Image courtesy of Microsoft's Next Media Research Group/WorldWide Telescope.

A technology preview of WorldWide Telescope was presented at TED2008 . Roy Gould, an astrophysicist from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics , introduced WorldWide Telescope in partnership with Curtis Wong, principal researcher of Microsoft’s Next Media Research Group and head of the project.

Microsoft Research says it is releasing WorldWide Telescope as a free resource to the astronomy and education communities with the hope that it will inspire and empower people to explore and understand the universe as never before.

The WorldWide Telescope i s a continuation of  work that began with the earlier SkyServer and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.

International Supercomputing Conference 2008. Image courtesy of ISC '08

• Advance Registration: March 01, 2008 – May 17, 2008
• Late Registration: May 18, 2008 - June 16, 2008
• Onsite Registration: from June 17, 2008

The current list of ISC ’08 exhibitors can be found at: www.isc08.org/exhibitors.

To learn more about the conference program,
please visit http://www.isc08.org/.

Also see information on the types of Visitor Passes available.

The venue for AHM 2008 is the University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK. Image courtesy of National e-Science Centre

UK e-Science AHM2008 is the principal e-Science meeting in the UK and brings together researchers from all disciplines, computer scientists and developers to meet and exchange ideas. The theme for this year's meeting is Crossing Boundaries: Computational Science, E- Science and Global E- Infrastructures. One of the central aims of this year's meeting is to promote the domain specific applications aspects of e-Science, as well as building bridges between the three communities of the theme title.

The meeting takes place the 8th - 11th September 2008 in Edinburgh, Scotland.

• Conference web site http://www.allhands.org.uk/2008
• Call for abstracts http://www.allhands.org.uk/2008/programme/call.cfm
• Abstract Submission Deadline: 15th May 2008
  

Before the show can go on, there must be extensive, full-scale dress rehearsals. For the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid, that means several Common Computing Readiness Challenges. Stock image courtesy of sxc.chu

 Rehearsal, rehearsal

Opening night

Like a theatrical company on the eve of a big new production, CERN's Computing Centre and its partner computing sites are preparing for their opening night. 

This summer, the two stars of their show will mark their debuts: The Large Hadron Collider ─ largest particle accelerator built to date ─  will start up, and the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG) will collect, move and process the massive amount of data the LHC generates.

In the next few months, final touches will be added to ensure that the WLCG and the people involved with it can put on their best performance, says Jamie Shiers, responsible for overall coordination of the system’s practice runs ─ known as ‘Common Computing Readiness Challenges.’ To prepare, WLCG staff have run these “dress rehearsals” for years, which have become more intense as curtain time nears.

“These final two dress rehearsals are much more realistic,” he says. “Before this, the testing was done in isolation; now it is everyone at the same time.”

Rehearsal, rehearsal

During each run, the LHC Computing Grid receives data from four main LHC experiments simultaneously, at loads predicted for a fully operational machine. After a quick cache, the Tier-0 site at CERN sends data to Tier-1 sites, which send it to Tier-2 sites. Over one hundred auxiliary Tier-1 and Tier-2 sites around the world also aid in storage and processing. 

The first full rehearsal was held in February; the final one will be in May. February’s test yielded a middleware bug and a delay in storage configurations, but nothing was crippling, states Shiers.

Preparing for opening night, left to right: Jan van Eldik, Miguel Coelho from CERN CASTOR operations team, Gavin McCance from the FTS operations team.   Images courtesy of Jamie Shiers

“It was quite a success,” he says. “We managed to get everyone to work together, all sites and all experiments, and we made it last. Before we started we honestly didn't know if we could support them all at the same time. We could have had to turn the volume down on the machine—and no one wanted to see that happen.”

Shiers believes May’s tests will probably reveal more glitches. For example, the grid may not be able to keep up with the scaling-up of computing volume. However, Shiers observes, the “LCG team” has grown adept at finding fixes or work-arounds.

 Start-up itself will be a time of excitement and relief, Shiers says. “Switching on a machine like this doesn't happen very often,” he says. “There is a sense that this whole process is like putting on a theatrical production ─ and we're the actors.”
                                                                                                                     - Danielle Venton

eResearch Australasia 2008 will be held 29 September to 1 October at the Sebel and Citigate Hotels, Albert Park in Melbourne, Australia. Stock image from sxc.hu

Submissions are invited for presentations, workshops and BoFs for eResearch Australasia 2008, to be to be held 28 September to 3 October 2008 in Melbourne, Australia.

Submissions must be received by 23 May 2008. Submissions for posters and live demonstrations are also invited and must be received by 15 August.

eResearch focuses on technological platforms that enhance researchers’ ability to generate, collect, share, analyze, store and retrieve information.

The conference aims to provide:

• A catalyst for innovation and collaboration, by bringing together the architects, builders, users, and managers of eResearch infrastructures and services;
• A forum to support the development, enhancement, and harmonisation of national, regional, and discipline-specific eResearch infrastructures and services;
• A showcase for innovative science and research enabled through these technologies and services.

Albert Einstein (c) Camera Press, K. of Ottawa

In 1916 Albert Einstein postulated that our universe is pulsing with gravitational waves created by the gyrations of black holes, neutron stars and other cosmic colossi. Nearly a century later, these waves’ existence has yet to be confirmed.

The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, LIGO, will detect the ripples in space-time using controlled laser light to precisely measure the time it takes light to travel between suspended mirrors.

In celebration of the World Year of Physics 2005 honoring this great scientist, and with the support of the American Physical Society and international organizations, LIGO launched Einstein@home, modeled after SETI@home, to attract CPU power to their data-intensive search.

Volunteers all over the world have been downloading Einstein@home and collectively processing about one terabyte per day of LIGO’s data on their home computers. Think of 50,000 trees made into paper and printed -- every day -- for over two years so far!

When Einstein@HOME reached one million BOINC credits a day, the team started running opportunistically on Open Science Grid resources, which has led to significantly increased throughput.

Einstein@home is currently searching for a gravitational signature from spinning neutron stars.  Keep up with the progress, and welcome Einstein into your home at http://einstein.phys.uwm.edu/ . 

What will the meeting of ancient wisdom with hi-tech science reveal about the disease-fighting activity of Thailand’s medicinal herbs? Images courtesy of ThaiGrid

Medicinal herbs have been part of Thailand’s way of life since ancient times. This is especially true in remote rural areas, where drugs are expensive and ancient wisdom still has an effect on people’s lives. Now, thanks to the efforts of Thai researchers, this wisdom is meeting the hi-tech world.

“Thailand has a large number of medicinal herbs, and many drugs are produced based on medicinal herbs,” reveals Chak Sangma of the Cheminformatics Research Unit at Kasetsart University, Thailand.

“However, many of these drugs are not tested at the chemical level. Hence, it is not very certain which drugs contain which chemical substances, and how they actually cure disease.”

Searching for molecular secrets

To improve this situation, Chak and his team are creating a one-stop-shop: a grid-powered portal where Thai researchers can have centralized access to both the molecular structure of medicinal herbs and molecular docking software. Chak’s database currently contains more than 100,000 3D molecular structures.

“Using molecular docking we can see how well a potential drug molecule can ‘dock’ to a disease enzyme, so we can select the most effective drugs without costly experiments,” says Chak.

This drug design portal, created by a team from Kasetsart University and available through the Thai National Grid Center, allows researchers to screen the molecular structures of substances found in medicinal herbs for their ability to dock with and disable disease-causing proteins. Image courtesy of ThaiGrid

Such screening requires huge computing power. For this, Chak and his team rely on ThaiGrid, provided by the Thai National Grid Center. “With the power of ThaiGrid, the work we do is finished much faster,” says Chak. “This allows more extensive study of the active substances.”

Access enables a new level of research

Chak and his team are also working with the Thai National Grid Center to build a virtual screening portal, so that researchers can directly experiment with molecules from the database using the power of ThaiGrid. So far, more than 30 positive substances have been found, and further tests are being conducted in the experimental lab to verify the results.

“By providing access to this data and computing power through the portal, we can help drive medicinal herb research to another level,” says Chak. “I hope this scientific approach to medicinal herb-based drug design will be widely adopted in Thailand, and will lead to safer, more cost-effective and better drugs for Thai people. We hope to make life for poor people or people in remote rural areas a little bit better.”

-    Putchong Uthayopas, ThaiGrid