Content about Americas

Opinion - The age of citizen cyberspace

Using LHC@home, particle beam dynamics can be studied with volunteer computing. Image courtesy CERN

(François Grey, one of the key people behind the founding of the present-day iSGTW and a frequent contributor to these pages, argues that with volunteer computing, we are about to embark upon a new era of “citizen science.”)
I first met Rytis Slatkevicius in 2006, when he was 18. At the time, he had assembled the world’s largest database of prime numbers — those which are only divisible by themselves and one.
He had done this by harnessing the spare processing power of computers belonging to thousands of prime-number enthusiasts, using the internet. 
Today, Rytis is a mild-mannered MBA student by day and an avid prime-number sleuth by night. His project, called PrimeGrid, is tackling a host of numerical challenges, such as finding the longest arithmetic progression of prime numbers (the current record is 25). P

Announcement - Latin American conference on high performance computing: CLCAR 2009

Choroní Beach, near Maracay, Venezuela
Image reused under terms of GNU Free Documentation License 

Event: CLCAR 2009
Venue: Choroní, Aragua State, Venezuela
Dates:

Conference: 21-25 September 2009Paper submission: pastPoster submissions due: 20 June

Official languages: English, Portuguese, Spanish
Conference Web site
Registration 
Contact

CLCAR, first held in 2007, will be a forum to share experiences, to review the state of advanced computing in Latin America, and to assimilate the knowledge and practices of researchers in other regions of the world. The CLCAR 2009 agenda is divided into workshops (September 21-22), conferences, oral presentations and poster discussions (September 23-25).CLCAR invites students, scientists and researchers in high performance computing, high throughput computing, parallel and distributed systems, e-science and applications to meet

Feature - Coming: Sustained petascale computing for open science

Illinois' Petascale Computing Facility (PCF), which will house Blue Waters, is planned as a leading edge, energy-efficient facility capable of housing multiple Blue Waters-scale systems.  The PCF will provide up to 20,000 square feet (about 1900 m2)and 24 MW for computer equipment (not counting cooling infrastructure) and is  expandable  to two to four times that.
Some of the innovative, energy-saving technologies in the building include 480V power (saves 5-10% in transmission loss), liquid cooling for computational components, and outside ambient air cooling for most of the year to avoid using artificially chilled water.
Image courtesy of NCSF.

Computing capacity has grown dramatically over the last decade, allowing scientists to tackle much larger and more complex research problems. The first sustained petascale computing system for “open” science — science done using open source to

Feature - Campus Champions: Users get help from a familiar face

A few words from Kay Hunt, pictured above . . .In the fall of 2007, Scott Lathrop asked me to work on a new effort to support campus representatives (Champions) across the nation who would become the local source of knowledge about high performance computing opportunities for researchers and educators.After working on the design and development of the project I really became enthused about making contacts all over the United States and developing a network of folks who could learn and grow with each other for the common goals of the group.Now, as lead of the Campus Champion program, I recruit Champions and provide them with timely information, user support, training, resource allocations, and outreach support. There are many who help with these activities — I coordinate the people and the process and do the bulk of the recruitment. I am like the head coach of a basketball team.Off the job, I am a “sportsaholic”

Opinion - Grids, clouds and communities: an Open Grid Forum perspective

Image courtesy BELIEF

(Editor’s note: Below, Open Grid Forum’s Paul Strong and Craig Lee give their view of the future of grids and clouds.)
OGF’s initial focus on grids has broadened over time, reflecting evolution in community needs and in technologies such as virtualization and cloud computing.
Grids have been widely adopted across academia and industry. Their evolution and deployment has been driven by several desires: to share data and computational resources, to get results faster, to improve efficiency and to collaborate.
Clouds are driven by different needs, primarily the desire for financial flexibility, offered by platforms such as “pay-per-use,” and business agility, such as reduced time to market and the ability to engage in fast, low-risk experimentation. The cloud model relies on the provider first achieving economies of scale, through sharing resources, and then offer

Feature - Clarity in clinial care: achieving fully interoperable databases

Werner CeustersImage courtesy of W. Ceusters.

Werner Ceusters, director of the  Ontology Research Group at the NYS Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics & Life Sciences, spoke at the Bio-IT World Conference in Boston this past April on the topic of "Do Healthcare IT Standards Hamper the Advance of Science?" 

“Swimming is healthy and contains eight letters.” Absurd? Of course — the real thing is confused with its symbolic representation. Absurdity, then, abounds in current Electronic Health Records (EHRs) according to Werner Ceusters of the New York State Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics and Life Sciences and the University at Buffalo. A polyp by any other name… A significant and universal problem with legacy EHRs, Ceusters says, is that software programs that access them cannot adequately differentiate between diagnoses for a given patient and link them prope

Image of the week - Melanoma image analysis

Nancy Thomas, an associate professor in the School of Medicine at the University of North Carolina specializing in melanoma research, leads the Melanoma Image Analysis project. Her team is looking at the use of image analysis approaches to aid in diagnosis and prognosis of melanoma from patient pathology slides. Based on prior research from Thomas and others, we know that observable characteristics of melanoma can stem from more than one type of genetic mutation.This project is working under the hypothesis that image analysis will allow for the quantitative extraction of melanoma features and that such features can be used to both identify cancerous tissues and link melanoma phenotype with genotype. If true, this will lead to enhanced prediction of patient survival and guide future treatment options. The research should result in a more robust and clinically relevant melanoma classification system based on causal pathways.Computing experts at the Re

Announcement - Parallel Programming and Cluster Computing, 9-15 August, Norman, OK, U.S.

Image courtesy of the University of Oklahoma 

Registration is open for Parallel Programming & Cluster Computing, to be held at the University of Oklahoma in Norman, OK, from 9-15 August.
This workshop will focus on techniques and tools for parallel computing. Much of it will concentrate on distributed parallelism (MPI); in addition, shared memory parallelism (OpenMP), instruction level parallelism, Graphics Processing Unit parallelism and hybrid shared/distributed parallelism are also explored.
Participants will learn about developing, debugging, profiling and tuning of parallel applications across a variety of architectures, using tools from a variety of sources, including GNU, Intel, TotalView, and the Bootable Cluster CD. The material is designed for undergraduate faculty from a variety of disciplines who would like to add parallel computing to their undergraduate teach

Announcement - 2009 caBIG® Annual Meeting, Washington, D.C.

Image courtesy of cabig.nci.nih.gov

Event: caBIG® 2009: Solving basic and clinical research challenges in cancer and beyond
Venue: Marriott Wardman Park Hotel, Washington, D.C., U.S.
Dates:

Meeting: 20-22 July 2009 Deadline for booking hotel rooms at discounted rate: 19 JuneAbstract submissions due: 29 May

Meeting Web site
Registration 
Preliminary program

Attendees will hear how caBIG® is accelerating biomedical research through interoperable tools, infrastructure, standards, and policies that enable data-sharing and collaborations that transcend institutional, geographical, and disciplinary boundaries. The meeting will feature:

Case studies and best practices in clinical trials management, in vivo imaging, molecular analysis, tissue banking and pathology, and data-sharing and security
Tips on implementing, adapting, and customizing caBIG® tools and infrastructure
Presentations o

Image of the week - Flutter for the shutter!

A Black Phoebe triggers a motion-detecting camera in a remote part of the National Park Service’s Cabrillo National Monument in Point Loma, California. The camera is part of a wireless network developed by the High Performance Wireless Research and Education Network (HPWREN) with funding from the National Science Foundation. HPWREN teamed with the Park Service’s California Mediterranean Research Learning Center (CMRLC) and San Diego State University’s Field Stations Program (SDSU FSP) to study natural resource impacts in the rocky intertidal area, while providing a ‘bird’s eye’ view of that area of the park to human visitors. HPWREN’s network uses solar-powered access nodes to support sensors and cameras, and relies on the San Diego Supercomputer Center at UC San Diego for its Internet connections.Credit: HPWREN, University of California, San Diego. Source: San Diego Supercomputer Center, UC San Diego

Announcement - Call for workshop proposals: Summit 09: Partnerships in CI Development

Image courtesy of summit09.ca

Event: Summit 09: Partnerships in CI DevelopmentThree events in one:

Open Grid Forum 27
IEEE Grid 2009
Cybera/CANARIE Summit

Venue: Banff, Alberta, Canada
Dates:

Summit: 12-16 October 2009 Proposal deadline Peer-reviewed (past): 4 MayProposal deadline Non-peer-reviewed: 31 JulyRegistration opens: 4 May

Summit Web site
Registration
Contact
Program

Summit 09 is accepting session and workshop proposals on innovative work and ideas from academia, industry and government regarding, challenges, opportunities, lessons learned and future directions around topics related to advanced computing and cyberinfrastructure.Topics include:

cloud computing
HPC/grid resource providers
service-oriented networks
network-enabled platforms and virtual organizations
social networking, web 2.0
green IT
other emerging cyberinfrastructure

Feature - Busting the myth of immutable microprocessors “Many Paths” © Sue O'Kieffe 2008 A whimsical representation of the myriad paths the logic can take through a reconfigurable microprocessor Imagine reconfiguring your computer’s hardware to perform individual tasks as efficiently as possible.  It's new, it's green, and it's . . . well . . . challenging. A standard computer’s hardware structure is fixed. To accomplish different tasks, its microprocessor runs different software programs. In a reconfigurable computing system — an up-and-coming technology pioneered by the National Science Foundation Center for High-performance Reconfigurable Computing (CHREC, pronounced “shreck”) and others — the hardware structure actually changes when performing different tasks. Reconfigurable hardware is proving capable of providing substantial improvements in power reduction and speed, in particular when applied to high-performance comp