ATTENTION: NEWS EDITORS AND SCIENCE REPORTERS

DATE: THURSDAY, 13 NOVEMBER 2014

LAUNCH OF THE NEW PHYSICS HIGH-THROUGHPUT ELECTRONICS LABORATORY

The Wits School of Physics invites all media to the launch of the High-Throughput Electronics Laboratory (HTEL) this Friday, 14 November 2014.

This state-of-the-art new lab and facilities at Wits will be a platform for research and development of high-throughput electronics for the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Organization of Nuclear Research (CERN). The laboratory is designed to deal with the Big Data problem related to the processing of large amounts of data needed to produce new discoveries, following the observation of the Higgs boson at the LHC.

This work would lead to the massive production of electronic devices by South African industry based on the designs developed at the High-Throughput Electronics Laboratory (HTEL).

Date: Friday, 14 November 2014

Time:  09:30 for 10:00

Venue:  P213 (Honours Presentation Room), School of Physics, Physics Building, Braamfontein Campus East

RSVP: Christina Thinane on 011 717 6848 or Christina.Thinane@wits.ac.za

All media are invited.

About the HTEL:

High-throughput electronics deals with the huge transfer of data at very high rates in challenging environments, such as those with a high level of radiation, possibly event upsets and other factors that may produce data corruption. To “read” this data, very fast decisions need to be made in order to select and modify the large amounts of data at high rates.

This laboratory will first of all serve the needs for upgrade of the ATLAS detector and more specifically, the Tile Calorimeter. This ATLAS sub-detector enjoys strong commonalities in the way data is transferred and how the off-detector electronics are designed.

But it is not only ATLAS that will benefit. South Africa’s flagship big science project, the SKA, also faces the same technological challenges related to high-throughput data flows with fast processing common to that of the ATLAS detector. Prototypes of fast-electronics and computing developed for the ATLAS detector could also be used by the SKA.

A spin-off of the design and prototyping work being done for the ATLAS project is the development of the Massive Affordable Computing (MAC) project. One of the limiting factors for harnessing large computing capabilities is the cost: High-performance computers are not cost-effective and need to be imported to the country. The idea behind this project is to develop prototypes for high-performance computing with cost-effective components for a very wide range of applications in research and industry. 

A first spin-off of the HTEL is the development of a mini-PC, catering to the needs of the educational system of South Africa. Few prototypes are currently available and are being tested at the HTEL. These incorporate power efficient and low-cost technologies. A number of these prototypes will be deployed to schools and universities in January-February for feedback. These mini-PCs could be manufactured in South Africa in quantities large enough to accommodate the needs of the educational system of the country.

Read more about this project and the work being done by the High Energy Physics Group at Wits University.

Ends

Issued by:

Erna van Wyk

Multimedia Communications Officer | Wits Communications 

University of the Witwatersrand

Contacts: +27 11 717 4023 

Email: erna.vanwyk@wits.ac.za

New NVIDIA Jetson-TK1 Cluster

We recently finished setting up a new cluster, but this time we wanted to go for maximum processing power compared to our existing Wandboard Cluster! We opted for the new NVIDIA Jetson-TK1 development boards which hosts the NVIDIA Tegra K1 System on Chip...

The Tegra K1 is a beast: it has a quad-core ARM Cortex-A15 CPU which runs at up to 2.3 GHz with a fifth low power core which is also a Cortex-A15 except it's clock is limited to a few hundred MHz. There is also a 192 core CUDA (Kepler) GPU on the SoC which, according to the spec sheets, can attain about 350 GFLOPS of performance. Preliminary benchmarks of the CPU indicate that High Performance Linpack scores over 20 GFLOPS in single precision! 

We have built a cluster with 11 boards, which equates to 44 ARM Cortex-A15 cores (~220 GFLOPS), 22 GB RAM, Gigabit Ethernet and around 3850 GFLOPS worth of GPGPU processing power! The entire cluster should consume less than 200 W of electricity under load.

We have started running benchmarks on the cluster and will report the results soon...