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Feature - ARGUS keeps a sure watch always

Upon the death of Argus, Hera honored her faithful watchman by gathering his many eyes and placing them on the tail of a peacock. Image courtesy Gari.Baldi, under Creative Commons license.

In classical Greek mythology, a multi-eyed, insomniac giant named “Argus” was employed by Hera to keep an eye on the doings of her husband Zeus — mightiest of gods.
Argus was extremely vigilant; an ancient poet wrote that “. . . sleep never fell upon his eyes; but he kept sure watch always.”
So it was appropriate that “ARGUS” became the name of a newly created authorization service to observe and protect Europe’s grid infrastructure. Overseen by the European Grid Infrastructure (which is in turn coordinated by the European Grid Initiative), ARGUS is designed to be a secure and efficient means of offering a single authorization and authentication point for multiple services.
ARGUS works in a series of s

Feature - Wireless grids: Squeezing a grid onto a widget

This diagram shows the layers from which WiGiT is composed.
Image courtesy WiGiT.

As wireless devices become increasingly common, and common devices become increasingly “smart,” wireless grids become increasingly practical. That means that the timing is perfect for WiGiT, a wireless grid testbed which will begin testing its alpha software in June.
The purpose of WiGiT (Wireless Grids innovation Testbed), according to the Syracuse University project leader Lee McKnight, is to refine open specifications for a wireless grid standard, and create a stable platform for experimentation.
“With WiGiT we expect to be able to do these large scale experiments from campus to campus, and we can run little experiments on that,” McKnight said. “Open specifications will make it easier for others to latch on.”
WiGiT, a National Science Foundation-Partners for Innovation program-funded collaboration between

Feature - Secure encryption, with Hydra

The Hydra was so poisonous that even its tracks were deadly; it was eventually killed by Hercules as one of his Twelve Labors. Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons

Greek mythology tells of the Lernaean Hydra, a nine-headed serpent with poisonous breath and a unique defensive system: every time you cut off one head, two more grew in its place.
According to legend, the acted as an effective guardian; if it were real, you might want one to guard your most important belongings.
In the world of grid computing, the Hydra data encryption system does just that: it is designed to help protect sensitive data while being stored and transferred.
It may be especially useful in the worlds of medicine and finance, where data is often highly sensitive and security is paramount. (In contrast, while the high energy physics community produces and processes huge volumes of data, the information itself is not financially valuable or personally sensitive.)
Grids pro

Feature - Collaboration matchmaking in VIVO An example of the sort of social network diagram that could be generated using VIVO data. This one maps co-authored papers. The line color denotes the first year that the connected researchers co-authored papers. The node color shows the number of times that author has been cited, and the node size indicates the number of papers that researcher has authored. To see a larger version of the image, including a list of some of the upcoming features in VIVO, please click on the image. Image courtesy of the project briefing given by Dean Krafft and Valerie Davis at the Spring 2010 Membership meeting of the Coalition for Networked Information. It’s tough to find a good match, but that doesn’t stop some from logging onto social networking sites in search of one. We all want to find that special someone who complements our strengths and shares our interests. That’s why Michael Conlon hopes scientists around the world will someda

SAFE-BioPharma - A new domain standard for secure identity

Mollie Shields-Uehling, pictured above, is the CEO of the SAFE-BioPharma Association. Image courtesy Mollie Shields-Uehling.

In medical and pharmaceutical research, researchers deal with sensitive private information on a daily basis. That makes secure identity management a crucial need. Mollie Shields-Uehling is the CEO of the SAFE-BioPharma Association, a non-profit organization charged with creating a standard that meets that need.
iSGTW: Thank you for joining us for this discussion, Mollie. Could you tell us a little bit about SAFE-BioPharma?
Shields-Uehling: SAFE-BioPharma Association is a non-profit industry collaboration established by the world's leading biopharmaceutical companies to develop and maintain a global interoperable digital identity and signature standard for the biopharmaceutical and healthcare communities. The purpose of the standard is to allow the transformation of business and regulatory process to

Feature - From EGEE to EGI: Plain talk with Bob Jones and Steven Newhouse At the Uppsala Gala Dinner, Bob Jones of EGEE handed over to Steven Newhouse of EGI his most prized possession — a crown made from all the name tags he collected from conferences in the past six years. Image courtesy GridTalk After six years, on 1 May, EGEE will hand over responsibility for the world’s largest grid infrastructure to a new organization dedicated to its coordination and development (EGI.eu), and its newly elected director, Steven Newhouse. During its lifetime, EGEE — Enabling Grids for E-SciencE — assembled a world-wide infrastructure of CPU cores, hosted by computing centers around the world. Each month, about 13 million jobs are executed on the EGEE Grid. This massive multi-disciplinary production infrastructure was led until now by Bob Jones who initially, like Steven, held the position of technical director at EGEE, and quickly advanced to project director. Du

Back to Basics – Data management

by TRACEY WILSON
Tracey Wilson is a program manager for Avetec’s HPC Research Division, DICE, the Data Intensive Computing Environment. DICE is a non-profit program that serves HPC and IT data centers in commerce, government and academia by providing independent third-party evaluations of data management practices on its geographically distributed test bed.

From smartphones to weather forecasts, data drives our world.
In the simplest terms, data is information, which can be found in many forms. Back when computer scientists used punch cards to store data, keeping them in order was a way of controlling or managing data.
We used to talk about how incredibly large a gigabyte of data was. Now terabytes and petabytes are the norm in scientific circles, and we will soon be talking about exabytes just as casually. And as the amount of data we generate grows, so does our need for data management.
Data management — the effective control

Feature - Stem cell research goes Boolean with BooleanNet

Image courtesy of Rodolfo Clix.

To make use of the human genome in our quest to understand genetic disorders, we need to learn more about what each gene accomplishes. Unfortunately, connecting a specific gene to the formation of a specific cell can take years of hard work and thousands of dollars.
An algorithm that could cut that time down from years to hours has passed its first litmus test, however, according to a paper recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The paper’s lead author, Debashis Sahoo, had his eureka moment during an immunology class. Sahoo, who was working on a doctorate in electrical engineering at the time, observed that although many biological relationships are asymmetrical, biologists tended nonetheless to look for symmetrical relationships. Sahoo and his advisors quickly realized that these asymmetrical relationships can be found using Boolean logic, such as if-

Opinion: Africa Grid?

Official ribbon-cutting for “Blue Gene for Africa” last year. This supercomputer is the fastest scientific computer on the African continent, capable of 11.5 teraflops (11.5 trillion floating point operations per second). Image courtesy Center for High-Performance Computing

At the EGEE User Forum in Uppsala, the author, Bruce Becker of the Meraka Institute and coordinator of the South African National Grid, called for making an AfricaGrid a reality. Here he outlines the reasons why now is the opportune time for work on this to be starting in earnest.
For some years now, many have been hinting at an “AfricaGrid.”
In the Mediterranean basin, we have seen many African countries participating directly in EUMedGrid (and more recently EUMedSupport).
In the southern region of Africa, we have seen much activity over the last couple of years that allows to envisage at least a “Sub-Saharan Grid.”
This prospect is very appealing to the r

Research Report - Turning the microscope inwards: Studying scientific software ecosystems As an example, this slide displays the logos of all of the software in the Eclipse software ecosystem. Image courtesy of James Howison and James Herbsleb. Almost every workflow that generates scientific results today involves software: from configuration and control of instruments, to statistical analysis, simulation and visualization. This means that creating and maintaining software is a significant activity in scientific laboratories, including science and engineering virtual organizations. Our research group at Carnegie Mellon University is examining scientific software as an ecosystem, seeking to understand the circumstances in which software is created and shared. The goal of this Open Science Grid project is to identify effective practices and provide input to science funding policy. Towards this end, the OSG/CMU Scientific Software Ecosystem Workshop was held 16-17 February 2010 in Los

Lights, camera, action: FilmGrid

Image courtesy FilmGrid

Film-making is a very labor-intensive craft, relying upon the work of many people.
This is especially true of the part known as “post-postproduction” — traditionally, that portion of the process when all the raw film has been shot and is “in the can.” During this phase, all the editing, natural sound, music, background painting, voiceovers, montages, special effects, and everything else take place.
Because so much of post-production is manual, and because so many hands are involved — and because post-production often involves widely scattered individuals and companies — it can often be very difficult to maintain an up-to-date picture of the status of a film production, leading to inefficiencies, unwanted duplication of effort, and complications. In addition, couriers sometime lose hard disks containing footage with terabytes of information, and security can often be difficul