Content about Europe

The Earth sciences, like geology, oceanography, and astronomy, generate vast quantities of data. The vision of the EarthServer project is to offer researchers ‘big Earth data at your fingertips’, so that they can access and manipulate enormous data sets with just a few mouse clicks.

At the recent ISC High Performance event in Frankfurt, Germany, the new TOP500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers was announced. Shaheen XC40, a Cray system in Saudi Arabia, is now ranked as the world’s seventh fastest supercomputer, and is the first supercomputer from the Middle East to crack the top 10.

When hunting neutrinos, a more powerful particle beam increases the chance of seeing neutrinos interact. Fermilab scientists recently set a new world record for high-energy neutrino experiments with a sustained 521-kilowatt beam, and will soon achieve beam power over 1 megawatt.

The Virtual Imaging Platform (VIP), a science gateway designed to provide access to grid computing and storage resources for medical imaging simulation, is helping scientists based in Sweden research new ways of monitoring the progress of multiple sclerosis.

The European Grid Infrastructure (EGI) makes it possible.

The Merlin smartphone app has the solution to your bird watching mysteries. Now, Merlin Bird Photo ID takes it one step farther, identifying birds from uploaded photos. Crowd sourcing and artificial intelligence come together to answer a frequently asked question: What bird is that?

Last week, CERN hosted an event to discuss ongoing efforts to develop a ‘European open science cloud’. The aim of this work is to bring public research organizations and e‐infrastructures together with commercial cloud-computing suppliers to build a common platform offering a range of services to Europe’s research communities.

Scientists have collected wildlife audio samples for many years, and there are many databases of these sounds in existence. BioAcoustica distinguishes itself through tight integration with a cyberinfrastructure for performing analyses.

The HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC) is the research arm of the HathiTrust, and provides computational know-how for humanities scholars. With secure access to copyright-protected works, HTRC helps scholars see patterns across decades of literature. 

Sergio Andreozzi outlines EGI’s vision for the Open Science Commons. He argues that this new approach to governing shared scientific resources has the potential to help to shape research policies and maximize scientific outputs.

Discover how the DNANANO project has been using the Curie supercomputer — a PRACE tier-0 system — to help design nanocages for targeted drug delivery.

Simulating one of these nanocages for just 100 nanoseconds would take nearly a decade on a normal workstation. However, by accessing PRACE resources, the research group was able to carry out multiple simulations of this kind in less than thirty days.