Content about Feature

Feature - HPC adds a spark to EDF’s computing capacities

Image courtesy Zsuzsanna Kilian, stock.exchng

Jean-Yves Berthou is responsible for IT in the research and development area of Electricite de France — a major energy company in Europe. EDF’s 2,000 researchers use computing to work on a number of different projects, including areas such as minimizing CO2 emissions, alternatives to fossil fuels, and ensuring the security of electricity grids. Here, he describes the use and impact of high performance computing (HPC) at the company.
Why do you use HPC?
Berthou: In many cases physical experiments and testing are not possible, for example in the simulation of fuel assemblies and crack propagation in nuclear reactors, or in optimizing electricity production and trading. Even when experimentation is possible, numerical simulation can go beyond what is physically possible. However, experimentation still remains an indispensable tool.
 
In what application

Interview - Kostas Glinos peers into his crystal ball

Image courtesy Corentin Chevalier, eScienceTalk

Kostas Glinos is a member of the European Commission’s Directorate-General for the Information Society and Media — and he just presented the European Grid Initiative with a 25-million euro contract in a brief ceremony onstage at the start of the EGI Technical Forum on 14 September. iSGTW caught up with him afterward, during a coffee break held in the middle of the poster session floor. We asked him about the significance of the EC’s backing, his hopes for EGI, and his ideas as to what it all means for the future.
iSGTW: What was the significance of the contract presentation today?Glinos: EGI is the culmination of an effort over eight years to look for a sustainable, long-term commitment from European countries, supplemented by the European Commission (EC). Of a projected 73 million euro cost, 25 million is coming from the EC, with the rest from member states. We n

Feature - Surfing for earthquakes

Aftermath of Haiti earthquake. Image courtesy UN Development Program

A better understanding of the ground beneath our feet may come from research by seismologists and an organization called RAPID—a group of computer scientists at the University of Edinburgh.
The very structure of the Earth controls how earthquakes travel and the amount of damage they cause. Therefore, a clear picture of this structure would be extremely valuable to earthquake planners — but it requires the analysis of huge amounts of data.
To help, the RAPID team developed a system that performs the seismologists’ data-crunching, and have made it easy to use by relying on an interface familiar to all scientists: a web browser.
Seismologists measure vibrations in the Earth at hundreds of observatories across Europe, which allows them to study earthquakes as they travel across countries and continents. By measuring the speed and strength of the vibrations at d

Project profile: PL-Grid

Legacies of older architectures exist along side the new in Poland, and not just in research computing: Here contemporary architecture in Warsaw reflects the past. Image courtesy Jaime Silva, Flickr, under Creative Commons license

Beyond being at the geographic center of Europe, Poland plays a central, leading role in Europe’s grid community. In 2009, Poland became the first country to form an independent and autonomous National Grid Initiative — an operational unit, based in a single country, set up to run a national computing infrastructure to support the European Grid Infrastructure (EGI).
With the close of the Enabling Grids for E-sciencE project, the health of the EGI is dependent upon such NGIs — and the technical process developed by Poland to move away from the parent EGEE ROC is a model other countries will look to. PLGrid itself is one of a series of NGIs to form as legal entities over the last few years, particularly in South Eas

Feature - Neighborly efficiency: Scaling kNN problems  (nearly) linearly using GPUs

This image depicts an example of a two-dimensional feature space. In this case, the unknown dot would be classified as “green,” because three of the five nearest neighbors are green.
Image courtesy of Cyrus Stoller and Libin Sun.

What is k-Nearest Neighbor?
The class of machine learning algorithms known as kNN classifies objects based on the closest training examples in the feature space. What does that mean? Let us illustrate that with an example.
Imagine you have a large set of digital images of friends and family. Many of them have already been tagged according to the person in the image. You would like a way to automate the tagging of the remaining photographs.
First, you would need a program that can analyze images of faces, quantifying features such as eye color, the distance between the eyes, and so on. The program would take in each image – say, 1000 – and re

Feature - BiG Grid’s big idea

Image courtesy BiG Grid

With the EGI Technical Forum coming up next week, iSGTW thought ths would be a good time to learn more about one of the Forum’s sponsors, BiG Grid.
Modern detectors, medical imaging instruments and micro-arrays produce huge volumes of data, far beyond the storage capacities of conventional computing — thus calling for ever-increasing enlargement of infrastructure.
To help solve this problem, the Netherlands-based BiG Grid project is turning to the grid as a place to combine data, analyze it and allow scientists to conduct research in a wide range of disciplines. BiG Grid is a collaborative effort between Nikhef (the National Institute for Sub-atomic Physics), NBIC (Netherlands Bioinformatics Center) and NCF (the National Computing Facilities foundation). “Our goal is to build and roll-out a nationwide, grid-based, e-science infrastructure,” said Arjen Van Rijn, chairman of the BiG Grid executiv

Profile - People behind the European Grid Initiative: Tiziana Ferrari

Image courtesy EGI

The European Grid Infrastructure’s role is to support research and collaboration across the continent by providing seamless, instant access to computing resources. But who has the job of making sure things actually work? Meet EGI’s Chief Operations Officer, Tiziana Ferrari. She spoke recently with iSGTW to tell us what is rewarding about her job, what is challenging and why it is important.
 
iSGTW: Describe what you do for EGI.Ferrari: I am responsible for coordinating the operations of the infrastructure across Europe. The user doesn’t care whether a resources is in Spain or in France, they just need it to work — that is my job. In EGI though, every country is responsible for its own operations.
But EGI needs to coordinate this and ensure that everyone is using the same protocols. That is my role. I need to make sure the production and accounting infrastruc

Feature - People behind EGI: Steve Brewer steps in as the voice of the user

Image courtesy Steve Brewer

With the EGI technical forum coming up in a few weeks, readers may want to know more about the people behind the scenes.
Much of the organization’s success will hinge upon its ability to foster strong communities between users and resource providers. Who will act as a communication point between these two groups? Steve Brewer, a long-time member of the European Grid Community, has recently been appointed chief community officer for EGI.eu, the new organization responsible for coordinating the European Grid Infrastructure.
iSGTW: Where does EGI.eu fit into the grand scheme of things?
Brewer: From physicists, to chemists, to geologists, many European researchers need distributed computing for their work. While these researchers previously used an infrastructure coordinating by EGEE (the project Enabling Grids for E-sciencE), the same infrastructure is now coordinate

Feature - OSG and TeraGrid join forces for ExTENCI

Image courtesy of Jayanta Behera.

Last week marked the kick-off for ExTENCI, the first major technical collaboration between TeraGrid and Open Science Grid.
“The idea is to have Open Science Grid and TeraGrid work together on a joint project as an experiment,” explained Paul Avery, the principle investigator for ExTENCI (which stands for Extending Science Through Enhanced National CyberInfrastructure). Although the two infrastructures have worked together to agree on principles and attend each others’ meetings, ExTENCI marks the first time that they will work together, sharing milestones and goals.
In order to make the partnership possible, the National Science Foundation’s Office of Cyberinfrastructure and Math and Physics Directorate each awarded ExTENCI approximately one million U.S. dollars over two years, for a grand total of just over two million U.S. dollars.
The limitations imposed by a small budget

Back to Basics - How hardware virtualization works: Part 4

BY GREG PFISTER Since retiring from his position as an IBM Distinguished Engineer, Greg Pfister has worked as an independent consultant as well as serving as research faculty at Colorado State University. Pfister is the author of “In Search of Clusters,” and over his 30-year career, he has accrued over 30 patents in parallel computing and computer communications.

It is possible to find many explanations of hardware virtualization on the Internet and, of course, in computer science courses. Nonetheless, there remains a great deal of confusion regarding this increasingly popular technology.
This is the last part of a multi-part series that attempts to provide an approachable explanation of hardware virtualization. To catch up, see Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.
Drown It in Silicon
In the previous discussion I might have lead you to believe that paravirtualization is widely used in mainframes (IBM zSeries and clon

Feature - Education and the future: eLearning

Image courtesy GridTalk

Computers and the web have transformed homes and businesses, and could do the same for education and training. Known as “eLearning,” this can be as simple as accessing a school timetable online, or as complex as running virtual communities for sharing and creating knowledge. eLearning is defined by the European Commission (EC) as ‘the use of new multimedia technologies and the internet to improve the quality of learning by facilitating access to resources and services, as well as remote exchanges and collaboration.’ The EC sees eLearning as an integral part of education and calls for member states to include eLearning in national policies; its Lifelong Learning Program, running from 2007-2013, includes it in schools, higher education, vocational training, and adult education.Where do grids fit in?
Grid technologies help researchers worldwide collaborate, analyze data and carry out research.

Feature - The sky’s the limit

Image courtesy Simon Langton Grammar School

Becky Parker, head of physics at the Simon Langton Grammar School in Kent, UK, is introducing her students to outer space. In 2007, Becky organized a trip to CERN for her 16 to 18 year-old students. There, they were introduced to the Timepix computer chip, a sensitive light-detector used for medical imaging. Back in Britain, one of her students came up with the idea of using the chips to measure cosmic radiation. Parker’s response: “Brilliant!” A Timepix chip has 65,536 pixels over a 2 cm² area. An event occurs when a particle strikes a pixel and is converted into an electrical signal, which can be measured. Her students wanted to use Timepix chips to detect particle type, energy and possibly, the directionality.Consequently, her students entered and won a space experiment competition with their design made from adapting readouts of the chip. Their instrument, called LUCID (Langton