Content about Education

Why are the new breed of software engineers acquiring their skills through 'informal' training? Who will fill the declining enrollment of university software engineering programs and the much needed technical leaders of the future - find out more here.

Would you like side of grid with your meal? Now you can, at the French version of the Grid Cafe.

Announcement - e-Science Talk is coming to ERIN4Africa, Helsinki, 9-10 December Due to the success of e-Concertation in Geneva this month, e-Science Talk has been invited to become a media partner at the 2010 Euro-Africa Week on ICT Research and e-Infrastructures, to be held in Helsinki, Finland on 7-10  December 7-10, 2010.  We will be blogging live on GridCast from this four-day conference, which is  supported by the European Commission, the African Union Commission and the Finnish government’s ministries for foreign affairs, employment and economy. The agenda is: •    7-8, Dec, 2010 — “3rd Euro-Africa Cooperation Forum on ICT Research” •    9-10, Dec, 2010 — “2010 Euro-Africa e-Infrastructures Conference”  •    10, Dec, 2010 — Lab Visits Registration is free of charge, but pre-registration is required. Registration forms are available at the following l

Feature - Ultra-fast networks: The Final Frontier A network researcher in awe of the billions of dark matter particles simulated on 15 ultra-high definition monitors. Image courtesy Freek Dijkstra Researchers from Holland have demonstrated a network infrastructure that could potentially help scientists save time and even transform the movie business. This could be done without the need for large computer clusters or grids, just off-the-shelf hardware components combined with human ingenuity and one of the world’s fastest research networks. The team were from SARA, a Dutch supercomputing and e-science support center. Threshold The SARA researchers wanted to show the practicalities of streaming video between two institutions (from SARA, Amsterdam to CERN, Geneva) at 40Gb/second (5GB/s). This link, if successful, would be 16 times faster than the TEIN3 network, which streamed Malaysian dancers over 9,000 kilometers away to a live orchestra performance in Stockholm at 2.5 Gb/s. Th

Announcement - Research and Education in Digital Libraries

What: Research and Education in Digital Libraries, a one-day seminar jointly organised by DL.org, DILL International Master and the University of Parma
Venue: 9 November 2010, Biblioteca Civica, University of Parma, Vicolo Santa Maria 5, Parma, Italy
Registration: Participation to the seminar is free, but for organizational reasons it is necessary to register in advance. Please send an email with your name and your affiliation to Christin Mollenhauer.
DL.org has forged an alliance with Digital Library Learning (DILL), a Master Programme under the European Union's Erasmus Mundus Programme, for a one-day seminar on Research and Education in Digital Libraries on 9 Novermber 2010 in Parma, Italy. The seminar aims to energise thinking on shaping the landscape in terms of sharing research results across the EU, pinpointing research topics at PhD level and the transferring DL.org research results on interoperability.
Details
The inform

Announcement - CERN Latin-American School of High Energy Physics, Natal, Brazil, 23-25 April 2011

Photo courtesy CERN

The CERN Latin-American School of High-Energy Physics is encouraging experimental high-energy physics students, who are also in the final years of their PhDs, to apply. Masters and post-doctoral students are also welcome to the course. There are a limited number of places so an early application is advisable. Please be aware that prior knowledge of high-energy physics is required in order to fully benefit from the programme.
The school is being organized jointly by the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN), Geneva, Switzerland; CIEMAT, Research Organization of the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science and a team of local organizers from institutes in Brazil.
Successful applicants will be housed in the Hotel Porto do Mar, which provides conference facilities for lectures and discussion sessions. The hotel also has sports and leisure facilities that will be

Profile – Domenico Vicinanza, master of fusion Musicians play ancient instruments live in Stockholm while dancers in Kuala Lumpur about 10,000 kilometers away simultaneously perform on the display above the stage. (Click on image above to see video of entire performance.) All images courtesy Domenico Vicinanza Domenico Vicinanza combines the worlds of science and music by using his talents as an engineer and a musician to bring ancient musical instruments back to life. In December 2009 Vicinanza and the 'Lost Sounds Orchestra' gave a unique performance. While playing ancient Greek music live in Stockholm on a virtual instrument, an ultra-fast, high-quality video-feed of dancers from Kuala Lumpur was displayed — simultaneously bringing two distant cultures and locations into one place. iSGTW caught up with Vicinanza for an interview.   iSGTW: What’s your job? Vicinanza: At DANTE I support international projects that use the GÉANT network, the pa

Announcement - DEISA-TeraGrid HPC school applications due

The Hotel Santa Tecla Palace, where the event will take place. Image courtesy of the Hotel Santa Tecla Palace.

Applications for the joint EU-US school on High Performance Computing Challenges in Computational Sciences are due 29 August.
The school, which is sponsored by the Distributed European Infrastructure for Supercomputing Applications (DEISA) and TeraGrid, will take place 4-7 October 2010 in Acireale, Catania, Italy.
High-level speakers from the US and Europe will address the following areas in computational science with high relevance for HPC simulations:

HPC Challenges and Technology
Challenges by Scientific Disciplines
Programming
Performance Analysis & Profiling
Algorithmic Approaches & Libraries
Data Intensive Computing and Visualization

Leading scientists in the fields of astrophysics, materials science, nanotechnology, quantum chromodynamics, and plasma physics will present discipl

Feature - OSG Summer School a success

The summer school in progress. Image courtesy of OSG.

Last month, Open Science Grid hosted its first summer school, and by all reports, it was a hit with both teachers and students.
“The OSG Summer School was a great experience,” said Vishagan Ratnaswamy, who will begin work on his doctorate in aeronautics this fall at Caltech. “I was able to learn more about the script files I was using as well as the systems I was running my simulations on.”
Before attending the summer school at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Ratnaswamy was already an OSG user. But by attending, he said, he learned more about the available computational resources and the many ways in which grid computing can be applied to various types of research.
Ratnaswamy was one of 17 students chosen from a pool of 45 applicants to receive funding to attend the summer school, the TeraGrid ’10 conference, and next year’s OSG All-Hands Meeting. At

Feature - NetLogo: A low threshold, no ceiling language

Two fifth grade students use NetLogo to learn about electrical current. Image courtesy Pratim Sengupta.
Front page image: Tiling with squares whose sides are successive Fibonacci numbers in length. Courtesy Wikipedia under Creative Commons license.

Elementary school students may not be able to decipher mathematical models such as Maxwell’s Equations. But given the right visualization and computational modeling tools, they can learn the underlying concepts.
Meet NetLogo, a multi-agent programmable modeling environment authored in 1999 by Uri Wilensky, a learning sciences and computer science professor at Northwestern University, and founder of the Center for Connected Learning and Computer-Based Modeling.
Remember the turtle?
A generation of adults were introduced to functions and programming through Logo and the “turtle” - an on-screen triangular cursor - that accompanied it. Logo was first created in 1967

Link of the Week - A new twist on summer camp: computing classes in the wild

Image courtesy Carlos Jaime-Barrios Hernandez

We’ve all heard of summer camp.But SuperComputing Camp (or SSCAMP, as it is known by its acronym in Spanish) is a little different.
Starting on the 15th of August, 46 undergraduates and masters students will learn about high performance computing, grid computing, volunteer computing and cloud computing — while staying in a hacienda near Panachi National Wildlife Park, just outside the small town of Piedecuesta, Colombia.The organizer, Carlos Jaime-Barrios Hernandez, says the idea is for students to learn in a natural environment, where they can explore and enjoy the great outdoors while having access to fully up-to-date facilities, including digital resources, projectors and live-video feeds to keynote speeches and online lectures. They will remotely connect to the grid infrastructure via the web. Hernandez — a research scient

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