Content about Announcements

Announcement - StratusLab surveys open until 16 July

The StratusLab project, which was announced last week, has opened two surveys to collect requirements for the StratusLab cloud toolkit distribution and to understand the existing experience with virtualization and cloud technologies.
The first is an end-user survey aimed at users and potential users of virtualization and cloud technologies.
http://www.zoomerang.com/Survey/WEB22AUQR4CGC2
The second is an administrator survey aimed at providers and potential providers of virtualization and cloud technologies with an emphasis on grid resource centers.
http://www.zoomerang.com/Survey/WEB22AUQPJCFDH
The surveys will be open until 16 July.

Next week: Chat live with experts about computational resources

Image courtesy brainloc.

What makes a grid perfect for one project, but a cloud better for another? When is a high-performance computer wasteful overkill, or a small cluster underpowered?
To answer these questions, iSGTW has invited experts from around the world to join us on Wednesday, 14 July 2010 at 10:30 a.m. CDT/4:30 p.m. CEST for a one-hour live chat - and you’re invited.
Can’t make it to the chat? No problem. For a week following the chat, an even larger host of experts will join us in our online forums to answer questions. To volunteer to serve as an expert, please email us at editors@isgtw.org.
We’ll be announcing the identity of our experts throughout the week by adding them to this page. But in the meantime, we’d like to offer you a preview of some of the experts you can expect to hear from next week.

Steven Newhouse
Director, European Grid Initiative
I

Announcement - Grid and e-Science, Valencia, Spain, 6-9 July

Image courtesy Grid and e-Science.

The course GRID and e-Science will be held at the Instituto de Fisica Corpuscular (IFIC) in Valencia, on 6-9 July. This is the 7th edition of the course, organized by the Institute of Physics Cantabria (IFCA) and IFIC.
The course is aimed at students and researchers who want to run applications on GRID-CSIC.
Its objectives are to disseminate the latest advances in distributed computing, grid and cloud computing, in terms of projects, infrastructure and technologies. It is aimed to give students the basic skills to use the grid, its tools and advanced applications. The various components will be discussed in detail, including user-level middleware, and sample applications, and use of grid infrastructure at international level and in production environments.
Emphasis will be placed upon use in real environments — which gives real-life examples of the tools in action, frequent error

Announcement - Project to integrate clouds and grids announced: Stratuslab

A deck of real-life stratus clouds looks like an ocean at this 11,000 feet trail stop on Long’s Peak trail in Colorado. Image courtesy atmospheric scientist Gregory Thompson, In the Clouds Photography.

Researchers from a collaboration of six European organizations attracted 2.3 million euros to develop a new internet-based software project called StratusLab.
The two-year project, headed by Charles Loomis from Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), was launched in Paris on June 14, with the aim of enhancing distributed computing infrastructures — such as the European Grid Infrastructure (EGI) — that allow research and higher education institutes to pool computing resources.
Funded through the European Union Seventh Framework Program, the two-year project seeks to integrate ‘cloud computing’ technologies into ‘grid’ infrastructures. Grids link com

Announcement - GridKa School registration now open

The participants in GridKa School 2010 pose for a group picture. Image courtesy of GridKa School.

Established in 2003, the International GridKa School is one of the leading summer schools for grid computing and e-science. This year's event is scheduled for 6-10 September in Karlsruhe, Germany.
The school cooperates with the Helmholtz Alliance 'Physics on the Terascale'. In addition, it is associated with EGI/NGI. GridKa School offers a broad range of topics, which are chosen from the realm of these projects and beyond.
Because of its parallel hands-on sessions, GridKa School targets different groups of people involved in grid computing:

grid novices, advanced users and administrators,
scientists and other users of grid,
graduate students, PhD students and post-docs involved in grid computing.

The advanced talks and presentations give an up-to-date overview on important and interesting grid and cloud computing subjects. About h

Announcement - PRACE calls for proposals to use JUGENE

The first HPC system available to researchers through PRACE: the IBM BlueGene/P – Jugene – hosted by FZJ in Germany. Jugene offers computational power of one petaflop per second and is one of the fastest computers in the world (number 5 on the latest Top 500 list of the world’s most powerful computers). Image courtesy of PRACE.

PRACE, the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe, enables researchers from across Europe to apply for time on the PRACE resources via a peer review process. This call marks the first regular call for the PRACE resources with the standard allocation time of one year. The call is aimed at projects to use the the IBM BlueGene/P – JUGENE – through PRACE. Allocations will be for one year starting from 1 November 2010.
JUGENE, which is hosted by the Gauss-Centre member site in Jülich, Germany, is Europe’s fastest computer at one petaflop per second, or number five on

Announcement - DEISA digest now available

Image courtesy DEISA

The new digest for DEISA — the Distributed European Infrastructure for Supercomputing Applications — was published on 10th of May 2010.
DEISA Digest 2010 presents articles about the key results of the research projects carried out using the DEISA research infrastructure during the recent years. It includes 15 popular science articles.
The DEISA Digest 2010 is available online as a pdf. 
Or if you prefer reading a printed version, order your free copy via email.

Grace Hopper conference registration opens

Registration is now open for the 10th annual Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing conference, which will be held 28 September – 2 October 2010 at the Hyatt Regency in Atlanta, Georgia. The full program for the event is also now available.
The world's largest gathering of women in computing in industry, academia, and government, the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing (GHC) is now a five day technical conference designed to bring the research and career interests of women in computing to the forefront. Over 600 speakers will include leading researchers and industry experts discussing their current work, while special sessions focus on the role of women in today's technology fields, including computer science, information technology, research, and engineering. Co-presented by the Anita Borg Institute and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the conference has expanded this year to feature more than 110 session

Announcement - CI Summer Institute for Geoscientists accepting applications, 6 June deadline

The 7th Cyberinfrastructure Summer Institute for Geoscientists is now accepting applications.
The event will take place 9-13 August at the San Diego Supercomputer Center on the University of California, San Diego campus.
The broad theme for CSIG’10 will be emergent geoinformatic approaches to 3D and 4D integration of geoscience data. Given the diverse interests of past CSIG participants, and based on feedback that they have provided, CSIG’10 will feature two “tracks” of instruction:

Build Track: technologies related to building geoinformatics systems; and
Education Track: use of geoinformatics resources in education

Interested applicants at all levels are encouraged to apply, including graduate students, postdocs, faculty, and professionals in earth science and related disciplines. Applicants will have the option to choose the track of interest at the time of applica

Announcement - TeraGrid '10 contest for high school, undergraduate, and graduate students

TeraGrid ’10 is seeking students to participate in this year’s 5th Annual TeraGrid Conference. As a student, you can participate in several ways:
Poster Contest How do you use computational science to solve science, engineering or mathematics problems? Let us know by submitting a poster that demonstrates your models, simulations, or visualizations. Awards will recognize the best poster in each of three categories: high school, undergraduate, and graduate.
Programming Contest Showcase your team’s programming skills by participating in this exciting, fast-paced on-site contest. With access to computing resources, teams (of up to five members, plus one coach) will receive a variety of interesting science and parallel computation problems to address at the conference. Awards will recognize creativity, quality of the solutions and innovative excellence of the teams who solve the most problems during

Announcement - Early Registration Discount closes 17 May, Digital Humanities

May 17 is the last day that participants are eligible for the reduced registration rate to Digital Humanities 2010, to be held in Kings College London, UK from 7-10 July.
The goals of the conference are to promote and support digitally-based research and teaching across the arts and humanities disciplines. It embraces three constituent organizations, including the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing (ALLC), the Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH) and the Society for Digital Humanities/Société pour l'étude des médias interactifs (SDH-SEMI).
Conference registration fees are (in GBP):

Member - early registration (by 17 May): £210
Member - late registration (after 17 May): £260
Non-member - early registration (by 17 May): £300
Non-member - late registration (after 17 May): £350
Student Member: £60
Student Non-member: &poun

Announcement - RSVP to attend Blue Waters presentation

Robert Wilhelmson, pictured above, will present on the Blue Waters supercomputer on 18 May 2010 at Argonne. Image courtesy of Robert Wilhelmson.

The Computation Institute is now accepting RSVPs for an 18 May presentation about the Blue Waters petascale computer.
Blue Waters is likely to be the most powerful supercomputer available for open scientific research when it comes online in 2011 at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana. The Blue Waters project includes NCSA, the University of Illinois, IBM, NSF, and the Great Lakes Consortium, of which the University of Chicago and Argonne are members.
Robert Wilhelmson, chief scientist at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and professor of atmospheric sciences at UIUC, will be giving the presentation. Wilhelmson will provide an overview of the Blue Waters project and its purposes along with some of the challenges that must be overcome to enable applications to ef