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Link of the week - Bid for your grid

GridEcon has developed a marketplace for the grid. Image courtesy Neil Gould, stock.xchng

Ever since grid computing was conceived, there have been visions of one colossal standard grid which is open and simple for anyone to use, just as you can plug into an electrical power grid to get as much electricity as you need on demand.
The dream of making grid computing a universal on-demand utility has yet to be realized. But what if instead of being like a power grid, grid computing resources were available through an open market?
The GridEcon project has developed a platform which turns grid computing resources into commodities which can be bought and sold like stock.
Because the ideology behind grids when they were first established was to enable computing resources to be shared for free, a market system for sharing computer resources seems to go against this ethic. However, the rising popularity of clouds — once described as &ld

Link of the Week - Nature Networks

Image courtesy Nature

Now that you have read our stories about astronomy and distributed computing, do you find yourself wanting to know more?
For that matter, have you generally wanted to followup, get the contact details of an author or interviewee, comment on stories, give feedback, pick your colleagues’ brains, or post questions about those nagging little things you’ve always wondered about?
Or simply have a ‘virtual water cooler’ to hang around and talk shop?
Now you can do all that, and more.
International Science Grid This Week now has an electronic “forum” on Nature Networks, the online scientific community moderated by the journal Nature. It’s non-profit and non-proprietary. Anyone can read a post; just go to the Nature Networks site and click on the forum entitled “iSGTW: grid computing, and more . . . ”
If you decide you want to add your own posts, that’s easy to do &mdash

Link of the Week - GridCast roundup, coming live from Barcelona

Image courtesy GridCast

GridCast, the blog that takes you behind the scenes of some of the most exciting events in grid computing, has got a brand new site. It’s now even easier to keep up-to-date with all the latest news about scientific grid computing.
Next week the team will jet off to Barcelona for EGEE’09 where it will be covering EGEE’s final conference before the transition to EGI.
So keep checking GridCast from 21-25 September to keep up with all the news from EGEE’09. And as a special Link of the Week, we take a look at its top five highlights from posts gone by:

Do you connect with grids or walk on clouds?  José Luis Vázquez-Poletti brought his inimitable blogging style to EGEE’08, with the GridTalk Impressions Information Service. Catch up with José’s thoughts on EGEE’09 next week on GridCast.
GridCast brought you two conferences for t

Link of the week – Flashback to 1967: computers are just hype

A screen grab of the story's opening spread.  Image courtesy of Modern Mechanix blog.

1967. Charlie Chaplin is out and Jimi Hendrix is in. It may be the summer of love, but it is also a year of riots and violence. While war rages in Vietnam, the space race is picking up speed.
In that atmosphere, it’s hardly surprising to see well-written, well-researched literary journalism appearing in Playboy. Max Gunther’s “Computers: Their built-in limitations” mixes piquant wit with an easy writing style that draws the reader in, creating an extremely well-crafted piece.
Too bad his criticisms of computing were so off the mark that today, his commentary has become unintentional satire.
There are many parts that may bring a smile to your lips. Here are a few gems:

Computers are just a status symbol. “To have a computer is ‘in.’ Even if you’re a scruffy little company that no

Link of the week - Read about SHARCNET research

Ever wondered who else is using the same grid as you, and what their research is about? SHARCNET (Shared Hierarchical Academic Research Computing NETwork) users don’t have to wonder. The SHARCNET webpage has a detailed listing of over 50 research projects that are using their grid.
The projects are broken down into 31 research categories ranging from applied econometrics to quantum gravity. SHARCNET’s page hosts a short paragraph describing each project, along with a link to the project’s webpage.
Check it out for yourself!

Link of the Week – Chatting about where cloud meets grid

Ignacio Llorente, the founder of HPCcloud.

Looking for somewhere to chat about the intersection of grid, cloud, and high performance computing? The HPCcloud Google Group could be the place to look.
According to the group description, “HPCcloud is a discussion group for presenting experiences and scenarios by individuals, organizations and projects to illustrate how Cloud computing can enhance the different types of distributed and high performance computing infrastructures in science and engineering.”
The group was founded by Ignacio Llorente, the head researcher at the Distributed Systems Architecture Research Group in Madrid.
Since HPCcloud’s inaugural post on 30 June, traffic and discussion have been sparse. Nonetheless, 109 people have already signed onto the group. As membership grows, conversation will too. All you have to do is participate!

Link of the week - Virtual Observatory round-up

NGC 9496, home to a supernova featured in one of the step-by-step Virtual Observatory guides.
Image courtesy of the Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes, La Palma.

Imagine what your field could accomplish if everyone pooled their data into one massive computer grid.
That’s exactly what astronomers have accomplished, in the form of the International Virtual Observatory Alliance. The alliance works to develop standards that ensure interoperability, so that everyone can share data freely. Since the IVOA was founded in June 2002, a number of discoveries have been made using virtual observatory tools.
For instance, in April 2003, U.S. scientists discovered a previously unknown brown dwarf star during a trial run of their National Virtual Observatory. And in June 2004 European scientists discovered thirty powerful supermassive black holes using a virtual observatory to analyze data gathered by both the European Southern Observatory and N

News of the Week - HealthGrid roundup

Brandenburg Gate. Image courtesy stock.xchng 

Last week, Berlin hosted the 7th HealthGrid conference, from 29 June – 1 July. The feeling pervading the event was that the HealthGrid community had progressed a long way — and yet for grids to reach their full promise in the area of health care, a lot of work remains.“I first participated in the conference three years ago in 2006,” said Xin Zhou, a conference presenter and maintainer of the grid infrastructure inside the University of Geneva Hospital. He added, “Back then, we were talking about ‘the plan.’ Many people then presented what they were going to do; now they are presenting the applications. This represents real progress in the research domain and shows movement towards practice.”Simple intuitive interfaces, appealing to non-specialist users, were an oft-called for commodity. In a demonstration of just such an interface, Tobi

Link of the Week - Creating scientific papers, the easy way

Just fill in your name, and voilà. Image courtesy SCIgen. Image on previous page courtesy Melodi T, stock.xchng

If anyone feels that they don't get to attend enough scientific meetings as it is, how about SCIgen, the automated paper generating tool?
Its creators, Jeremy Stribling, Max Krohn and Dan Aguayo — all grad students at MIT — say that SCIgen is a program that generates random Computer Science research papers, including graphs, figures and citations, all with the use of  “context-free grammar.”
Simply plug in your name and those of your colleagues, press the button and out comes a prepared scientific paper ready for submission, complete with references and figures.
Scarily, the inventors claim that they have had papers accepted at genuine scientific meetings - and have attended and presented the slides!
(Warning: don't try this at home. For amusement only.)
A colleag

Link of the Week - Data transfer at a snail's pace. Literally.

The snail-based system in feed-forward action. Image courtesy Herbert Bishko. Photo on front page courtesy Lysanne Ooteman, stock.exchng

If you think you have problems with the sometimes slow pace at which information travels from one computer to another, then consider the solution offered by this scientific paper: “Snail-based Data Transfer Protocol.”
It describes an experiment in data transfer using real, genuine, live snails, along with a “lettuce-based guidance system.”No lie.There’s even a picture (see right).The papers’ authors, Shimon Schocken, dean of Efi Arazi School of Computer Science Herzliya, and Revital Ben-David-Zaslow of the Department of Zoology at Tel Aviv University, Israel, reported that their experiment delivered a 37 million bits-per-second data transfer rate — faster than ADSL.
Their paper earned the distinction of being named a “Classi

Link of the Week - The future of innovation

With e-infrastructures such as Geant2, astronomers are able to combine information from telescopes around the world to produce pictures of the universe that a 100 times more detailed than ever before. Image courtesy of Dante

What is the future of European e-infrastructures? What kinds of strategic investments and actions need to be taken to ensure their ongoing contributions and successes?
About 600 million Euros have been earmarked for investment in infrastructures. What directions will they go?
The latest GridBriefing, "The future of innovation: Developing Europe's ICT infrastructures," seeks to answer these and other questions.
It's based upon a March 5, 2009 communication from the European Commission entitled "ICT infrastructures for e-Science" - which aims to trigger discussions on actions needed to ensure the future of European infrastructures.
For more, check out the rest of the GridBriefing series on the GridTalk websit

Link of the Week - A day for Ada

Ada Augusta, Countess of Lovelace, translated a “Sketch of the Analytical Engine,″ and added her own extensive commentaries to the first written outline of a computer, making her what some term The First Hacker. Image courtesy of The Analytical Engine by John Walker

In honor of Ada Lovelace Day, March 24, a total of 1,980 people pledged to blog about a woman in technology that they admire.Ada Lovelace, born in 1815 to Lord Byron and his wife, translated Luigi Menabrea’s memoir on Babbage’s Analytical Engine, appending notes that included a method for calculating Bernoulli numbers with the machine — the first computer program. (Unfortunately, the calculations were never carried out, as the machine was never built.) She also wrote the very first description of a computer and of software.The Ada programming language is named after her.
See the Ada Lovelace Day Collection of postings. From Barbara Liskov (