Content about Links-Statistics-Acronyms

Wondering what a bag-of-tasks application, elasticity, or cloudbursts are? Read on to find out.

  Link of the Week: Coming to an i-Phone near you Image courtesy Flickr under Creative Commons licence Since the story in iSGTW last year about Cinefilia, the grid-enabled film recommendation service, it creator and sole webmaster, Leandro Ciuffo, says his user base has increased by 27% — without any direct promotion or advertising. Once a user has signed up for a Cinefilia account they can review whether they like or dislike one of hundreds of films on the database. The system then ‘learns’ that user’s preferences and generates personalized recommendations accordingly. (But in order for the results to be accurate a minimum of 20 films must be rated by a user.)   Ciuffo aims to increase the amount of Brazilian films on the database because 95% of users on his site are Brazilian, possibly because there are currently no recommendation systems for Brazilian films. Ciuffo is looking for partners to help him improve the recommendation software algo

Link of the Week: Physics for Poets

Woodblock print of ‘The Sea off Satta,’ from ‘36 Views of Mount Fuji’ by Hiroshige Utagawa. Image courtesy Wikipedia under Creative Commons license

At the scifaiku website, fans of science fiction can express their passion for time travel, spaceships and aliens in haiku.
The rules of this ancient Japanese poetic form are relatively simple: each poem is composed of a maximum of three lines, with 5 syllables on the first line, 7 on the next, and 5 on the last.
But while traditional haiku make a reference to nature; “scifaiku” call for a science fiction reference, such as:
Asteroids collidewithout a sound . . . We maneuver between fragments.
It seemed unfair that science fiction fans should have all the fun, so we tried our hands at this art, focusing on the theme of computing. This can be a challenge, given the distressing number of syllables in phrases such as “distributed computing infrastructur

Link of the week - GPU computing webcast

Image courtesy of Moi Cody.

A week from today, a free webcast sponsored by Scientific Computing and Dell Inc. will explore the use of GPU technologies in advanced computing contexts.
The announcement states:
The dramatic increase in more standardized capability, coupled with the delivery of exceptional performance envelopes, all within a lower cost band, positions GPU technologies at the forefront of the next wave of broad architecture adoption. GPU technologies have made tremendous advancements in overall capability, programming and toolkits, providing a much more compelling performance architecture model for complex and computationally intense environments – where performance and speed of delivery are the make or break points to competitive advantage or evolutionary breakthroughs and innovation.
Join Scientific Computing and a diverse panel of experts to discuss the many benefits of GPU technologies as performance accelerators for c

Link of the Week - GPU Technology Conference

This photograph was taken at the 2009 GPU Technology Conference.
Image courtesy nVIDIA.

Last week, computing expert Greg Pfister told us why he thinks that cheap GPU-based supercomputing is coming to an end. And as iSGTW readers from around the world read that article, other computing experts gathered in San Jose for the GPU Technology Conference, an event with a very different underlying perspective.
Sponsored by nVIDIA, the GTC offered separate streams for researchers, developers, and industry.
NVIDIA created daily video recaps for the three-day event. The source aside, they are a quick and convenient way to find out about some of the most interesting presentations from the event.
You can go directly to video one, two, and three to watch them, or read more about the conference by browsing VizWorld posts tagged as “gtc” at our link of the week.

Podcast of the Week - Alan Sill of OGF discusses standards, grids, and clouds

Open Grid Forum Vice President of Standards, Alan Sill.
Image courtesy of Alan Sill

It’s been a few months since Alan Sill took over the position of vice president of standards for the Open Grid Forum. Now that he’s had a chance to settle into his new position, Derek Stevens of Cloud Commons has posted an in-depth interview with Sill.
Currently, Sill is a senior scientist at Texas Tech University, where he helped to establish a CMS Tier-3 center and held key positions within TIGRE and PEGrid. He is a charter member of The Americas Grid Policy Management Authority, and has contributed to a variety of working groups within Open Science Grid and the OGF over the years. At the moment he participates in the LHC CMS experiment as a physicist, and contributes to SURAgrid on a regular basis.
According to Sill, a full set of standards for grid computing would necessarily address many of the s

Link of the Week: Live from the CCS

Image courtesy e-Science Talk

Last week, from 2 to 3 September, GridCast headed over to the Citizen Cyberscience Summit, held at Kings College London, to find out all the latest about volunteer computing.Their team of bloggers was on hand throughout the meeting to get the lowdown on the use of volunteer computing in everything from protein folding to searching for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence.
Highlights include: 
• David Anderson, director of the SETI@home project, Space Sciences Laboratory, UC Berkeley;
• George Dyson, historian and philosopher of science and author of Darwin Among The Machines;
• Myles Allen, head of ClimatePrediction.net at Oxford University.But that’s not all! Take a look at more videos, photos and discussion from last week’s summit at the GridCast blog, especially François Grey’s thoughts on the event in this podcast.
 

Website of the Week - “. . . where physics and life collide”

The “no exploding cars” sign on Route Rutherford at CERN. (Presumably, it forbids vehicles of 30 tons or more from carrying inflammable loads.) Image courtesy CERNLove.org

Face it, few physics, engineering or computing institutions resemble the fictional setting of “Angels and Demons,” in which marble-columned, ivy-covered, red-brick buildings placed upon rolling green lawns represent the geometrically symmetrical  grounds of a well-known physics research center.
In our experience, most such facilities bear more resemblance to the labyrinth of an eternal construction site — a style in which they seem to take a perverse pride. (Ever see the MIT Campus Subterranean Map?)
Consequently, in CERN’s case, visitors find themselves wondering why Building 58 is between Building 3 and Building 4.
Or why there is a viewing platform atop a water tower with a permanently locked

Link of the Week - A new twist on summer camp: computing classes in the wild

Image courtesy Carlos Jaime-Barrios Hernandez

We’ve all heard of summer camp.But SuperComputing Camp (or SSCAMP, as it is known by its acronym in Spanish) is a little different.
Starting on the 15th of August, 46 undergraduates and masters students will learn about high performance computing, grid computing, volunteer computing and cloud computing — while staying in a hacienda near Panachi National Wildlife Park, just outside the small town of Piedecuesta, Colombia.The organizer, Carlos Jaime-Barrios Hernandez, says the idea is for students to learn in a natural environment, where they can explore and enjoy the great outdoors while having access to fully up-to-date facilities, including digital resources, projectors and live-video feeds to keynote speeches and online lectures. They will remotely connect to the grid infrastructure via the web. Hernandez — a research scient

Link of the Week: 62 Projects to Make With a Dead Computer

What to do with dead electronics? Image courtesy Mother Jones “Eco-Nundrums”

So, you want to deal with used electronics in an ecologically sensitive way.
Meet Randy Sarafan, a graduate of the Design Technology program at New York City’s Parsons School of Design, who has a fascination with technology, art, and all things green.
He has come up with new ways to deal with those dead PCs and laptops, old cell phones, broken printers, orphaned keyboards, irredeemable iPods, busted digital cameras, and tangles of cables and wires that we all accumulate.
A few of his solutions include the iMac terrarium, the laptop Digital Photo Frame, the Flat-Screen Ant Farm, the power strip Bird Feeder, and the Walkman Soap Dish, among others. 
Now a Virtual Fellow with the Free Art and Technology Lab, he has published a book called 62 Projects to Make With a Dead Computer, that tells novices how to safely take

Link of the Week: WLCG, Live from London

Image courtesy GridTalk

Last week, from 7 to 9 July, GridCast headed over to the WLCG workshop, held at Imperial College London, to find out all the latest LHC and grid related news.Their team of bloggers was on hand throughout the meeting to get the lowdown from Tiers 0 through to 3, as well as all the LHC experiments.Highlights from the blog include video interviews with Ian Fisk of CMS, and Jamie Shiers who leads the grid support group in the IT department at CERN. There’s also some great discussions on storage, courtesy of blogger James Jackson.But that’s not all! Take a look at more videos, photos and discussion from last week’s WLCG workshop at the GridCast blog.

Link of the Week - EuroVis2010 blog posts

The EuroVis 2010 conference logo.
Image courtesy EuroVis 2010.

Here at iSGTW, we wish we could be at every major scientific computing conference, but it just isn't possible.
Earlier this month, we missed the EuroVis2010 conference, which took place 9-11 June in Bordeaux, France. Luckily, T.J. Jankun-Kelly, a computer science researcher at Mississippi State University, was in attendance – and blogging up a storm.
Jankun-Kelly's daily summaries of the conference were posted on Vizworld; you can see them by clicking on the links below.

Day 1

Day 2

Day 3