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Announcement - CI Summer Institute for Geoscientists accepting applications, 6 June deadline

The 7th Cyberinfrastructure Summer Institute for Geoscientists is now accepting applications.
The event will take place 9-13 August at the San Diego Supercomputer Center on the University of California, San Diego campus.
The broad theme for CSIG’10 will be emergent geoinformatic approaches to 3D and 4D integration of geoscience data. Given the diverse interests of past CSIG participants, and based on feedback that they have provided, CSIG’10 will feature two “tracks” of instruction:

Build Track: technologies related to building geoinformatics systems; and
Education Track: use of geoinformatics resources in education

Interested applicants at all levels are encouraged to apply, including graduate students, postdocs, faculty, and professionals in earth science and related disciplines. Applicants will have the option to choose the track of interest at the time of applica

Feature - New result could shed light on the existence of the Universe

The DZero collaboration has found evidence for a new effect which could explain the matter-antimatter asymmetry of nature. CP violations, such as this effect, are in disagreement with the predictions of the theoretical framework known as the Standard Model of particles and their interactions. The effect ultimately may help to explain why the universe is filled with matter while antimatter disappeared shortly after the Big Bang. Image courtesy of the DZero collaboration. 

The Big Bang should have created a universe with equal amounts of matter and anti-matter. Instead, we only see antiparticles when they are produced in nuclear reactions, cosmic rays, and particle colliders.
The dominance of matter that we observe in the universe is possible only if there is ‘CP violation’ – differences in the behavior of particles and antiparticles. Although physicists first observed certain forms of CP vio

Image of the week - Traffic visual

This visualization of traffic flow in downtown Chicago was created using data generated by TRANSIMS, the TRansportation ANalysis and SIMulation System.
TRANSIMS is a regional transportation modeling and simulation software environment, used in this case to generate data that represents car paths. In order to bring that data to life, those car paths were converted into trajectories. Next, the trajectories were read into a data visualization plug-in called Maya, which was developed by Alex Betts at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications’ Advanced Visualization Laboratory. The finishing touch was to add accurate models of buildings.
TRANSIMS is part of the US Department of Transportation’s Travel Model Improvement Program. In order to create the Chicago version of TRANSIMS, AVL has been collaborating with the Argonne National Laboratory TRACC Center.
What next? According to the AVL website, “AVL’s Matt Hall is creating an

Magellan explores scientific clouds – scientifically

The Magellan management and network control racks at NERSC. To test cloud computing for scientific capability, NERSC and the ALCF installed purpose-built test beds for running scientific applications on the IBM iDataplex cluster. Magellan systems at both NERSC and the ALCF will be built using QDR InfiniBand fabric. Image courtesy R. Kaltschmidt, LBNL

It’s clear that cloud computing is today’s hot computing buzzword. All the cool kids are doing it, and scientists are no exception. But how much do we really know about the intersection between science and cloud?
“Cloud computing has become a very exciting new field with several companies making offerings that are already being used by scientists around the world,” said Pete Beckman, director of Argonne Leadership Computing Facility and leader of the ALCF Magellan team. “The question the Department of Energy has is pretty straightforward: what kind

Announcement - NSF Macrosystems Biology Call for Proposals

The National Science Foundation has recently identified continental-scale ecology as a critical priority for scientific advancement. The associated program, Macrosystems Biology: Research on Biological Systems at Regional to Continental Scales, is now accepting proposals.
This new program will support quantitative, interdisciplinary, systems-oriented research on biosphere processes and their complex interactions with climate, land use, and invasive species at regional to continental scales as well as planning and development activities to enable groups to conduct Macrosystems Biology Research.
A number of facilities, such as NEON, exist to support these types of large-scale scientific questions.
The first round of proposals is due 16 September 2010. To learn more, or to apply, please visit the program page.

Feature - Collaboration matchmaking in VIVO An example of the sort of social network diagram that could be generated using VIVO data. This one maps co-authored papers. The line color denotes the first year that the connected researchers co-authored papers. The node color shows the number of times that author has been cited, and the node size indicates the number of papers that researcher has authored. To see a larger version of the image, including a list of some of the upcoming features in VIVO, please click on the image. Image courtesy of the project briefing given by Dean Krafft and Valerie Davis at the Spring 2010 Membership meeting of the Coalition for Networked Information. It’s tough to find a good match, but that doesn’t stop some from logging onto social networking sites in search of one. We all want to find that special someone who complements our strengths and shares our interests. That’s why Michael Conlon hopes scientists around the world will someda

Image of the Week - Protect your identity - the comics said so!

Reproduced with permission. Please visit www.SecurityCartoon.com for more material.

Believe it or not, one of the leading causes of security vulnerabilities is the apt and malicious use of social engineering.
That's what Sukamol Srikwan Jakobsson and Markus Jakobsson aim to address using cartoons such as the one pictured above.
Srikwan Jakobsson and Jakobsson are both adjunct professors at Indiana University-Bloomington's School of Informatics. The two crusading researchers co-authored a paper about the cartoons entitled "Using Cartoons to Teach Internet Security," published in Cryptologia, vol. 32, no. 2.
Their "About" page states:
Some people believe that security education is pointless, and that technology alone can address security problems. They point to previous failures to communicate important advice, and argue education is like nailing jelly to the wall. Others, mostly people who read source code, underesti

SAFE-BioPharma - A new domain standard for secure identity

Mollie Shields-Uehling, pictured above, is the CEO of the SAFE-BioPharma Association. Image courtesy Mollie Shields-Uehling.

In medical and pharmaceutical research, researchers deal with sensitive private information on a daily basis. That makes secure identity management a crucial need. Mollie Shields-Uehling is the CEO of the SAFE-BioPharma Association, a non-profit organization charged with creating a standard that meets that need.
iSGTW: Thank you for joining us for this discussion, Mollie. Could you tell us a little bit about SAFE-BioPharma?
Shields-Uehling: SAFE-BioPharma Association is a non-profit industry collaboration established by the world's leading biopharmaceutical companies to develop and maintain a global interoperable digital identity and signature standard for the biopharmaceutical and healthcare communities. The purpose of the standard is to allow the transformation of business and regulatory process to

Feature - Frontier guides computing through the collision landscape

Just like you might have trouble navigating using this antique map, detector experiments can’t make sense of their data using an out-of-date map of their detector. Image courtesy Boston Public Library’s Norman B. Leventhal Map Center under Creative Commons license

The colossal particle detectors that monitor collisions at the Tevatron in Illinois and the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland are unique beasts.
Scientists design most of the parts inside them to meet an individual set of specifications. But every once in a while, they find something the detectors can share.
Scientists at the CMS and ATLAS experiments at CERN are using a software system that Fermilab’s Computing Division originally designed for the CDF experiment at the Tevatron. The system, called Frontier, helps scientists distribute at lightning speed information needed to interpret collision data. The system is based upon the wid

Back to Basics – Data management

by TRACEY WILSON
Tracey Wilson is a program manager for Avetec’s HPC Research Division, DICE, the Data Intensive Computing Environment. DICE is a non-profit program that serves HPC and IT data centers in commerce, government and academia by providing independent third-party evaluations of data management practices on its geographically distributed test bed.

From smartphones to weather forecasts, data drives our world.
In the simplest terms, data is information, which can be found in many forms. Back when computer scientists used punch cards to store data, keeping them in order was a way of controlling or managing data.
We used to talk about how incredibly large a gigabyte of data was. Now terabytes and petabytes are the norm in scientific circles, and we will soon be talking about exabytes just as casually. And as the amount of data we generate grows, so does our need for data management.
Data management — the effective control

Announcement - Research call to DOE National Labs due 3 May

The US Department of Energy is soliciting proposals from DOE National Laboratories in four key areas, some of which will require computing expertise. Proposals for this Research Call are due 3 May 2010 at 11:59:59 p.m. Eastern Standard Time.
Each three-year award will go to a single National Lab (the “lead lab”) to organize and coordinate all activities required to execute the scope of work. The lead lab will be expected to provide these services to DOE through combinations of its own staff and collaborators selected by the lead lab in consultation with DOE.
Paraphrased quotes regarding the computational component of some, but not all of the research areas, are highlighted below.
Area of Interest 1: Interregional Electricity Reliability Issue Assessment and Analysis
The changing composition of the generation fleet and the loads comprising the US electric power system requires detailed review, assessment, and analysis to ant

Image of the week - Hubble goes 3D

Image courtesy of NASA.

If this image of the Orion Nebula looks a little like a Hubble image, and a little like a 3D graphic, that's because it's both.
Science visualization specialists at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland created 12 minutes of visualization for Hubble 3D, a 43-minute 3D Imax film chronicling the history of NASA's Hubble Space Telescope.
The visualization includes a four minute tour through the gas and dust "canyon" of the Orion Nebula.
NASA's website on the project states:

For some of the sequences, STScI imaging specialists developed new techniques for transforming the 2-D Hubble images into 3-D. STScI image processing specialists Lisa Frattare and Zolt Levay, for example, created methods of splitting a giant gaseous pillar in the Carina Nebula into multiple layers to produce a 3D effect, giving the structure depth. The Carina Nebula is a nursery for baby stars.
Frattare painstakingly removed the