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PEGrid gets down to business

This image depicts a simulation of the water saturation changes in a quarter of a homogeneous oil reservoir over time, as water is injected. The water increases the pressure in the reservoir, pushing the oil to the surface. Because the reservoir is symmetrical, researchers were able to save time by simulating only one quarter of the reservoir.
The colors indicates the water saturation, with purple being highly saturated and red being least saturated. Each of the six slices represents a snapshot in time.Image courtesy of Shameem Siddiqui.

Although Petroleum Engineering Grid officially started up in late 2009, it is already a classic example of how research projects can have unexpected benefits.
PEGrid came into existence using techniques and tools created by TIGRE (Texas Internet Grid for Research and Education), a state-funded project based on the use of federally funded middleware such as Open Science Grid’s Virtual Data Toolkit.
When TIGRE ende

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 - EELA-2 Conference

Fernando Liello gives a keynote at the 2nd EELA-2 Conference in Choroni, Venezuela. Image courtesy of EELA-2.

On 25-27 November, researchers from Latin America and Europe descended on the town of Choroní, Venezuela for the second EELA-2 Conference, hosted by the University of Los Andes and CeCalCULA.
Financed by the European Commission, the EELA-2 Project (E-science grid facility for Europe and Latin America) has the objective of promoting grid technology in Latin America and Europe. EELA, which began four years ago, is a high capacity grid with quality production. Using the RedCLARA and GÉANT2 networks, EELA also created a digital bridge between Europe and Latin America.
Over this cooperation network the EELA-2 grid is supporting the development and testing of several advanced applications that are serving to improve not only scientific and technological development, but also everyday lives. The science supported by EELA-2 ranges from analyzi

Feature - New Year Predictions

This week marks the beginning of a new decade. What does the future hold for eScience? To find out, iSGTW spoke with experts from all walks of eScience. Here’s what they had to say.

François Grey
Visiting Professor at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Tsinghua University, Beijing
Expertise: Citizen cyberscience

What do you think will be the big story or trend within your area of expertise in 2010? Within the area of citizen cyberscience, expect to see a big growth of projects that invite volunteers to contribute via their smart phones. The switch to this platform for volunteer computing - and above all volunteer thinking - is going to enable far greater public participation in science.
What do you think will be the big story or trend within e-science as a whole in 2010? The developing world will catch up with the industrialized world, and in many areas overtake it when it comes to exploiting distributed computing and other d

Feature - An interview with the “Particle-Zoo Keeper”

Julie Peasley presents her particle zoo during a visit to the CERN library. She has created a plush toy version of the decay of a top quark for Fermilab. One of the artist’s plush toy can reverse inside-out with a zipper, and open up to reveal a big bottom quark with a mini anti-muon and a mini muon-neutrino. Image courtesy CERN

There are many different ways to depict the workings of the Standard Model — typically involving things such as blackboard drawings or 3D computer animations. However, a Los Angeles artist has come up with a new,  unorthodox approach, using hand-sewn, fuzzy, plush toys, which she collectively describes as her “particle zoo.” A behind-the-scenes look into her work seemed  appropriate for the holiday season.
Physicists consider that they have “seen” a particle when their detectors send an electronic signal and a spot appears on their compu

Biology group issues challenge to computing

The O6-methylguanine DNA methyltransferase protein from Vibrio parahaemolyticus. This protein methylates DNA and is associated with DNA repair. Vibrio is a bacterium in the family that causes cholera. Image courtesy eNMR.

The famous Chicago architect Louis Sullivan — arguably the founder of the modern skyscraper — once said that “Form follows function.”
And what is true of architecture is true of chemistry and structural biology as well: a molecule’s function — how it behaves, and what it causes to be produced — can be deduced by its form. Knowing a molecule’s precise, three-dimensional geometry tells researcheers how and where it will bind to some other molecule, and what effects the two combined molecules will have when they are united.
Or, as Timothy Lovell, a computational chemist at a pharmaceutical company, summed it up: “Once you have the structure down on p

Feature - Fighting money-laundering, with the grid

Image courtesystock.exchng

When it comes to money laundering, crime really does pay. An estimated 1 trillion US dollars is laundered annually worldwide by criminals moving dirty money around in an attempt to cover up the origins of their cash.
The AMONG (Anti money laundering in Grid) Business Experiment from BEinGRID is set to stop such crooks in their tracks.
AMONG is helping banks to cooperate in order to improve their Anti-Money Laundering (AML) mechanisms. Currently, banks track suspicious behavior with AML systems set up within their own individual institution, with communication between banks initiated only in the case of an anomaly. But this approach can only detect simple cases of fraud.
“Money laundering cannot be dealt with when you look only within one organization,” says Kostas Tserpes from NTUA (National Technical University of Athens), a partner in the project. “By default, the person doing money l

I see crime scenes

IC-CRIME’s laser scanner technology will allow investigators to accurately record room and object dimensions, as well as the placement of every piece of evidence in a crime scene.Image courtesy NCSU

Fighting crime with science isn’t as simple as popular TV shows like CSI would have you believe. But those shows get one thing right: science and technology have a tremendous potential for changing the way crime is investigated.
Today, investigators record crime scenes using sketches and photographs. Bullet trajectories are determined using lasers or even lengths of string. “They take a microsnapshot,” said Mitzi Montoya, a North Carolina State University researcher who specializes in knowledge and virtual team management. “You don’t really know what’s relevant in a crime scene, and you can’t go back and create it, because once it’s cleaned it’s gone forever.”
That could change if the IC-CRIME (Interdiscip

Feature - OpenAIRE: archive access anytime, anywhere Peggy Bacon in mid-air backflip, Bondi Beach, Sydney, 1937. Open Access can breathe new energy and productivity in to the work of research. Image courtesy State Library of New South Wales, Australia If scientific progress was a living organism that could be fed and nurtured, the swift, free exchange of ideas would be a key nutrient. “Easy and free access to the latest knowledge in strategic areas is crucial for EU research competitiveness. This open access pilot is an important step towards achieving the ‘fifth freedom,’ the free movement of knowledge amongst Member States, researchers, industry and the public at large,” said EU Commissioner for Science and Research Janez Potočnik last year. “Beyond, it is a fair return to the public of research that is funded by EU money.” Formally embracing the open access ethic, the European Commission has decided to require that results from research it f

Feature - A tool for reaching the cloud

There are a many different clound providers to choose from. Image courtesy UCAR

Utility computing is a way for potential clients — whether they are a business or an academic researcher — to match the cost of their computing and storage needs to their demand for these resources. Suppose you need the resources of 1,000 computers, but for only one day per week. Using on-demand utility computing such as clouds allows you to purchase the resources just for the one day, which can result in substantial cost-savings.
Faced with the challenge of developing dynamic, service-focused infrastructures for the media and financial sectors — where data is often subject to rapid peaks and troughs in demand (consider how quickly breaking news develops and how traders on Wall Street react to it) — the Belfast e-Science Center BeSC found that to best exploit the benefits of cloud technology daily, the user needs the opti

Feature - Women in IT: Lebanon

Image courtesy Claire Devereux.

Claire Devereux, who works on the EGEE, GridPP, and NGS grid computing projects at the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council, travelled to Lebanon in September as part of a British Council Exchange Program to promote women in information technology. During her trip, she spent five days in Beirut and three days touring the country’s industry, meeting women in high-profile positions: ministers, entrepreneurs, university researchers and professors. This was followed by a two-day networking event. Representatives from seven countries from the Near East and North Africa were involved.Devereux: “The idea was to get women in the IT industry together, to establish networks and discuss best practices for enabling more women to enter the field and to stay in careers once they get there. We were able to talk about normal enabling practices in the UK: flexi-time, part-time working, on-site child care, etc. Both the UK

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