Content about Environment

Feature - Seeing particles with VPM

VPM Interview from Renaissance Computing Institute on Vimeo.

Before we can make use of data, we need to make sense of it. But with complex concepts such as particulate air pollution, you could just as easily drown in the data.
And that’s exactly what was happening when NASA first approached Uma Shankar, an atmospheric scientist at the Institute for the Environment at UNC Chapel Hill, to ask what sort of advanced visualizations the particulate matter research community needed.
After some thought, Shankar suggested an application to visualize particulate matter across the range of sizes in which it occurs.
“Particulate matter has such important impacts on a variety of air quality issues, especially human health” Shankar explained. “Now we better understand the connection between particulate matter and climate, so its importance is even greater than we originally understood.”
Despite this better understanding, the existing visu

Image of the Week - Earthquake comics

Image courtesy PHIVOLCS

In the EUAsiaGrid Disaster Mitigation Workshop at ISGC 2010, Bart Bautista of the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology (PHIVOLCS) reminded delegates that it is not enough to simply detect earthquakes and the tsunamis they produce with sophisticated sensors, or simulate them with grid computing. Countries in earthquake-prone regions must also invest heavily in preparing the population to cope with major natural disasters. This starts in schools, where outreach material like the comic book shown above is used to raise awareness among children.
— Francois Grey, EUAsia Grid

Feature - Keeping an eye on the skies with LifeWatch, poster winner of EGEE 09

Bird encounters jets. According to the photographer, “This was not done in Photoshop. The bird was certainly a lot closer than the planes, but the depth of field was deep enough to capture everything in focus.” Image courtesy Flickr/Kent Smith

Reports of ‘bird strikes’ in recent years are on the rise. According to Scientific American, in 1990 there were only 1,750 incidents in which birds struck a plane, whereas the number for 2008 was close to 8,000. While these encounters never work out well for the bird, normally the plane and passengers escape unharmed — although sometimes a lot of luck is involved. A small percentage of the time, the plane becomes seriously damaged and its engines fail, forcing an emergency landing (as happened last January with US Airways Flight 1549).
Several factors are contributing to the rise in bird strikes. For one thing, migratory bird popu

Feature - Envirogrids: Protecting the Black Sea

Kız Kulesi (Leander’s Tower) in Istanbul’s harbor, whose waters feed into the Black Sea via the Bosphorus Straits. The EnviroGRIDS project will aid in protecting an area of great natural and cultural beauty. Image courtesy özhan 

The Argonauts sailed on its waters. Its eastern shores (now Georgia) marked the boundary of the known world to the Ancient Greeks. The lands along its northern shores are possibly the cradle of the Indo-European language family. The Black Sea region is rich in culture, history, natural beauty and — for the past 50 years — environmental problems.The land area containing the tributaries that feed into the Black Sea is five times the size of the sea itself (2 million square km). This “catchment basin” stretchs from near Munich in the west, the headwaters of the Danube near Moscow in the north, close to the border of Kazakhstan in the east, from the source o

Nanoporous materials for green technology

Pictured here, a metal-organic framework with pores of approximately 1.4 nanometer in diameter.  Image courtesy of David Dubbeldam.

A new class of materials with nano-scale pores could help to improve hydrogen fuel cells or reduce auto emissions.
Using a variety of TeraGrid resources, researchers at Northwestern University and Kansas State University were able to model and evaluate metal-organic frameworks to see how these materials will perform under specific circumstances. They found that metal-organic frameworks act much like sponges, soaking up hydrogen gas and storing it in their nano-sized pores. In fact, these metal-organic frameworks are capable of soaking up far more hydrogen gas than could normally occupy the same amount of space.
To learn more about this research and its further applications, visit the research group’s website.

Feature - How green is my grid?

Image courtesy European Communities, 2009

(Editor’s note: the following is a condensed version of a GridBriefing on Green IT, that was just published on 31 July.)
Climate change is one of the biggest challenges of the 21st century. Across Europe, efforts are being made to reduce energy usage and carbon emissions by 20% by the year 2020. The European Commission has identified Information and Communication technologies (ICTs) as key to accomplishing this. It hopes to cut our carbon footprint all across the economy by harnessing technologies such as virtualization, and by investing in ICT research — which together promise to reduce energy consumption and increase our knowledge of the changing climate.
How green is our ICT? ICT is responsible for 2% of European carbon emissions — a figure equalling that of  the aviation industry — and emissions are expected to increase by 6% per year.However, the biggest savings a

Feature - Plenty more fish in the sea?

According to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, over 70% of the world’s fish stocks are fully exploited, overexploited or depleted. Image courtesy nahpets/stock.exchng 

Once thought to be an endless source of bounty, the oceans’ supply of fish has plummeted dramatically. The biggest cause of this deterioration — bigger than pollution — is overfishing.
Rampant over-fishing around the globe has caused some of our favorite species to hover near collapse. There has been a 90 percent drop in the number of tuna, salmon, cod, swordfish, rays, pollack and haddock since the 1950s, wrote Jeremy Jackson, director of the Scripps Center for Marine Biodiversity and Conservation at the University of California, San Diego, in a paper published last year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The effects of over-fishing are being exacerbated by global climate change, which changes the distribution of sp

Image of the week - The Antarctic as seen from space

Image courtesy 

In this image, the Wilkins Ice Shelf can be seen in the process of slowly breaking away from the Antarctic Peninsula as the ice bridge that connects it to nearby islands looks set to collapse. New rifts forming along its center axis resulted in a large block of ice breaking away.The 40-kilometer-long (25-mile-long) ribbon of sea ice that secured the Jamaica-size ice shelf to Antarctica had been "hanging by a thread" since August 2008.
But now, at least, scientists can keep an eye on the phenomenon nearly in real-time, using images downloaded from the European Space Agency’s Webcam from Space, which have been processed by the Earth Observation Grid Processing On Demand operated at ESA/ESRIN using grid computing.
This is one several third-party applications and services integrated and supported by the European Space Agency Grid using Terradue's gridify application integration environment. The gri

Opinion - Engaging UK researchers

Some of the things that ENGAGE has been involved in include software for the Aladin2 project, which allows for a simple, fast-running model of the Earth’s climate system. Image courtesy National Snow and Ice Data Center/World Data Center for Glaciology, Boulder, Colorado

It is risky to second-guess your users. There can be a difference between what we think our users need, and what they actually need. This is especially the case when trying to create technological platforms that enhance researchers’ ability to generate, collect, share, analyze, store and retrieve information; this is a young technology with a multi-disciplinary research base that can change focus with lightning speed. To counter this problem, the UK’s universities of Southampton, Edinburgh and Manchester (represented by OMII-UK, of which I am a part) and the National Grid Service  began the ENGAGE project. The goal was to create a picture of the computational need

Feature - A FOOTPRINT keeps pesticides out of the water A Calvados producer may use as many as 100 different varieties of apple to produce their brandy. The apples used can be sweet (such as the Rouge Duret variety), tart (such as Rambault), or bitter (such as the Frequin, Saint Martin and Mettais varieties).  Image courtesy Sandor Fizli Apple farmers in France's Vallée d'Auge — a part of Normandy renowned for its apple-based Calvados brandy — apply the insecticide Phosmet to their orchards to keep apple worm caterpillars from ruining their crops. But they don't want to pollute local water sources in the process. Knowing how much to add is tricky. Too little, and the compound will stay localized and break down before it travels far enough to do much good. Too much, and the pesticide may contaminate surface water and groundwater. The EU estimates that already 40% of Europe's surface water has been affected by such runoff problems, as have the fresh-water plankton, amphibians, fish and other

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

Video of the week - Polar Grid The ice shelves in West Antarctica are disintegrating, and glaciers in southern Greenland are moving faster. These great ice sheets affect the global climate in complex ways. The impact of their retreat on sea levels would be profound.In September 2007, iSGTW reported on Polar Grid (PolarGrid: entering the ice age), a “project to advance cyberinfrastructure, empower minority and smaller universities, and provide scientists with a gateway to teraflops of power: enough to drive new and improved high-performance simulations and enable measurement and prediction of ice sheet response to climate change and effect on ocean levels.”Watch the video for an update on PolarGrid!See more at the Polar Grid Web site.