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Campus grids secret to productive grid sites A picture of FermiGrid, the campus grid at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. Image courtesy of Fermilab Visual Media Services.Photo by Reidar Hahn. Fostering a local campus grid may be the secret to running a super-productive grid site, according to Rob Gardner, integration coordinator for Open Science Grid. “We noticed certain sites on Open Science Grid that were very productive relative to their peers,” Gardner said. “The common denominator was that they were accessing resources beyond the scope of their research domain by accessing resources on their campus.” That realization prompted OSG to look more deeply into existing campus grids. The idea, Gardner said, was to find out what the sites were doing right, and to learn from them in three key areas: job management, data management, and identity management. The ultimate goal? To arrive at a set of best practices for establishing and running campus grids.

Feature - Q&A: Grid Colombia warms up

A group photo at an Open Science Grid-sponsored Grid Colombia workshop, which took place in October 2009. Image courtesy of Open Science Grid.

With a little help from colleagues at Open Science Grid and EGEE (via EELA-2), Colombia is on the cusp of launching its first national grid infrastructure. iSGTW caught up with Jose Caballero to learn more about the present and future of this promising project. Caballero currently does software development for ATLAS, and serves as the OSG liaison to South America. Previously, he spent five years working with the gLite grid software for the CMS experiment.
iSGTW: How did Grid Colombia get started?
Caballero: EELA-2 (E-science grid facility for Europe and Latin America) chose Colombia to host one of its main conferences in 2008, and that brought the worldwide grid movement to the attention of both academia and government in Colombia. After that, universities started to study the creation of a national

Announcement - Virtually attend UPCRC 18-19 March

The UPCRC Illinois Summit brings together researchers from the Illinois Universal Parallel Computing Research Center, the Intel Corporation, and Microsoft Corporation, who sponsor the UPCRC. Summit presentations showcase UPCRC Illinois’ current agenda, research, progress, and collaborations.
Although on-site participation is limited to UPCRC Illinois, Intel, and Microsoft, friends and colleagues in academia, media, and industry are invited to attend online via live streaming 18-19 March. (The workshops 16-17 March will not be streamed for public consumption.
Online participants must register in advance. The agenda and links for live streaming and live chat are now available online.

Feature - OSG All Hands Meeting

Attendees visited vendor tables to network and watch demonstrations at the first ever vendor and e-demonstration session to run at an OSG All Hands Meeting.
Image by Miriam Boon.

Last week, 183 researchers and vendors gathered at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois for the Open Science Grid’s annual All Hands Meeting.
In addition to hosting workshops for CMS and ATLAS computing meetings, sessions covered a variety of topics, including security, virtualization, cloud computing, biology applications, reports from European colleagues, and the future of US cyberinfrastructure. This year also marked the first vendor and e-demonstration session.
Several people expressed pleasure at the dynamic discussions that occurred during the panel-style sessions, said Paul Avery, a researcher at the University of Florida and co-chair of the OSG Consortium Council. Kent Blackburn, Avery’s fellow co-chair and a researcher with LIGO Caltech, suggested that the inc

Announcement - Submissions now accepted, SC10 Technical Program, New Orleans, Louisiana

Supercomputing 10 (SC10) is now accepting submissions for its technical program. The 23rd annual conference in the series, SC10 will take place in New Orleans, Louisiana from November 13–19, 2010. Over 11,000 attendees from industry, academia and government are anticipated.
This year, the technical program encourages participants to focus on one of three thrust areas to be featured prominently at the conference: climate simulation, heterogeneous computing and data-intensive computing.
Climate simulation spotlights the tremendous importance of research in global climate change, including HPC-based climate simulation techniques which help scientists understand global warming, climate change and other environmental processes.
SC10’s other thrusts highlight important emerging HPC technologies. Heterogeneous computing covers the technological and research advances in software that are required fo

Announcement - HUBbub 2010 Early Bird Registration

An open source release of HUBzero’s core software is scheduled to be unveiled at HUBbub2010, a workshop for current and potential users of the HUBzero Platform for Scientific computing.
The two-day workshop is designed for people interested in employing the open source release to establish their own hub, or already using a hub who want to learn more; early bird registration is due on 12 March 2010.
Developed at Purdue University, HUBzero is a sort of Swiss Army Knife for deploying and accessing computational research codes, and visualizing and analyzing results, all through a familiar Web browser interface. Built-in social networking features akin to Facebook create communities of researchers and educators in science, engineering, medicine, almost any field or subject matter and facilitate online collaborations.
The HUBzero platform powers nanoHUB.org and 20 other sites already, delivering hundreds of research tools and seminars to n

Blog post of the week - Out of the mouths of babes

A recent high school field trip to Argonne National Laboratory and Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory was recorded the 21st century way – with tweets.
In a recent Symmetry Breaking blog post, Symmetry intern Andrea Mustain wrote:

“I was looking for a way for them to journal, but in a more realistic way. I think that’s what texting is and definitely what Twitter is—a way to journal,” says Dale Basler, instigator of all that cell-phone gazing and a physics teacher at Appleton East High School. Basler gave the students several assignments for the field trip; he’d set up a Twitter feed, and one option was to post tweets throughout the day. But he laid out some ground rules. The students had to do at least 16 tweets, on a variety of topics–physics topics–and, Basler says, he enforced strict cell phone etiquette: ringers off, and utmost discretion while tweeting. He did allow for some lighthea

Q & A: Larry Rudolph talks about pervasive computing, virtualization, and science

Image courtesy of Larry Rudolph.

We’ve all heard about how pervasive computing will change the way we connect and compute in our everyday lives. But what about the way we do science? How is that going to change?
Larry Rudolph joined VMware in 2008 to help start a project on mobile phone virtualization, after five years as part of Project Oxygen: Pervasive Human-Centric Computing at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). Read on to find out what he had to say about pervasive computing, virtualization, and science.
iSGTW: How would you define virtualization or virtual machines?
Rudolph: A virtual machine is a computer made out of software. It is just like a regular computer. It can run programs, and it has a file system, mouse, keyboard, and display. Virtual machines run on physical computers, but it can be easily moved from one physical machine to another an

Feature - Doing science on the hub

Michael McLennan demonstrates a visualization tool hosted on nanoHUB.org in his office at Purdue University. Image courtesy Miriam Boon.

The HUBzero platform will be released as open source for the first time at the HUBbub 2010 workshop, 13-14 April. The release of this powerful platform could change the way you research, collaborate, and teach.
HUBzero has been described as a cloud, a content management system, and “FaceBook for scientists.” In a way, these are all true. Yet none of them adequately convey the capabilities of this platform.
It all began with a web infrastructure called PUNCH, which was developed in 1995 at Purdue University in order to deploy simple science gateways. Scientists could use PUNCH to create a web form that, when filled out and submitted, would run batch jobs.
At the time, this was pretty revolutionary. But by 2002, it was time for an update. So they began work on the now well-known nanotechnology resource

Announcement - Call for papers: Life Sciences Workshop

The workshop on Emerging Computational Methods for the Life Sciences is now accepting paper submissions.
The event will take place 21-25 June 2010 in Chicago, Illinois, as part of the International Symposium on High Performance Distributed Computing.
The purpose of this the workshop is to provide the opportunity for researchers, scientists, engineers, and students to discuss and share the latest research in parallel and distributed high performance systems applied to Life Science problems. It aims to offer an interactive environment for investigators working on novel “computational thinking” for (Systems) Biology, Bioinformatics, Biocomplexity, and Cheminformatics, so that future activities and collaborations will be initiated, as well as fostering discussions about the utilization of HPDC systems in their respective research initiatives. Selected papers will be published in a special issue of Journal Concurrency and Compu

Announcement - Early-bird registration: Women of Vision Awards Banquet

Early-bird registration for the Women of Vision Awards Banquet has been extended until 12 February 2010.
The Women of Vision Awards Banquet, hosted by the Anita Borg Institute Board of Trustees, honors women making significant contributions to technology. One winner is selected in each category: Innovation, Leadership, and Social Impact.
The banquet will take place 12 May 2010 from 6-9:30 p.m. in the Mission City Ballroom, Santa Clara, California. This year’s keynote speaker is Arianna Huffington, the co-founder and editor-in-chief of the Huffington Post.
For more information, please visit the event’s webpage.
To register, please visit the registration page.

Announcement - Call for papers, CLADE, deadline 1 March, Chicago

Under the ‘El’ in Chicago.
Image courtesy of Brad Martyna, stock.exchng

Papers are now being accepted for CLADE (Challenges of Large Applications in Distributed Environments); the deadline is 1 March for this Chicago, Illinois, event.
Subjects to be covered at CLADE are applicable to science, engineering, medicine, business, economics, education, and other disciplines. They  include recent results on large scale  innovative applications that use distributed heterogeneous and dynamic computing environments.
Topics of interest will illustrate advances in:

Large-scale distributed applications, both computation- and data-centric
Application-specific portals in distributed environments
Distributed problem-solving environments
Distributed, collaborative science applications
Large, distributed data analysis
Applications with heterogeneous spatial and temporal characteristics
Distr