Content about Grid computing

iSGTW reader Harvey Newman gives his perspective on SC10.

At a recent workshop, physicists from several LHC experiments compared results.

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

Announcement - StratusLab releases open source cloud solution for grid

Photo courtesy of OpenNebula.org

StratusLab has released the first open-source cloud solution designed for the grid.
The StratusLab project has released the first version of its cloud computing software, which aims to provide a full cloud solution for grid and cluster computing.
The release is a technology preview (beta test) and not production-ready yet, but it will give system administrators and users a chance to try out the new features of what will become an integrated solution for cloud management and running grid services within clouds.
The software is based on the OpenNebula open-source toolkit for cloud computing management and can be used as an interface for managing cloud sites. It also provides a range of tools and services specifically designed to facilitate integration of cloud and grid technologies. These include automatic configuration of sites and integration with fabric management tools such as the

  Link of the Week: Coming to an i-Phone near you Image courtesy Flickr under Creative Commons licence Since the story in iSGTW last year about Cinefilia, the grid-enabled film recommendation service, it creator and sole webmaster, Leandro Ciuffo, says his user base has increased by 27% — without any direct promotion or advertising. Once a user has signed up for a Cinefilia account they can review whether they like or dislike one of hundreds of films on the database. The system then ‘learns’ that user’s preferences and generates personalized recommendations accordingly. (But in order for the results to be accurate a minimum of 20 films must be rated by a user.)   Ciuffo aims to increase the amount of Brazilian films on the database because 95% of users on his site are Brazilian, possibly because there are currently no recommendation systems for Brazilian films. Ciuffo is looking for partners to help him improve the recommendation software algo

Feature - LHC open to all

An actual recorded event from the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment—this event shows radiation and charged particles spilling into the detector from the beam colliding with material in the beam pipe.
Image courtesy Carl Lundstedt

Occasionally, iSGTW runs across stories in other publications related to the fields we cover. Below is an excerpt from Linux Journal, containing one person’s view of the whole process.
One of the items at the heart of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiments is open-source software. The following will provide a glimpse into how scientific computing embraces open-source software and its open-source philosophy.
The LHC at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland, is nearly 100 meters underground and produces the highest-energy subatomic particle beams on Earth. The Compact Muon Solenoid experiment is one of the many collider experiments within the LHC. One of its goals is to give physicists a window into the universe fractions

Announcement - NZ eResearch Symposium, 26-27 October, Auckland, New Zealand

The University of Auckland’s Fale Pasifika (above) is a traditional symbol of the Pacific Island. This Fale is the second largest such structure in the world. In addition to the traditional fale building, the Center complex includes academic offices, classrooms and a multi-media laboratory. Photo courtesy NZ eResearch Symposium

Register now for the 1st NZ eResearch Symposium online , to be held at the Owen G Glenn Building and the Fale Pasifika, at The University of Auckland.
Our NZ eResearch Symposium is a forum for NZ’s research sector and nascent eResearch community, being those involved in using, developing, and supporting applications and services that take advantage of distributed collaboration platforms for team science, including grid middleware, high performance computing, data infrastructure, advanced video-conferencing, and advanced research networks. This is also an opportunity to meet l

Announcement - Registration open, Computing and Astroparticle Physics-ASPERA, Lyon, France

Photo courtesy ASPERA

Registration is now open for Computing and Astroparticle Physics-ASPERA, to be hold in Lyon, France from 07 October to 08 October 2010.
Astroparticle Physics has grown in a few years from a field of a few charismatic pioneers transgressing interdisciplinary frontiers to a global science activity projecting very large infrastructures involving hundreds of researchers each. In particular, the large infrastructures proposed in the ASPERA Roadmap will face challenging problems of data collection, data storage and data mining. In some of these, the cost of computing will be a significant fraction of the cost of the infrastructure and the issues of model of computation, data mining complexity and public access will be extremely challenging.
In the Lyon workshop these issues will be addressed, along with data storage and analysis models developed in neighboring fields such as part

Feature - Achilles tendon a blessing, not a curse

Sprinters lining up for the start of the Women’s 100-meter at the Beijing Olympics. Image courtesy LIM CK, under Creative Commons license.

Compared with other runners on this planet, humans are feeble.
If Olympic sprinters competed against mammals of comparable size, they would never even qualify for the finals. The top speed for an in-shape male human is normally between 15 and 18 miles per hour (24 to 29 kilometers per hour). The world record is 27 mph (43kmh), and that was sustainable for only a few seconds.
Meanwhile, horses have been clocked at about 48 miles per hour, wolves about 42, and the speed champion — the cheetah — at 70 miles per hour. (That’s about 77 kmh, 68 kmh, and 113 kmh, respectively.)
Even warthogs are faster than us.
But in the field of endurance racing however, we leave everyone else in the dust. Over long distances, a well-trained human can outrun a horse.
What is the ke

Announcement - Deadline extended for abstracts, CGW10, Krakow, Poland

The deadline for abstracts to be submitted to the Krakow Grid Workshop (CGW10) has been extended to 12 September.
A presentation will be accepted on the basis of an abstract; details about the abstract format and review criteria are available. 
Proceedings of the CGW10 will be traditionally printed after the event; papers will be accepted on the basis of the evaluation of presentations and the review of full papers. Selected papers will be recommended for submission to FGCS. Additionally, we plan to publish in the first quarter of 2011 extended versions of selected papers from CGW10 and CGW09 at one of well known and recognized publisher; negotiations are in progress.
Topics include:

e-Science, system-level science and collaborative applications
models, methods and tools for collaborative applications
virtual laboratories and problem solving environments
distributed computing infrastructures, grids and clouds

Announcement - Abstracts for Symposium on Authentication Technologies for Research and Education due September 15

The Symposium on Authentication Technologies for Research and Education will continue to accept abstracts through 15 September.
The symposium and the accompanying Roundtable on Cloud and Grid Security Standards will take place Monday 4 October on the campus of Texas Tech University.
The symposium will be focused on working solutions in campus security infrastructures that can contribute to solutions for simple but effective provision of strong authentication in research, educational, government and industrial settings. Submissions are invited from members of the identity management and distributed computing security communities.
Talks will be open to the public. Participants will be given adequate time to explain and expand on their idea or project. The audience will include participants familiar with this problem and knowledgeable about working solutions in concept or in pract

Feature - Winning the ‘scrap lottery’ Image courtesy Diego Carvalho Plastics manufacturers had a problem.The typical production line produces hundreds of distinct plastic products of varying weight, shape and size. A single desktop computer can manage the process of deciding which combinations of products should be married to which production lines, but the task increases exponentially when trying to predict how much waste “scrap” is generated. This is because predicting the amount of scrap is a highly stochastic process, meaning it could have many probable outcomes. Industry insiders describe it as a ‘scrap lottery’, in which the only way to know an outcome is to ‘spin the balls,’ or in this case create the plastic. The problem was particularly acute at Vitopel, an Argentine company that is one of the world’s five largest plastic manufacturers. It produces biaxially-oriented polypropylene, or BOPP — an important mater