Content about Resources

While many of our readers were focusing on preparing for SuperComputing 2010, the World Community Grid celebrated its sixth birthday.

Announcement - Last chance, Data Center Infrastructure Management, Nov. 16-18, MERIT network

Photo courtesy Merit

The three-day "Data Center Infrastructure Management" online learning class will be available November 16-18 through Merit's Professional Learning program. Merit is a nonprofit corporation, owned and governed by Michigan's public universities, providing high-performance networking solutions to public universities, colleges, K-12 organizations, libraries, state government, healthcare, and other non-profit organizations.
Instruction will be entirely online — you can attend from anywhere where there is an Internet connection. You can also attend at Merit's offices if you need a space away from your daily demands. The course will provide knowledge about the professional management of data facilities, which is increasingly important for organizations of all types and sizes. It is of interest to individuals who manage data centers or server rooms, IT staff with hardw

Link of the Week - Apps.gov rolls out IaaS

Image courtesy of Apps.gov.

Over a year ago the US General Services Administration launched Apps.gov, an online store where government agencies and bodies can shop for and purchase software as a service.
Now, the GSA has announced that Apps.gov will soon provide access to cloud storage, virtual machines, and other forms of Infrastructure as a Service. To learn more, read the original press release at our link of the week.
—Miriam Boon, iSGTW

Announcement - PRACE awards 320 million compute hours to 10 European research projects

Ten research projects — five from Germany, two from the UK one each from Italy, the Netherlands and Portugal — have been awarded access to the PRACE infrastructure. In total, 321.4 million compute core hours were granted. Sixty-eight applications requesting a total of 1870 million compute hours were received in this call, which was the first opportunity for researchers to apply for PRACE resources. The successful research projects are in the fields of astrophysics, earth sciences, engineering, and plasma and particle physics, including collaborators from 31 universities and research institutes in 12 countries. These projects will have access to JUGENE, IBM BlueGene/P, hosted by the Gauss-Centre for Supercomputing member site in Jülich, Germany, a petascale HPC system that is the fastest computer in Europe available for public research.The following ten projects were granted

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

Image of the Week - It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s a . . . mouse? A tracker ball?

Another version of the technology. Note one of the finger holes in the bowling ball above. Image courtesy CERN Bulletin

 
Way back in 1972, before the advent of a lot of computing hardware & software that we now take for granted, CERN electronics engineer Bent Stumpe needed some way to control an electronic pointer on a computer screen.
So, he purchased a bowling ball and put it in a box along with several other, smaller balls, some electronics and other devices, thus creating what was essentially an upside-down mouse, or tracker ball.
The device worked by transmitting the X-Y movements of the ball to two bearings (one for each direction), which then transmitted them to incremental encoders. The encoders and the rest of the electronics then sent a stream of digital signals to the computer, telling it the direction and speed of the movement.
It continued to be used in what is

Announcement - Call for proposals: Cycles on ALCF 10 petaflop Blue Gene system

The Argonne Leadership Computing Facility is now accepting proposals for time allocations on its next-generation, 10 petaflop IBM Blue Gene system. Allocations through the Early Science Program (ESP) are for pre-production hours (between system installation and full production) beginning in early 2012. More than four billion core hours are available.
To ensure the success of these early projects, ESP awardees will receive significant support from the ALCF staff of computational scientists and performance engineers, plus additional assistance from program postdocs.
Proposals are due 29 April 2010, and must include a detailed plan for the science to be accomplished plus a description of the application development that would be done. For full details or to submit your proposal, visit the website.  Or, for more information about the Early Science Program, please email earlyscience@alcf.anl.gov.

Link of the Week - LarKC: The “Large Knowledge Collider”

Image courtesy LarKC 

The Large Knowledge Collider, or LarKC (pronounced ‘lark’), is part of a €10 million project to promote  “massive distributed incomplete reasoning.”
The goal is to go beyond the limited storage, querying and inference technology currently available, and enable semantic computing — in which data is given meaning (semantics) that  enables computers to look up and “reason” in response to, say, user searches. Or, in an example from Wikipedia — at the moment, a person can create a web page that lists items for sale. The HTML of this person’s catalog page can make simple, document-level assertions such as “this document’s title is ‘Widget Superstore,’ ” but there is no capability within the HTML itself to assert unambiguously that, for example, item number X586172 is an Acme Gizmo with a retail p

Link of the Week - Nature Networks

Image courtesy Nature

Now that you have read our stories about astronomy and distributed computing, do you find yourself wanting to know more?
For that matter, have you generally wanted to followup, get the contact details of an author or interviewee, comment on stories, give feedback, pick your colleagues’ brains, or post questions about those nagging little things you’ve always wondered about?
Or simply have a ‘virtual water cooler’ to hang around and talk shop?
Now you can do all that, and more.
International Science Grid This Week now has an electronic “forum” on Nature Networks, the online scientific community moderated by the journal Nature. It’s non-profit and non-proprietary. Anyone can read a post; just go to the Nature Networks site and click on the forum entitled “iSGTW: grid computing, and more . . . ”
If you decide you want to add your own posts, that’s easy to do &mdash

Link of the Week – Chatting about where cloud meets grid

Ignacio Llorente, the founder of HPCcloud.

Looking for somewhere to chat about the intersection of grid, cloud, and high performance computing? The HPCcloud Google Group could be the place to look.
According to the group description, “HPCcloud is a discussion group for presenting experiences and scenarios by individuals, organizations and projects to illustrate how Cloud computing can enhance the different types of distributed and high performance computing infrastructures in science and engineering.”
The group was founded by Ignacio Llorente, the head researcher at the Distributed Systems Architecture Research Group in Madrid.
Since HPCcloud’s inaugural post on 30 June, traffic and discussion have been sparse. Nonetheless, 109 people have already signed onto the group. As membership grows, conversation will too. All you have to do is participate!

Link of the Week - Creating scientific papers, the easy way

Just fill in your name, and voilà. Image courtesy SCIgen. Image on previous page courtesy Melodi T, stock.xchng

If anyone feels that they don't get to attend enough scientific meetings as it is, how about SCIgen, the automated paper generating tool?
Its creators, Jeremy Stribling, Max Krohn and Dan Aguayo — all grad students at MIT — say that SCIgen is a program that generates random Computer Science research papers, including graphs, figures and citations, all with the use of  “context-free grammar.”
Simply plug in your name and those of your colleagues, press the button and out comes a prepared scientific paper ready for submission, complete with references and figures.
Scarily, the inventors claim that they have had papers accepted at genuine scientific meetings - and have attended and presented the slides!
(Warning: don't try this at home. For amusement only.)
A colleag

Announcement - DOE accepting proposals until July 1 for use of supercomputing resources through INCITE program

Image courtesy of DOE

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced April 16 it is accepting proposals for a program to support high-impact scientific advances through the use of some of the world’s most powerful supercomputers located at DOE national laboratories.  Approximately 1.3 billion supercomputer processor-hours will be awarded in 2010 through the Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program for large-scale, computationally intensive projects addressing some of the toughest challenges in science and engineering.“The INCITE program is instrumental in driving America’s leadership in science, which is vital for our economic prosperity, energy security and global competitiveness,” said Michael Strayer, DOE Associate Director of Science for Advanced Scientific Computing Research.  &ldqu