Content about Environment

Researchers at the Los Alamos National Laboratory used supercomputers to model ocean vortexes and their effect on floating oil rigs. Their work has won industry awards — increasing safety and reducing potential harm to deep sea environments.

Rainforest Connection uses simple devices created from discarded cellphones to listen out for illegal logging activities and provide rangers with real-time alerts. The organization was founded in 2012 by Topher White, who gave a talk about his work at TEDxCERN last month. White’s system has already helped stop illegal logging in Indonesia and further pilot projects are set to be launched soon in both Brazil and Cameroon.

One of Antarctica’s biggest ice streams, the Pine Island Glacier, may be in uncontrollable retreat, with the potential risk of raising global sea levels by up to 1 cm by the year 2031. Discover the role that high-performance computing played in enabling this research.

Last month, CERN played host to the 2nd Workshop on Energy for Sustainable Science at Research Infrastructures. Delegates discussed how various aspects of large-scale research infrastructures could be made more energy efficient, including the computing centers which underpin the science carried out.

Sea level is projected to rise by up to a meter by 2100 due to human-caused increases in greenhouse gases. However, a new study indicates that cutting four kinds of heat-trapping emissions could have an impact this century. Such progress is possible because these pollutants cycle through the atmosphere relatively quickly.

Grid computing is helping scientists to design cheaper and greener plastics for everyday use.

Read about how the EpiCollect application can help field researchers gather data.

Image of the Week - Google Street View lands in Antarctica

The above picture is of Half Moon Island in the South Shetlands. You can see a 360 degree panoramic view of the island by pressing the arrows in the top-left hand corner of the picture. It has a certain ‘cool’ factor in more ways than one, don’t you think?
Original courtesy Brian McClendon, vice president of engineering, for Google Earth and Maps.

The ubiquity of Google knows no bounds. Their Street View service, first introduced in 2007, with its 360-degree panoramic street-level images has now captured views of our planet’s most southern-most continent – Antarctica.
Brian McClendon, vice president of engineering for Google Earth and Maps, took the Street View images or ‘vacation photos’ while travelling to Antarctica on a cruise ship. More information about his trip can be found here.

Announcement - Registration open, Computing and Astroparticle Physics-ASPERA, Lyon, France Photo courtesy ASPERA Registration is now open for Computing and Astroparticle Physics-ASPERA, to be hold in Lyon, France from 07 October to 08 October 2010. Astroparticle Physics has grown in a few years from a field of a few charismatic pioneers transgressing interdisciplinary frontiers to a global science activity projecting very large infrastructures involving hundreds of researchers each. In particular, the large infrastructures proposed in the ASPERA Roadmap will face challenging problems of data collection, data storage and data mining. In some of these, the cost of computing will be a significant fraction of the cost of the infrastructure and the issues of model of computation, data mining complexity and public access will be extremely challenging. In the Lyon workshop these issues will be addressed, along with data storage and analysis models developed in neighboring fields such as part

Feature - Surfing for earthquakes

Aftermath of Haiti earthquake. Image courtesy UN Development Program

A better understanding of the ground beneath our feet may come from research by seismologists and an organization called RAPID—a group of computer scientists at the University of Edinburgh.
The very structure of the Earth controls how earthquakes travel and the amount of damage they cause. Therefore, a clear picture of this structure would be extremely valuable to earthquake planners — but it requires the analysis of huge amounts of data.
To help, the RAPID team developed a system that performs the seismologists’ data-crunching, and have made it easy to use by relying on an interface familiar to all scientists: a web browser.
Seismologists measure vibrations in the Earth at hundreds of observatories across Europe, which allows them to study earthquakes as they travel across countries and continents. By measuring the speed and strength of the vibrations at d

Feature - The sun never sets on the GreenStar Network The GSN project is lead by Quebec Ecole de technologie superieure in Montreal. In this picture, the team behind the GreenStar Network pose next to the Communications Research Centre Canada's GSN node. From left to right: Martin Brooks, Mathieu Lemay, Michel Savoie, John Spence, Bobby Ho. Image courtesy of John Spence. When the sun sets on the Communications Research Centre in Ottawa, Canada, the solar-powered computational jobs might be sent across the high-speed connection to the Cybera data center in Calgary, where it’s still bright and sunny. And when the sun stops shining in Calgary, if the wind is blowing at the wind-powered BastionHost facility in Truro, Nova Scotia, then the jobs could be sent back east. Most forms of renewable energy are not reliable – at any given location. But Canada’s Green Star Network aims to demonstrate that by allowing the computations to follow the renewable energy across a lar