Content about Images

Image of the week - “Little Eyes” of the sky This sky mosaic of the Pleiades, created using grid-enabled Montage software, shows the high-resolution beauty and detail made accessible through the power of grids.Image courtesy of Inseok Song, IPAC/Caltech; created using Montage v3.0Known throughout the world under various names—“Subaru” to the Japanese, Matarii or “Little Eyes” to the natives of Tonga and Athur-ai or “The Stars of Hathor” to the ancient Egyptians—the Pleiades (as it was known to the ancient Greeks) is a cluster of naked-eye stars located in the constellation Taurus, the Bull. This cluster is now known to be a collection of relatively young stars, born only 100 to 125 million years ago. The brightest stars shown here are those visible to the naked eye on a clear winter’s night and represent hot blue giants much more massive than our Sun; the faintest members of the cluster are red dwarfs only a tenth of the Sun’s mass. The blue, green and red cha

  Images of the week - CERN Open Day draws tens of thousands The GridCafé provided a friendly spot for visitors to learn about grid technology, discover the history of computing at CERN, take the challenge of grid-themed computer games, explore interactive grid maps, hot coffees, cakes and more.Image courtesy of Anton Topurov GridCafé volunteers answered the big questions for visitors from all over the world, explaining the difference between grid technology and the Internet and sharing the different ways in which grid technology is helping to fast-track scientific research.Image courtesy of Anton Topurov Volunteers showcased emerging technologies including GridMap (CERN openlab/EDS), a visualization that shows the status of different sites in the Worldwide Large Hadron Collider Computing Grid. Green indicates the site is “OK,” orange indicates degraded service and red indicates that the site is down.Image courtesy of Anton Topurov The CERN Computer Centre, just prior to

Image of the week - LICORICE, photons and the end of the Dark Ages This grid-powered simulation shows radiative transfer of Lyman-alpha photons during the Epoch of Reionization: results that are necessary to compute the hydrogen 21-cm line emissions that will be observed by the future SKA telescope. The box is 2563 particles wide. The color ramp codes the number of Ly-alpha scatterings per atom per second. Image courtesy of Benoit SemelinOnce upon a time, when the Universe was very young and hot, matter existed only as protons and electrons. Then, one day, things cooled off; the ions got together to form neutral atoms.This recombination marked the beginning of what cosmologists call the “Dark Ages of the Universe,” a period of about one billion years for which there is no observational data.Beyond the Dark AgesTowards the end of these Dark Ages, the Universe entered a new phase—the Epoch of Reionization—when UV and X-ray emissions from stars and quasars began to reionize the newly formed neutral atoms. We h

Image of the week - The Water Bearer springs a gas leak The power of grid-enabled Montage software allows astronomers and star-gazers alike to feast their eyes on the Helix nebula in its entirety.Created with IRSA On-Demand Image Mosaic Service and Montage v3.0.The Helix Nebula, also known as NGC 7293, spans a width about half that of the full moon and is located in the constellation Aquarius, the Water Bearer. Although not visible to the unaided eye, a telescopic view, like that shown here, reveals this to be a planetary nebula, one of the closest such nebulae to the Sun. The Helix nebula was created when the central star exhausted its store of hydrogen fuel, causing the star’s core to collapse into a hot remnant—known as a blue subdwarf—and its outer layers to expand into the complex ring of gas and dust seen here. This nebula, because of its immense size on the sky, is difficult to study in its entirety via conventional methods. The image shown here was created using grid-enabled Montage software and encompass

Image of the week - Grids help map salt in coastal aquifer The Korba aquifer in Tunisia is being studied using the grid-enabled CODESA-3D tool, a hydrological application deployed on the EUMEDGRID e-infrastructure.Image courtesy of EUMEDGRID Many of us love to live and vacation near the coast. But as coastal zones experience dramatic demographic and socio-economic development, there are also growing and conflicting demands on the natural resources of coastal areas. This leads to often irreversible degradation of natural resources, which severely limits the potential for further development. In parallel with this, expanding human activity is placing increased pressure on groundwater reserves, an issue heightened by seawater intrusion and salinization of coastal aquifers and soils, leading to major threats for food production and natural resources protection.To help manage these issues a team from the Center for Advanced Studies, Research and Development in Sardinia and the University of Padua, Italy, have developed CODESA-3

Image of the week - A map of all things science Science-related activity on Wikipedia: Overlaid are 3599 math (blue), 6474 science (green), and 3164 technology (yellow) related articles. All other articles are shown as grey dots. This map is part of the Places & Spaces exhibition. An interactive version of the full Wikipedia visualization is also available. Image courtesy of InfoVis LabKaty Börner knows what Wikipedia looks like in English, all 2.1 million articles of it. Börner, a professor at Indiana University Bloomington, is director of the Information Visualization (InfoVis) Laboratory, and along with her InfoVis colleagues, Börner has analyzed and “visualized” the network of knowledge that is Wikipedia in English.The image on the right is a science-themed version of the same visualization, created using science-related Wikipedian activity. To construct it, the team laid out a sample of article images on a circular grid, positioning similar, linked articles close together. The result is a mo

Image of the week - SNAREd in the biological act A schematic snapshot of the SNARE protein complex embedded between two cell membranes. The dynamic 340,000 atom simulation was conducted using the distributed resources of DEISA. Image © Marc BaadenCell membranes are a hot-zone of biological activity, allowing chemicals in and out of your cells, playing host to intra-membrane proteins, and even fusing with neighboring membranes. Disturbing any of these functions can have far-reaching consequences for your health, which is one reason why Marc Baaden is working to improve our understanding of just how cell membranes work.Baaden and a team from the Institut de Biologie Physico-Chimique, CNRS, France, are using complex computer simulations to model the function of the membrane-fusing SNARE complex.Using GROMACS software and 218,000 CPU hours from 96 distributed DEISA processors, Baaden was able to simulate the dynamic interactions of the two-membrane SNARE system, a massive task incorporating the trajectories of 340,000 atoms.

  Image of the week - Earth-quaking science in Hollywood These images show results from simulations of a 4.2 local magnitude earthquake striking Hollywood, California, U.S. The left-hand column compares the effect of two different wave propagation codes when they both use the same velocity model. The top row shows results from one wave propagation code using two different velocity models. The bottom right image is a topographical map showing the epicenter of the event. Image courtesy of SCECEver wondered what would happen to the world’s movie industry if a sizeable earthquake were to hit Hollywood? Now researchers with the Southern California Earthquake Center can find out.The SCEC have developed several seismological modeling codes that simulate earthquake processes, including earthquake wave propagation. These codes allow researchers to study the impact of the different earthquake source models, velocity models and modeling codes.Each simulation involves multiple computational stages, including preparation of input pa

Image of the week - DILIGENT crunches Flickr over EGEE The DILIGENT team used the EGEE computing grid to process 37 million images from the online Flickr database in just 16 weeks. Approximately 1,000 grid jobs were submitted per day, with each job processing around 1,000 images. Image courtesy of SAPIREver wished for a more reliable way of searching for images on the Web?  Grid-enabled digital library project DILIGENT has recently completed a data challenge on image feature extraction that has taken us one step closer to just that: next-generation image searching.Executed on the EGEE infrastructure, the recent DILIGENT challenge has created one of the world’s largest collections of multimedia metadata to be made publicly available for research purposes.37 million Flickr images in a flashThe DILIGENT team used the EGEE computing grid to process 37 million images from the online Flickr database in just 16 weeks. This computation generated approximately 112 million text and image objects—nearly 5 terabytes of

Image of the week - In the beginning The filamentary structure in this simulation in a cube covering 1.5 billion light years per side is also seen in real life observations such as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. A particularly massive galaxy cluster, with a mass 2 quadrillion times that of the Sun can be seen in the center. Image courtesy of Matt Hall, NCSAAstronomers can “time travel” back into the universe’s early history using a number of “red shift” surveys that record objects in sections of the sky that are ever farther away—and therefore older, since their light travels billions of years to reach the Earth.To help understand these observations, UC San Diego cosmologist Michael Norman and collaborators are using TeraGrid to crunch a simulation that uses the ENZO cosmology code, a code that can simulate the universe from first principles, starting near the Big Bang. In work submitted to the Astrophysical Journal, the researchers have conducted the most detailed simulations ever of a regio

  Images of the week - Scenes from SC07 Pumping at the pinnacle of energy, innovation and computing power, SC07 is serving up the latest and greatest in IT to a record crowd this week in Reno, Nevada.Image courtesy of Douglas Mansell The Stony Brook University team are all smiles just prior to beginning their 44-hour race against the clock and five other undergraduate teams as part of the Cluster Challenge.Image courtesy of Douglas Mansell The Enabling Grids for E-sciencE stand showcases the achievements of EGEE, a project which brings together partners from 45 countries to create a grid strongly focused on interoperability and accessibility.Image courtesy of Jerry Newton Photography The Fermilab team, members of Open Science Grid, are demonstrating high bandwidth Tier-1 to Tier-2 LHC data transmission. The OSG duck can be found on OSG member stands throughout the exhibition.Image courtesy of John Urish Projects including AstroGrid, OMII, National Grid Service, NaCTeM, the London e-Science Centre and GridPP are highl

Image of the week - MAGIC: low-energy gamma-ray astronomy on a grid MAGIC is characterized by the largest collection surface of any existing gamma-ray telescope world-wide, an assembly of nearly 1000 individual mirrors, together resulting in a parabolic dish of 17 meters diameter.Image courtesy of Robert Wagner, Max-Planck Institute Located on a mountain top on the Canary Island of La Palma, the MAGIC or Major Atmospheric Gamma Imaging Cherenkov telescope records about 500 gigabytes of raw data every night. This data is shuttled via the Enabling Grids for E-sciencE cyberinfrastructure to gamma-ray astronomists from 17 collaborating institutions across nine different countries.EGEE resources also facilitiate more sophisticated analysis of MAGIC data, allowing the MAGIC collaborators to run more complex simulations.The MAGIC-II Datacenter provides storage and access to the experiment data, which is accessible to all collaboration members.The Datacenter also hosts the MAGIC-II Database and an automatic analysis system that serves s