Content about Americas

Feature - Open Science Grid Workshop in Argentina Participants in a recent Open Science Grid workshop held in Argentina. Image courtesy of Carolina Leon Carri, University of Buenos AiresFor some Latin American students, a recent workshop held in Santa Fe, Argentina, may have been an important step towards a lifetime of working with grids. The goal of the “Hands-on Workshop in Grid Computing,” presented by educators at the Open Science Grid and the University of Buenos Aires, March 12–14, was to give young scientists, with almost no background in distributed computing, the ability to use grids in their research. The workshop, part of a two-week-long information technology school organized by the National University of the Littoral in Santa Fe, hosted 20 students from universities all over Argentina.“The students were interested and very capable,” said Ben Clifford, OSG science education specialist, about his trainees. “The group included a nice spectrum, from people interested in applications to t

Feature: Worldwide Grids, Worldwide ScienceSan Francisco hosted the 2007 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.  Scientists at last week’s meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Francisco discussed the use of grid technologies and volunteer computing to fight disease, predict earthquake effects and hazardous weather conditions, understand the origins of the universe, and decode our own behavior.“Science is distributed because life is distributed,” said TeraGrid Director Charlie Catlett in one of three sessions devoted to grid computing. “The Internet is worldwide, people are putting computers and storage facilities on the Net. The question is not whether you want a distributed infrastructure, but whether you want to use that infrastructure to do science.”During the grid-focused sessions attendees learned about the global growth of distributed computing infrastructures and their use by scientists around the world.    &nbs

Feature - Making the Earth Move  The warm colors leading from the fault region into the Los Angeles area illustrate how a chain of sedimentary basins can guide earthquake waves away from the fault where they originate into heavily populated regions in Southern California.Image courtesy of Amit Chourasia, San Diego Supercomputing Center. An ambitious group of more than 40 institutions, together called the Southern California Earthquake Center, is building earthquake modeling capabilities to transform seismology into a predictive science similar to weather forecasting. To bring that vision to life, SCEC has built a set of grid-based scientific workflow tools. A series of simulations based on these tools—TeraShake 1, TeraShake 2, and the most recent CyberShake—began in 2004. They've run on TeraGrid resources across the country and are already yielding significant results.TeraShake 2, for example, simulated a series of earthquakes along the San Andreas Fault. Run in concert at NCSA and SDSC, it revealed a striking

Feature: Unlocking Secrets of the HeartA volumetric heart model created from a surface model received from New York University.Image courtesy of the Computational Visualization Center, University of Texas at Austin Mathematical models of hearts may not be the most romantic of things, but to patients at risk for vascular disease they hold much more promise than a box of chocolates. Scientists from the University of Texas at Austin combine images of people’s hearts and arteries with mathematical modeling techniques to simulate the interaction between blood flow and the walls of the heart and arteries. The goal of the project is to help physicians better predict the onset of vascular disease and evaluate treatment plans for affected patients.“Our work is focused on the development of patient specific models. We use material- and flow-related data from the literature, but by imaging a person, we capture his or her geometry,” says Victor Calo, a postdoctoral fellow in the team from the Institute for Computational Engin

Feature: San Diego Supercomputer Experts HelpNavajos Build “An Internet to the Hogan” Leonard Tsosie (center), a Navajo senator and a leader of the Internet to the Hogan Project, uses a laptop to explain the project's benefits to friends at their traditional dwelling, or Hogan. Supercomputer experts from UC San Diego will help end the "digital divide" for many in the Navajo Nation in the Southwest.  Image courtesy of SDSC.Navajos in the American Southwest, many of whom have never had access to a personal telephone, will soon make a significant leap into the Internet Age, thanks in part to resources and expertise provided by the San Diego Supercomputer Center at the University of California, San Diego.The Navajos, who refer to themselves as the “Dine” (dee-nay), celebrated “An Internet to the Hogan and Dine Grid Event” on Monday, January 29, at Navajo Technical College in Crownpoint, New Mexico. Highlights of the event include their official acceptance of a “Little Fe&rdquo

Feature: Caltech and TeraGrid See the Big Picture    The Samuel Oschin telescope at the Palomar Observatory in California.Courtesy of Palomar Observatory. The Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles recently unveiled a spectacular new display during its grand re-opening. The “Big Picture,” an image of the Virgo Galaxy Cluster 150 feet wide and 18 feet high, recorded for posterity on porcelain-enameled steel tiles, was created using data from the Palomar-QUEST sky surveys that were processed using TeraGrid resources.“The observatory came up with this idea five or six years ago, that a single image of the sky would cover the main wall of their new exhibit hall,” says Caltech astronomer George Djorgovski. “Palomar-QUEST surveys 1.25% of the entire sky each night, and covers the same areas multiple times. By the end of the survey we’ll cover 15,000 square degrees, or 40% of the entire sky.” Even the Big Picture, huge by

Feature: In Search of the Subtle and RareCDF Detector rolling out of the collision hall after discovering the top quark.Image Courtesy FermilabThree trillion times per second — that's how fast quarks in the B sub s (Bs) particle “oscillate,” or switch between their matter and antimatter states, according to scientists from the Collider Detector at Fermilab collaboration. The CDF physicists measured this rapid oscillation with the help of the world's most powerful particle accelerator, Fermilab’s Tevatron, unprecedented computing power made available through the Open Science Grid and the LHC Computing Grid, and a healthy dose of ingenuity. “Bs oscillation is a very subtle and rapid effect,” says Jacobo Konigsberg from the University of Florida, co-spokesperson for the CDF collaboration. “It's astonishing that we can measure it at all.”Astonishing as it may be, CDF routinely measures phenomena both subtle and rare. Recently, CDF researchers caught the rare and elusive Sigma s

Feature: A Fair Shake for Seismologists

Instantaneous surface velocity 75 seconds after the earthquake origin time. The warm colors leading from the fault region into the Los Angeles area illustrate how a chain of sedimentary basins can guide earthquake waves away from the fault where they originate into heavily populated regions in Southern California.

In the Midwestern United States, in the spring, there are weeks when you can't get through an episode of your favorite television show without an alert telling you that your county is under a tornado watch or, more invasive still, the local meteorologist interrupting programming to tell you to head to your basement. It saves lives, and it represents an incredible amount of simulation and data collection — even if you do have to scurry to the Web later to find out how “Lost” ended that week.
There may never be an equivalent for temblors, a local “earthquake man” breaki

Image of the Week: Using WestGrid for Earth Sciences Composite seismic cross-section of an area near southern Vancouver Island. Image courtesy Andrew Calvert, Simon Fraser University Andrew Calvert, a professor of earth sciences at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, uses the computing power of WestGrid for his seismogram modeling and seismogram simulations, and to process large volumes of imaging data. WestGrid, the Western Canada Research Grid, is a $50 million project to operate a high performance computing, collaboration and visualization infrastructure across western Canada. WestGrid encompasses 14 partner institutions across four provinces and was the first provider in Canada to adopt a grid-enabled system for its resources. This image shows a composite seismic cross-section across the Cascadia forearc near southern Vancouver Island, superimposed on a display of P wave velocities and relocated earthquakes. 

Feature: The Portal Provider
Eric Roberts

Eric Roberts knows portals. As a staff member at the Texas Advanced Computing Center, he has spent the last five years developing, testing, redeveloping and refining them – first as a member and project manager of the GridPort toolkit team, and now as lead developer for the TeraGrid User Portal.
“We launched the TeraGrid User Portal on May 15, and since then things have gotten very busy for us,” says Roberts.
The aim of a grid portal is to simplify the use of grids for everyday users. TodayÂ’s TeraGrid User Portal provides a repository of information for users, including a system monitor for all TeraGrid resources, information on data collections and documentation. It also provides account management functions, allowing users to see their accounts on different resources, and to manage users and accounts for their projects. The current functionality, however, is only the foundation for what