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Video of the week - Learning with multi-touch

Multi-touch technology has been around longer than you might think; experimental implementations have been surfacing since the early 1980s. This technology really hit the big time, however, when Apple released the first iPod Touch.
In 2008, the Renaissance Computing Institute at University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill unveiled a multi-touch table that has since become an invaluable tool in the scientific visualization toolbox. At the same time, learning scientists, computer scientists, and psychologists from Virginia Tech and the University of Chicago formed itemL – interactive technologies for embodied mathematics Learning – and began investigating how young children (three to eight-years-old) interact with a multi-touch play table.
“We are collecting extensive data on the commercially available SMART Table while developing our own technology, TanTab,” explained Michael Evans, assistant professor of learning science and technologies at Vir

Announcement - International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium call for papers

The IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium is now accepting abstracts for its 25th annual conference, which will take place 16-20 May 2011 in Anchorage, Alaska.
Anchorage, home to moose, bears, birds and whales, is strategically located at almost equal flying distance from Europe, Asia and the Eastern USA. Embraced by six mountain ranges, with views of Mount McKinley in Denali National Park, and warmed by a maritime climate, Anchorage offers year-round adventure, recreation, and sporting events. It is a fitting destination for IPDPS to mark a quarter century of tracking developments in computer science. To celebrate the 25th year of IPDPS, plan to come early and stay late and also enjoy a modern city surrounded by spectacular wilderness.
IPDPS is an international forum for engineers and scientists from around the world to present their latest research findings in all aspects

Feature - The sun never sets on the GreenStar Network The GSN project is lead by Quebec Ecole de technologie superieure in Montreal. In this picture, the team behind the GreenStar Network pose next to the Communications Research Centre Canada's GSN node. From left to right: Martin Brooks, Mathieu Lemay, Michel Savoie, John Spence, Bobby Ho. Image courtesy of John Spence. When the sun sets on the Communications Research Centre in Ottawa, Canada, the solar-powered computational jobs might be sent across the high-speed connection to the Cybera data center in Calgary, where it’s still bright and sunny. And when the sun stops shining in Calgary, if the wind is blowing at the wind-powered BastionHost facility in Truro, Nova Scotia, then the jobs could be sent back east. Most forms of renewable energy are not reliable – at any given location. But Canada’s Green Star Network aims to demonstrate that by allowing the computations to follow the renewable energy across a lar

Opinion - A round-up of the grid in Chile

Palacio de la Moneda, the seat of government in Chile. Image courtesy Max Cossio, stock.xchng.

I was lucky enough to be a guest of REUNA in Chile, and make a presentation at their eScience Workshop in Santiago.
REUNA is a not-for-profit organization connecting 16 universities in Chile, working to promote and advance grid computing in the region and bring together science and business to exchange ideas. REUNA is the original NREN in Chile, connecting the country to the 20,000 gridified institutions around the world via RedCLARA and the ALICE2 project.
The organization has been investigating the state of the art in the region, setting up grid pilot projects in areas such as climate change, bioscience and grid technology, in which they transfer expertise through training and setting up an action plan for the future.
Many other areas of research are ripe for grid computing, including astronomy, engineering, education and physics. REUNA

Announcement - OSG Storage Forum, 21-22 September

OSG Storage Forum will be held at the University of Chicago 21-22 September 2010.
Discussions will cover scalability, performance and tuning of the storage technologies adopted by T2 and T3 sites. We will also discuss analysis jobs storage requirements.
The storage software developers and expert storage administrators will be invited to share tips on how to improve stability and scalability of deployed storage systems. OSG storage administrators and representatives of various Virtual Organizations are encouraged to share their experiences and discuss common problems.
For more information, please visit the event’s Indico website.

Feature: Fruitfly + flight studies + grid = flying robots?

The GUI pre-processor used to generate the geometry of the fly wings. (Click on image to enlarge.) All images courtesy Diego Scardaci, INFN

The study of the flight of a fruit fly may one day lead to the development of autonomous ‘Micro-air vehicles’ (MAVs), or independent ‘flying robots,’  if scientists in Argentina have their way.
Working in conjunction with the Italian Institute of Nuclear Physics (INFN) under the EELA-2 initiative, they are conducting the study to understand the flight mechanisms of insects and small birds. Their hope is that someday, 'flying robots' could be developed with maneuvering capabilities similar to insects — the most agile flying creatures on Earth.
MAVs could be used to study and explore places that are too dangerous or inhospitable for humans to tread; examples include search-and-rescue teams exploring buildings to detect fires, or scientists investiga

Feature - Distributed computing experts gather in Chicago

At OGF29, Mark Morgan demonstrates XCG, a production grid maintained by the Genesis II team at the University of Virginia.
Image courtesy Miriam Boon, iSGTW.

Last week, distributed computing experts from around the world converged on Chicago to attend OGF29 and the ACM International Symposium on High Performance Distributed Computing 2010 (HPDC).
“It’s been a quite successful HPDC,” said Peter Dinda, the event’s program chair. “In terms of the grid context, it’s good to have it co-located with Open Grid Forum.”
Both events benefited from the co-location, reporting increases in attendance.
Although the conference chairs did not actively seek out programming on the topic of clouds, this emerging technology became a major theme throughout both conferences.
OGF29’s second day featured a status update on the Open Cloud Computing Interface, and cloud technology demonstrations by t

Feature - Cancer researchers speed crystallography

Scientists have trained a system to recognize the formation of 3-D protein crystals, automating a time-intensive, manual process necessary for scrutinizing the structure of cancer-related proteins.
Image courtesy of IBM and the World Community Grid.

Using the World Community Grid, scientists at the Help Conquer Cancer Project have found a way to automate and speed up protein crystallography, according to a recent paper in the Journal of Structural and Functional Genomics.
X-ray crystallography is the process of using x-rays to map the structure of crystals. Although biological molecules such as proteins and DNA are not normally crystalline in form, they can be prompted to form crystals through exposure to the right chemical compounds. Once crystallized, the scientists can use x-rays to map the protein; knowing the structure of a protein is invaluable to scientists who are trying to understand how a protein interacts with the human

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caBIG® 2010 call for abstracts extended; registration now open

Attendees at the 2010 caBIG® Annual Meeting to be held September 13-15 at the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel in Washington, D.C., will be immersed in the latest developments and applications of caBIG® technology and will be presented with new opportunities for participation. 
The meeting will feature:

Guidance to help achieve interoperability—including adaptation of existing systems, adoption of industry-recognized standards and common data elements, or development and deployment of services and tools that are interoperable with caBIG®
Case studies and lessons learned from peers who have deployed and developed caBIG® tools and infrastructure
Access to resources that will help you achieve your goals for data integration, exchange, and collaboration, including hands-on and instructor-led educational sessions on caBIG® tools and infrastructure
Descriptions of caBIG®-en

BP oil spill: Scientists mobilize to create new disaster response science

The Gulf's wildlife is increasingly being affected by the spill. Image courtesy of NOAA.

Less than two weeks after the BP Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion killed 11 and began leaking between two and four million liters of oil per day, the calls started coming in. The oil would soon reach the Louisiana coast, where it would do untold amounts of damage to the local marshes, wetlands, and channels. Could the team that successfully modeled hurricane storm surges along the Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas coastlines help?
“We started working on the project fairly quickly, probably around the 10th of May,” said Clint Dawson, head of the Computational Hydraulics Group at the Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences at The University of Texas at Austin.
With the highly accurate descriptions of the Gulf of Mexico’s coastline Dawson and his colleagues previously used for hurricane si

Link of the Week - If it were my home

When centered on West Hartford, Connecticut, the oil spill stretches over seven U.S. states.
Image courtesy Miriam Boon, taken as a screenshot on 4 June 2010.

It isn’t easy to get perspective on a major disaster such as the BP-Deepwater Horizon oil spill.
But this week’s link of the week, “If it was my home,” can at least help us to understand the scale of the oil spill.
The website automatically detects your location, then superimposes an approximate image of the oil spill, based on NOAA data, centered on your location. On the website you can move the oil spill around by entering other locations, or by clicking the button, “Put it back in the gulf.”
By seeing how much familiar ground the oil spill would cover, you can get a better sense of the spill’s physical size.
Of course, the information displayed on this map is just the tip of the, ah, oil; much of the spill remains underwater.
It is