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Imagine living next to a busy highway operating 24 hours a day for 365 days per year. That’s what life is like for ocean animals living next to busy shipping lanes.

iSGTW reader Harvey Newman gives his perspective on SC10.

New computing tools could save graduate students from thousands of hours spent visually inspecting historical maps, quilts, medieval art, and manuscripts.

Humanities researchers use laborious visual inspection of historical materials to determine authorship and artistic lineage for manuscripts, maps, and quilts. A typical research project could take the time of several graduate students two or more years.

“We are interested in understanding how to support these domain scientists so they are more efficient,” said Peter Bajcsy, principal investigator for the Digging into Image Data to Answer Authorship-Related Questions (DID-ARQ) project at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. He added, “We are giving them tools that will automate the visual inspection process.”

Those tools are the product of extensive collaboration between humanities researchers and Bajcsy’s team. To create them, the computer experts engaged in lengthy discussions to determine what questions the humanities researchers seek to answer, and exactly how they would answer them using traditional methods. Their inquiries sought out details such as which image features researchers use – consciously or unconsciously – to identify the author or artist. Then the computer scientists developed algorithms that could rapidly identify those features automatically.

Feature - Life at the extreme at the Pierre Auger Observatory The Pierre Auger Observatory has a detection area of 3,000 km², so large that it is best seen by airplane. A space-based sucessor with a detection area hundreds of times greater is already being planned: the JEM-EUSO will be attached to the International Space Station in 2013. It will use large volumes of the earth’s atmosphere to detect and observe particles colliding with planet’s magnetic field. All images courtesy Pierre Auger Observatory Some people enjoy living life at the edge, such as participants in extreme sports. At the other extreme are those who relish watching rare events.Among the latter are astronomers at the Pierre Auger Observatory, a multi-national collaboration to detect the 'light-signature' given off as these cosmic rays hit particles in our atmosphere. Based in Argentina, the observatory monitors ultra-high energy cosmic rays —  spectacular examples of some of nature

Feature - Can a digital earth save the planet?

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Ash spewing from Iceland’s volcano, “Eyjafjallajoekull’ in 2010, in an image from the European Space Agency’s Envisat satellite. Image courtesy ESA (European Space Agency).

With climate change hot on the agenda, activists, scientists and politicians are looking into what can be done to provide a united front against this global issue.
At the 8th e-Infrastructure Concertation Meeting, held at CERN last Thursday and  Friday, a networking event organized by the European Commission (EC), one such project aims to consolidate the various Earth sciences. Their work could reduce the loss of life and property due to natural disasters, and help us better understand how our planet’s climate is changing.
Ground European Network for Earth Science Interoperations - Digital Earth Community (GENESI-DEC) is focused on providing a virtual resource for scientist

Feature - Scientific computing rock stars unveiled We asked you what makes someone a rock star of scientific computing, and you answered. Click on the image for a larger version. When last we polled our readers, we asked you who you think is a rock star of scientific computing. There were many names nominated, including Robert Grossman, director of the National Center for Data Mining, and Malcolm Atkinson, director of the e-Science Institute and the National e-Science Centre in the United Kingdom. Not all of our nominees were available to comment. Nonetheless, we did get three fantastic responses to our wacky rock star questionnaire. Read on to find out about where fame and computing meet! Ian Foster Director of the Computation Institute at Argonne National Laboratory Q: Let's start with the shameless plug part: What are you working on right now, why should your average user or developer care, and why is it super cool and challenging? A: Let

Feature - LHC open to all

An actual recorded event from the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment—this event shows radiation and charged particles spilling into the detector from the beam colliding with material in the beam pipe.
Image courtesy Carl Lundstedt

Occasionally, iSGTW runs across stories in other publications related to the fields we cover. Below is an excerpt from Linux Journal, containing one person’s view of the whole process.
One of the items at the heart of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiments is open-source software. The following will provide a glimpse into how scientific computing embraces open-source software and its open-source philosophy.
The LHC at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland, is nearly 100 meters underground and produces the highest-energy subatomic particle beams on Earth. The Compact Muon Solenoid experiment is one of the many collider experiments within the LHC. One of its goals is to give physicists a window into the universe fractions

DEISA and TeraGrid host joint EU/US Summer School in Italy

Attendees outside the  Santa Tecla Palace on Sicily’s southeastern shore. Image courtesy Summer School

The Santa Tecla Palace on Sicily’s southeastern shore was recently a classroom for a summer school dedicated to fostering collaboration and innovation in computational science among graduate and postdoctoral scholars from Europe and the United States.
A joint effort of the EU’s DEISA and America’s TeraGrid, it provided a multicultural student community the opportunity to learn about high performance computing (HPC) resources, tools and methods.
“We hope to continue with such events every year — alternating between EU and US destinations,” said Hermann Lederer, who presented a DEISA infrastructure and service overview.
Sixty graduate and postdoctoral scholars from 20 nations were selected from more than 100 applications. Participant expenses were paid by DEISA and TeraGrid. &

Feature - Theorists find dark matter evidence in open data

A visualization of the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope.
Image courtesy of NASA and General Dynamics.

Dan Hooper and Lisa Goodenough are not part of the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope collaboration. But by using FGST’s publicly released data, they were able to find clues to some of the universe’s juiciest secrets at the center of the Milky Way.
In their analysis, Hooper, a Fermilab theorist, and Goodenough, a graduate student at New York University, report that very-high-energy gamma rays coming from the center of the Milky Way originate from dark-matter collisions.
“We went out of our way to consider all causes of backgrounds that mimic the signal, and we found no other plausible astrophysics sources or mechanics that can produce a signal like this,” Hooper said.
A recent paper, published on the pre-print server arXiv, outlines their findings.
Astrophysicists have long postulated a wide range of

Feature - New physics in space

A C5 Supergalaxy, one of the world’s largest planes, loading the AMS-02 experiment at Geneva Airport. Image courtesy CERN Bulletin

New life was breathed into the International Space Station (ISS) this year after NASA announced it will extend the ISS from 2015 to at least 2020.The new deadline extends opportunities for science experimentation in the largest space research laboratory ever constructed. One of these experiments is the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS-02), a detector that may help scientists understand why our universe exists and why there is more matter than anti-matter.Most space-grade electronics are about ten years old, so the AMS-02 represents the newest and most advanced physics experiment in outer space to date. Currently, it is being tested and due to launch in February 2011. AMS-02 was shipped via Geneva airport to NASA this August in one of the largest planes in the world, a US Air Force C5 Super Galaxy.Once aboard the ISS, A

Feature - Astronomical computing
Supporting the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope means thinking big

A visualization of the LSST.
Image credit: Todd Mason, Mason Productions Inc./LSST Corporation

The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope to be constructed in Chile will incorporate the world’s largest digital camera, capable of recording highly detailed data more quickly than any other telescope of comparable resolution.
For the scientists working on the project, that all amounts to an exciting opportunity to learn more about moving objects (including monitoring asteroids near the Earth), transients such as the brief conflagrations of supernovae, dark energy, and the structure of the galaxy.
For computing specialists, it means more data. A lot more data.
The LSST will take between 1000 and 2000 panoramic 3.2 gigapixel images per night, covering its hemisphere of the sky twice weekly. Along with daytime calibration images, this will amount to 20 terabytes of data stored every 2

Feature - Data is big news

Members of the expert group, as well as commission officers; John Wood is standing in the center holding the report.
Previous page: “Atomium” sculpture, from the 1958 World's Fair in Brussels. Images courtesy e-ScienceTalk.

What will data infrastructures look like 20 years from now?To find out, the European Commission (EC) assembled  a panel of experts to prepare a vision of scientific data e-infrastructures in 2030. The resulting report, overseen by chair John Wood of Imperial College London, was released last week in Brussels.“Data is big news,” said Wood. In the past, date might have been thrown away but it’s now being kept and recorded as emails, videos, mobile phone data and more. CERN produces petabytes of data each year, but with genome sequencing, electronic health records and upcoming experiments such as the Square Kilometer Array, we’re on schedule to generate hundreds of times more. In the words of Wood: