iSGTW 16 May 2007

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Issue 24: iSGTW 16 May 2007

Feature - Health-e-Child Prepares for Deployment

A Health-e-Child imaging application for juvenile idiopathic arthritis.
Image courtesy of Siemens

Between now and the end of May, members of the Health-e-Child collaboration will crouch over their newly arrived servers, installing and testing software, as part of a project they hope will revolutionize pediatrics in Europe. When the servers are installed and turned on at hospitals in London, Paris and Genoa they will be crucial nodes of the Health-e-Child infrastructure.

Health-e-Child is a distributed computing project that connects hospitals and participating institutions, allowing them to share integrated, multi-level information.

Feature - Editorial

OGF20 and EGEE 2nd User Forum: Thoughts From a Grid Novice
A few months ago I thought the grid was something you used to solve a sudoku. Ideally, the majority of grid users need never know any different; the word “grid” will be buried into the services it represents.

The Grid is a work in progress. Its users are its guinea pigs, hopefully its allies, and certainly those who should have most influence on its development. Many thousands of these users are already dependent on grid technology for the everyday running of their projects. We have seen vast improvements in the quality of grid services in the last few years, but there is a long way to go before using the grid becomes as simple as just plugging in.

Feature - Science

Meeting the Ethanol Challenge
Termites and fungi already know how to digest cellulose, but the human process of producing ethanol from cellulose remains slow and expensive. The central bottleneck is the sluggish rate at which the cellulose enzyme complex breaks down tightly bound cellulose into sugars, which are then fermented into ethanol.

To help unlock the cellulose bottleneck, and bring us closer to ‘carbon neutral’ biofuels, a team of scientists conducted molecular simulations at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, based at University of California at San Diego, California, U.S.

Statistic of the Week

272,000
In April, Internet2, a community focused on advancing internet technology, announced two consecutive land speed records for data transfer. The new record is 9.08 gigabits per second over 30,000 kilometers (roughly three-quarters the circumference of the earth), the equivalent of 272,200 terabit-meters per second.

These records, set by an international team led by the University of Tokyo, were in the IPv6 single and multi-stream categories, these surpass the records set with IPv4 networks.

Image of the Week

Running AMUC: Motion Capture on the Grid

Announcement

Multi-Threading and Parallelism Workshop at CERN
A free, two day workshop at CERN will help programmers navigate the intricacies of parallel programming and learn about the most efficient solutions to common multi-threading problems.

The workshop, to be held May 31 to June 1, will include a hands-on lab. Registration is based on a first-come first-served basis by sending e-mail to openlab.workshops@cern.ch.

Announcement

HPDC Seeks “Hot Topics”
The Sixteenth IEEE International Symposium on High-Performance Distributed Computing is searching for “Hot Topics.”

The Hot Topics session is devoted to emerging, exciting ideas that might not be ready for publication in the traditional technical track. This session seeks work-in-progress reports and ideas that are promising but speculative.

For more information visit the HPDC Web site.