Content about Earth science

SEE-GRID-SCI User Forum 2009: Abstract deadline

Logo courtesy of SEE-GRID-SCI User Forum 2009.

Abstract submissions are due on September 30 for the SEE-GRID-SCI User Forum 2009 (that stands for South-East European Grid eInfrastructure for regional eScience).
The event will take place 9-10 December 2009 at Bogazici University in Istanbul, Turkey. The event will focus on parallel and distributed computing, with a focus on seismology, meteorology, environmental protection, and other research fields in the earth sciences.
Topics of interest for submissions include, but are not limited to:

Featured topic: earth sciences and the grid, with a main focus on grid applications related to seismology, meteorology and environmental protection
Advanced grid applications and workflows
Grid architecture, systems and middleware
Grid resource management
Distributed information management
Distributed storage systems
Formal models for grid computing
Parallel and distributed programming languages

Feature - Academia Sinica watches global carbon

Chi-Lan Flux Tower is located on one of the long-term ecological research sites in Taiwan, in the northeast part of the island and close to Yuan-Yang Lake nature preserve. At 1400 - 1800 m above sea level, the area of the Chi-Lan Mountain site covers approximately 310 hectares, with a high frequency of fog and cloud year-round. The climate is temperate, heavy and moist, and the trees are mainly Taiwan Cypress. Image courtesy Jia-ying Jiang, Chi-Lan Mountain
Front page: Polarized light reveals the state of the atmosphere thousands of years ago, in a slice of glacial ice containing bubbles of atmospheric gases trapped eons ago. Image courtesy UCAR

With the help of data standards and computing resources, Academia Sinica Grid Computing Center (ASGC) has developed an innovative, grid-enabled approach to tackle carbon flux observation.
The carbon cycle — in which the carbon from the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2) travels fro

Feature - Watch near real-time earthquake simulations

(Click image for more information on the topographical map and to see cross-sectional diagrams of compressional wave speed.)
Every time an earthquake occurs in Southern California, thousands of seismograms are recorded at hundreds of seismic stations. The Caltech team collects these seismic recordings automatically from the Southern California Seismic Network (SCSN) through the internet. They subsequently simulate the seismic waves generated by the earthquake in a 3-D  southern California seismic velocity model using the source parameters determined by the seismic network. At periods of about 4 seconds and longer, the resulting wave motion simulated at most stations closely match the gathered data recorded at these stations. Image courtesy of Caltech; image previous page courtesy of Nate Brelsford, stock.xchng

When an earthquake rumbles through southern California, seismometers at almost 400 sites jump into action. They s

Feature - Gridding the aerosol problem

Image courtesy BEinGRID

It can be difficult to measure the number of aerosols – tiny particles suspended in the air – that are in our planet’s atmosphere.Such knowledge is important in a number of ways, as aerosols can have an effect upon everything from short-term  air-quality forecasting to predicting the effects of aerosols on global warming. At least one climatologist says that on a long-term, global scale, aerosols will make India’s monsoons more intense, and Australia’s droughts hotter and longer. So, wet areas will be wetter, and dry areas drier. (See 7 January 2009 iSGTW, “Opinion - UK grid researchers aid efforts to understand climate change.”) Tracking where aerosols come from, where they tend to collect, and where they tend to “sink” on a planetary scale is a tricky business as well . Due to wind and weather patterns, sometimes the most pristine, remote areas accumulate the most

Feature - Foreseeing floods

A typical forecast for France. Green represents good weather, yellow is possible rain, darker yellow (at bottom center) is Level 3 Hazardous Weather Alert. Image above  courtesy Meteo France. Image on previous page courtesy Gavin Spence, sxc.hu

During the last decade, flash floods have become one of the most significant natural hazards in Europe.
In September 2002, the Cévennes mountain range in south central France experienced a storm that lasted for 15 hours and caused 600 mm (almost 2 feet) of rain within one day — the normal equivalent of one year’s rain in the Paris area. Unexpected flash floods caused the deaths of more than 20 people, and economic damage estimated at 1.2 billion euros (about $1,555,261,897 in US dollars as of press time).
The ability to predict such situations is vital.
“There were not forecasting systems set up at that point (of the 2002 flood),” says Vincent Thierion, a geo-informatics researcher

Opinion - Perspectives on advancements in distributed computing At an informal SC08 discussion titled "Traditional & Distributed HPC–What has changed? What remains the same?" participants — both users and developers — shared experiences and insights on the advancement of grid-based High Performance Computing. Led by Gabrielle Allen and Daniel S. Katz of the LSU Center for Computation & Technology, and Gary Crane, SURA Director of IT Initiatives (including SURAgrid), the group identified several areas in which it believes grid technology needs to advance in order to deliver cost-effective service. Management of distributed dataMany research domains require data from diverse sources, and output from one application is frequently used as input to another. Data definitions that cross application boundaries are rare, making sharing between applications difficult or impossible. Participants noted the progress in relevant standards development by the Common Component Architecture group. They also c

Opinion - UK grid researchers aid efforts to understand climate change Then and now: The way Muir Glacier looked back in August, 1941, when it was photographed by W.O. Field on White Thunder Ridge, Muir Inlet, Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve, Alaska. (See photo at bottom of page for comparison.) Image courtesy of National Snow and Ice Data Center/World Data Center for Glaciology, Boulder, Colorado. (Our latest opinion piece comes from a team of researchers at the Natural Environment Research Council Datagrid (NDG), and OMII-UK.) To learn about climate change and its effects, climate researchers have to play detective. And as detectives, they need access to a wide variety of clues, on everything from the rate of coral growth in the Great Barrier Reef to the amount of carbon in the atmosphere since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. For instance, one climate researcher—Beate Liepert at Columbia University—has floated above the greater New York City area in a hot-air balloon, in order to collect aerosol sampl

Feature - Catching quakes with laptops The interactive program built around the BOINC screensaver, designed for classroom activities.  Recent earthquakes and sites of major historic earthquakes are indicated; information about these events can be retrieved by clicking on them. Image courtesy of the Quake Catcher Network project. Inside your laptop is a small accelerometer chip, there to protect the delicate moving parts of your hard disk from sudden jolts. It turns out that the same chip is a pretty good earthquake sensor, too—especially if the signals from lots of them are compared, in order to filter out more mundane sources of laptop vibrations, such as typing. It’s an approach that is starting to gain acceptance. The project Quake Catcher Network (QCN), already has about 1500 laptops connected in a network that has detected several tremors, including a magnitude 5.4 quake in Los Angeles in July. Led by Elizabeth Cochran at the University of California, Riverside, and Jesse Lawrence at Stanford University, QCN u

Feature - GEON A model showing a three-dimensional view of a typical landscape, without Lidar. Image courtesy of Chaitan Baru A mysterious world of complex geological processes lies hidden beneath the earth’s crust and produces the amazing topographic features on the surface. To better understand these hidden processes, scientists must probe the earth’s surface for clues of what goes on underneath.To do this, geoscientists use lasers to scan earth’s surface and capture elevation points over large areas with high accuracy. These Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) scans allow geoscientists to map key topographic regions more precisely than ever before. The current collection of LiDAR data sets contains more than 7 billion data points, amounting to close to 5 terabytes of data.The problem is that to store, process and analyze these large data sets requires extensive computing resources that many scientists do not have. To solve this problem, the Geosciences Network (GEON) project, based at the San Diego Supercomp

  Image of the week - Modeling the salty seas With climate change, just how salty is the ocean getting? Fiona Reid and her team at the University of Edinburgh wanted to build the tools to find out. Working in conjunction with a combined French/European Nucleus for European Modeling of the Ocean, or NEMO, they have been working with "nested models" of computers, under a Distributed Computational Science and Engineering grant, with the aim of delivering state-of-the art ocean models needed for the next decade of marine science.  Image courtesy of EPCC    

Link of the week - Children’s publication features tornado animation Simulated Twister This sequence of frames from an animation, created by PSC visualization specialist Greg Foss, show the simulated tornado as it moves within the grid volume and evolves. (Darkness of gray shading corresponds to water concentration.)Image courtesy of Pittsburgh Supercomputing CenterThe online edition of the classic children's publication Weekly Reader recently featured a tornado animation produced at Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center. PSC visualization specialist Greg Foss created the animation from a simulation by University of Oklahoma scientist Ming Xue. Xue, director of the Center for the Analysis and Prediction of Storms at Norman, used PSC supercomputing to simulate a 1977 supercell storm system and the high-intensity tornado it spawned. The results—which capture the tornado’s vortex structure, with wind speed of 260 miles per hour—represent the highest resolution simulation ever done of an entire thunderstorm and

  Feature - Building BRIDGEs between Europe and China The BRIDGE project includes three case studies of interoperation between Chinese and European middleware, covering aerodynamics, meteorology and pharmaceuticals.Images courtesy the BRIDGE project Grid middleware has become a pervasive e-science technology and Chinese middleware is no exception, with technologies such as CNGrid GOS and CROWN Grid contributing to e-science efforts across the globe.Yet one of the remaining challenges in grid computing is interoperability, and more sustainable international co-operation must be accomplished to align middleware developments on a global scale.The EU ICT BRIDGE project (Transcontinental Workflows for Simulation, Engineering, and Design on heterogeneous Grid Platforms) is addressing these challenges using three case studies of interoperation between Chinese middleware CNGrid GOS and European middleware GRIA in the aerospace, meteorology and pharmaceutical sectors.Protein docking for disease controlThe first case study is a distrib