Content about Images

Image of the week - Acoustic field of a supersonic jet Shock-induced noise plays an important role in “jet screech”, a strong, sharp peak in sound pressure corresponding to high-pitched noise of up to 160 decibels, loud enough to potentially damage aircraft parts that are near the nozzle.Image courtesy of Jan Schulze and Jörn SesterhennSpend some time at the exit nozzle of a supersonic jet engine and you’ll soon notice it’s a rather loud place to play. Much of the shock-induced noise is caused because the nozzle exit pressure differs from ambient air pressure, which results in a series of shocks, compressions and expansions that interact until the differences in air pressure have been resolved. Many of the physical processes responsible for this process have not yet been clearly identified, which is why Jan Schulze and Jörn Sesterhenn of UniBW Munich are working to find out more.Schulze and Sesterhenn used direct numerical simulations to compute a three-dimensional supersonic rectangular jet that

Image of the week - World Trade Center North Tower at 0.37 seconds Computed damage to the core structure of the World Trade Center North Tower, 0.37 seconds after impact.Image courtesy of Mete Sozen, Ayhan Irfanoglu and Christoph HoffmannThe Northwest Indiana Computational Grid and Purdue’s Network for Computational Nanotechnology have provided the infrastructure support for large-scale simulations of the effects of crashing an air frame loaded with fuel—similar to a Boeing 767-200ER—into a steel and concrete structure—similar to that of the World Trade Center North Tower.Results from the simulations are being used to understand the extent of the damage caused by the impact.The modeled airframe is loaded with the approximate amount of fuel and set to impact the WTC-1 building at the speed, position and orientation published in official reports.The simulation models both the exterior building skeleton and the core support structure of the building, as well as concrete floors and supporting girders.The simulat

Image of the week - CERN’s PC grid goes TOP500 CERN’s computer cluster recently rated 115 in a list of the 500 most powerful computing systems in the world. It is the Tier-0 site for the Large Hadron Collider Computing Grid and consists of 340 servers with two Intel Xeon 5160 (Woodcrest) processors and a total of 1360 cores.Image courtesy of CERNCERN’s computer cluster consists of 340 servers with two Intel Xeon 5160 (Woodcrest) processors and a total of 1360 cores. The cluster recently made its first appearance on the prestigious TOP500 Supercomputing Sites, a sign that the processing power of the individual computing centers comprising grids is reaching levels comparable to top supercomputers.The CERN cluster is one of only a few commodity clusters in the most recent TOP500 list and ranked a respectable 115th in the world—not bad for a bunch of PCs! Significantly, CERN achieved this result using only about 20% of the computing power available in its computer centre, which in turn is only a fraction of the

  Image of the week - Anti-cancer agent in watery bind Water molecules bind to anti-cancer agent 5-fluorouracil to prevent formation of a newly discovered form II polymorph. All molecules are immersed in liquid nitromethane, which is not shown for reasons of clarity. Image courtesy of Said Hamad These images show the interactions of water molecules with each other and with molecules of anti-cancer agent 5-fluorouracil in nitromethane solution. These interactions are strong enough to prevent the formation of 5-fluorouracil clusters, which in turn prevents the formation of a more stable 5-fluorouracil polymorph: the elusive “form II”. Only when water molecules are completely absent from the system will “form II” crystals appear. This molecular dynamics investigation was carried out by investigators now at the University College London, as part of the Control and Prediction of the Organic Solid State project.CPOSS is dedicated to predicting the crystalline structures of organic molecules and uses the e-sc

Image of the week - Fishy business Each fish represents the health of a single node in a computer cluster. This particular aquarium is monitoring two clusters. Image courtesy of University of Nebraska Think something’s fishy with one of your nodes? You don’t need to fish for answers any more.Get hooked on Fish Virtual Cluster Monitoring, a program that uses Ganglia to portray each node in your cluster as a fish.Each swimmer comes complete with all the usual fishy attributes, used to describe the state of each of your nodes (watch for the ones that go belly-up and then float to the top).Electronic grid-fish have reared their pixilated fins in various other forms, including regular appearances as part of the Globus Build-A-Service tutorial.The program delivering the pictured fish was produced by Derek Weitzel of the University of Nebraska, Nebraska, U.S., and expands on work done by Cory Leuninghoener. It is open source and can be freely downloaded.- Cristy Burne, iSGTW 

Image of the week - Electric sheep Computers running the Electric Sheep screen saver work together to create a morphing population of animations known as  “sheep.”Image courtesy of Scott Draves and the Electric Sheep Electric Sheep is a free, open source screen saver and an example of distributed computing, perhaps at its wierdest.Computers running the Electric Sheep screen saver share results, working together to create morphing abstract animations, referred to as “sheep.” Users vote for their favorite animations; the more popular sheep live longer, reproducing according to a genetic algorithm. The electric “flock” hence evolves to please its global audience. Users can also design their own sheep for submission to the “gene pool.”The result is billed as a collective “android dream,” homage to Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the book that birthed the sci-fi cult film Blade Runner.  

Image of the week - Does this compute? Not really “Scientists from the Rand Corporation have created this model to show how a home computer will look like in the year 2004. However, the needed technology will not be economically feasible for the average home. Also the scientists readily admit that the computer will require not yet invented technology to work, but 50 years from now scientific progress is expected to solve these problems. With teletype interface and the Fortran language, the computer will be easy to use.”This image, supposedly from Popular Mechanics magazine, allegedly shows a 1954 scientists’ impression of how home computers might look in 2004.In fact, it’s a doctored picture of a submarine control room, submitted as part of an image modification contest and then circulated in an Internet hoax.The hoax fooled more than a few IT gurus, including Lotus founder Mitch Kapor, and Chief Executive of Sun Microsystems, Scott McNealy. Whoops.  

Image of the week - A rising valley Rising lowland: last summer an expansion of magma pushed up an area of Hawaii’s Kilauea crater.Image courtesy of the Advanced Land Observing Satellite, JapanA section of the Kilauea volcanic crater on Hawaii Island, U.S., rose about 10 centimeters in just three months last summer. The change was due to an expanding magma reservoir, observed by the PALSAR Phased Array type L-band Synthetic Aperture Radar, onboard the spacecraft “Daichi”.  The image on the right uses colors to show the degree of the diastrophism, or land change, observed. Warm colors show a reduction in the distance between the satellite and the land, indicating that the land has risen; cold colors show an increase in this distance, indicating subsided land.PALSAR is one of three remote-sensing instruments on Japan’s Advanced Land Observing Satellite. Images such as these are produced using data grid and computing grid technology as part of the Global Earth Observation Grid framework. Such images, comb

Image of the week - Tissue analysis with grids An example of test analysis: left, the input image, a tissue slice from a donor; right, the slice digitized.Image courtesy of Federica Viti, Università degli Studi di GenovaIn the ongoing battle against disease, some researchers are taking standard tissue analysis a step further: a technique known as tissue microarray analysis, or TMA, helps researchers search tiny pieces of tissue for traces of disease. Digitizing these images allows them to be analyzed and shared with the help of computers. Using digitized TMA, researchers can access and analyze many tissues at once, saving time and expense. Although sharing images between institutions certainly increases a researcher’s resources, it can also add to their data burden, and it can also raise concerns about patient privacy.  A team from the Institute for Biomedical Technologies, National Research Council in Milan, Italy, and the Institute for Applied Mathematics and Information Technology, National Research Council in

Image of the Week - Science on Top of the World  Scared of heights? Don't look down. And don't get too excited about all those gamma rays and start hyperventilating: the partial pressure of oxygen at this laboratory is about half that at sea level.Image courtesy of EUChinaGRIDBeing 4,300 meters above sea level brings you closer not only to the stars, but also to the things stars spit out: gamma rays. For researchers eager to detect these gamma rays before the rays are absorbed by the atmosphere, this is a good place to be, or at least, it is a good place to put your equipment. In Tibet, 90 kilometers north of Lhasa, sits the High Altitude Cosmic Ray Laboratory. The lab, run by a Chinese-Italian collaboration, will use the EUChinaGRID infrastructure to store and transfer data so it can be accessed by collaborators around the world.EUChinaGRID expects to transfer 250 terabytes a year to Beijing, and then on to Italy, at the steady rate of around 10 megabytes per second.

Image of the Week - Studying the Process of Learning   A simulation by the Virtual Cell project of a membrane reaction in a neuronal dentritic spine, one of the key aspects of learning and memory.Image courtesy of Virtual CellWant to learn more about how you learn? Our neuronal system lies at the root of learning and thought. Neurons communicate among themselves and with rest of our bodies using electrical and chemical signals. The points of communication between neurons are synapses. At a synapse, a signal received from outside the cell may or may not trigger a chain reaction that propagates the signal to other cells. After a time, synapses, on tiny protrusions called spines, can become sensitized or desensitized to certain chemical signals, known as neurotransmitters. The next time that synapse receives that neurotransmitter it may be extra responsive, or it may ignore it completely. This helps our brain organize itself in to neuronal circuits—paths of often-used neurons. Currently, researchers

Image of the Week - Neurons in Action Simulation of calcium levels in nerve cells after stimulation.Image courtesy Ion Moraru, University of Connecticut Health Center  The Richard D. Berlin Center for Cell Analysis and Modeling at the University of Connecticut Health Center focuses on creating new technologies for understanding the dynamic distributions of molecules in living cells. CCAM is the home of the Virtual Cell, a grid-enabled tool to build models and run cellular simulations. The Virtual Cell can model the reactions, diffusion, membrane transport, flow, electrical potential and currents within a cell. Users can create compartmental or spatial simulations (1-D, 2-D or 3-D) on analytical or image-based geometries. The image at the right, taken from a presentation given by Ion Moraru at the 2007 Open Science Grid All Hands meeting, simulates a wave of calcium influx into nerve cells after simulation.