Content about People

Feature - Nancy Wilkins-Diehr: “Follow what you enjoy” Nancy Wilkins-Diehr, head of the TeraGrid Science Gateways, shown passing the final “gateway” at the Boston Marathon. “I'm probably best known at the Supercomputer Center for my running at lunchtime,” she says. She also enjoys cooking, entertaining, playing flute and spending time with her husband and 12-year-old son Julius. Image courtesy of Boston Athletic Assn. ISGTW interviewed Nancy Wilkins-Diehr, head of the TeraGrid Science Gateways project. She shared her thoughts on her work, how she got where she is, and how young people can keep their career options open. iSGTW: Please tell us what you do in TeraGrid.NW-D: I lead the Science Gateways program in the TeraGrid.  The gateway program connects high end supercomputers with Web portals designed by scientists for scientists.  We're able to extend the capabilities of scientists, often without them even knowing they are using the TeraGrid.iSGTW: What has been your career path

Feature - LCG, a challenge in 4-D: size, complexity, adaptability, funding Image courtesy of Les Robertson Les Robertson, a key player behind the development of the LHC grid, retired in 2008 after 35 years at CERN. The following highlights a speech he gave at GridFest last October.In a few words, it is hard to say something about computing that can compete with the wonders of the machine and its detectors.Nevertheless, I shall try. I hope to give an overview of the project, where it has come from, the challenges we faced, the computational structures and human collaborations we built to overcome these challenges, and a map of where we intend to go in the future.As we have seen, this accelerator creates extremely high-energy particle collisions, which in turn create new particles that decay in very complex ways as they move through the detector. The detector registers the passage of these particles with a vast number of sensors and, finally, creates a digitized summary that is recorded as what we call an “event.” Physici

Feature - People behind the grid: Simon Lin Simon Lin at the Academia Sinica Grid Computing Center. Image courtesy of Kevin Wang (Editor's note: Simon C. Lin is currently coordinator of the Asia Federation in EGEE and is responsible for the ASGC—Academia Sinica Grid Computing Center—the only WLCG Tier-1 Center in Asia. He is deputy project manager of the EUAsiaGrid project, coordinated by ASGC and INFN in Italy.)iSGTW: How did you get involved in particle physics? I am a theoretical physicist by training. Like many of my generation, I was inspired by the great names in physics of the first half of the 20th century. I was fortunate enough to do my Ph.D. at Edinburgh University under Peter Higgs. Firstly, I worked on applying group theory to supersymmetry but then turned to field theory on surfaces and interfaces later. I still feel theoretical particle physics is excellent training for physicists, independent of what they go on to do.iSGTW: How did you get involved in computing?In Edinburgh, I had Dave Wallace as

Link of the Week - The Economist’s take on a conference in Istanbul The Blue Mosque as seen from the rooftops of the Hagia Sophia, in Istanbul during EGEE ’08. Image courtesy of Dan Drollette So, we all got a good look at Istanbul during EGEE ’08, and had a chance to meet our colleagues, learn about new developments in the grid, attend lectures and seminars, and explore a bit of Istanbul and its culture—such as visiting the Blue Mosque, or bargaining for goods in the Grand Bazaar. But what did others think of us attendees and our culture? What did they observe of the way we conduct business, and our foibles?To find out, take a look at the latest Correspondent’s Column in The Economist, in which writer Natasha Loder describes her first experience with the computational crowd, in a lighthearted, tongue-in-cheek way.(Loder was the key presenter at a session on  Working with Journalists.) Warning: Part of The Economist’s headline says “An odd crowd congregates in a stunning city.&rdquo

  Opinion - Reaching for the Exa-scale, with volunteer computing Over the last few years, GPUs green) and CPUs (blue) have increased exponentially in speed, but the doubling time for GPUs has been about 8 months, while it has taken 16 months for CPUsImage courtesy of NVIDIA (Editor's note: David Anderson is the founder of the popular volunteer computing platform known as BOINC, or the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing. Here, he peers into his crystal ball to predict the direction of volunteer computing, especially as new, high-speed graphics processing units come into the market.)Remember your prefixes? Kilo, mega, giga, tera, peta . . . exa? Each denoting a thousand times more than the one before? Today, the average personal computer can do a few GigaFLOPS (the acronym refers to doing one billion FLoating-point Operations Per Second). A modest cluster might do one thousand GigaFLOPS, or 1 TeraFLOPS. And for several years, one thousand TeraFLOPS, or one PetaFLOPS, was the Holy Grail

Feature - Office of Cyberinfrastructure at NSF: the first two years Daniel Atkins is a professor in the School of Information and the College of Engineering at the University of Michigan and Associate Vice President for Research Cyberinfrastructure.Image courtesy of Daniel Atkins. Cyberinfrastructure (CI) has become a vital tool for scientific research and discovery.  A system of distributed computing, storage, software and management using the network as its backplane, and for which the complexity is largely hidden from the user, CI has the potential for revolutionizing the way science and engineering research is conducted, says Daniel Atkins, former and initial director of the National Science Foundation’s  Office of Cyberinfrastructure.With an initial annual budget of $185 million, the office coordinates and supports the development of CI resources, tools, and services. In its conception, the office focused almost exclusively on high performance computing. Over the course of Atkins’ tenure, its vision bro

Feature - People behind the LHC grid: Michel Vetterli Mike Vetterli hiking in the North Vancouver mountains near his home. Image courtesy of Mike Vetterli. An outdoorsman when his dual responsibilities at Simon Fraser University and TRIUMF allow him the time to hike with his daughter, physicist Michel (Mike) Vetterli not only loves nature, he wants to understand it.  He’s always wanted to see how things work. He remembers being inspired by watching the Apollo 13 ground crew solve problems with the spacecraft remotely. In graduate school he became fascinated with the fundamental workings of computers.  Now he’s working to uncover nature’s secrets with grid computing.In addition to his professorship at SFU in Vancouver, Canada, Vetterli has been instrumental in setting up both WestGrid and the ATLAS-Canada Tier-1 Data Center at TRIUMF. He is currently computing coordinator for ATLAS-Canada, charged with ensuring that Canada has the necessary computing resources to analyze ATLAS data. He was recently e

Podcasting from beam day In the control room of ATLAS, where there was a champagne toast shortly after the first beam successfully completed its 27 kilometer circuit.Image courtesy of iSGTW, GridTalk and GridCast. Today is the big day for all the sites involved in the superconducting supercollider. Click here, on the image at right, or on the GridCast page, to see the final moments in the control rooms, as the clock ticks away toward the startup.  (All times in the subtitles are approximate.)

Feature - Leading digital data research group moves to North Carolina DICE and the distributed data delugeFor more than 10 years the DICE group’s Storage Research Broker (SRB) data grid has been used by research teams worldwide to automate all aspects of manipulation of large, distributed data files, including discovery, access, retrieval, management, replication, archiving and analysis. DICE most recently developed iRODS, the open source Integrated Rule-Oriented Data System, which introduced user-settable rules that automate complex management policies, helping users tame today’s mushrooming collections of digital data.The team has worked on national and international projects, providing data management systems for major grid and distributed research projects, including the Southern California Earthquake Center, the TeraGrid, the Worldwide University Network, California Digital Library-Digital Preservation Repository, the Laboratory for the Ocean Observatory Knowledge Integration Grid, the Biomedical Informatics Researc

Link of the week - SDSC director urges academia to make cyberinfrastructure  “real” Francine Berman.Image courtesy of SDSC. Comprising the “infrastructure” for the Information Age, cyberinfrastructure—the organized aggregate of information technologies such as computers, data networks, digital storage systems, and scientific expertise—is essential for future research advancement and discovery. In this month’s EDUCAUSE Review, Fran Berman, director of the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at UC San Diego, makes the case for investment in cyberinfrastructure as part of the “IT bill” for the Information Age.Just as technology transformed the Industrial Age, Berman writes that cyberinfrastructure has the potential to be a key driver of the Information Age, particularly with the explosive growth in digital data that is creating a new set of challenges in information management, storage, and long-term preservation. The challenge is that in the research and education communi

Feature - Youngest-ever at grid summer school? Iris Schott (center), possibly the youngest-ever OGF delegate,  produced a report on OGF23, highlighting issues such as cloud computing, the BEinGRID Industry Days and OGF-Europe's Seminar on Digital Repositories. Image courtesy of OGF This summer, OGF (Open Grid Forum ) welcomed someone who was possibly the youngest delegate in their history at OGF23, a grid standards conference held in June in Barcelona, Spain. We caught up with 15-year-old Iris Schott to hear how she got interested in grids and what else she has been doing with her summer. Here is the result of our question-and-answer session:iSGTW: What did you think of the conference?IS:  “To be honest, I didn’t understand much the first two days! At the end of the second day, some friends sat down with me, I asked them questions, and they explained a lot about how grid computing works. After that I found it much more exciting.”iSGTW: What do you think is exciting about grids? IS:  “You c

  Image of the week - Summertime on the Dubna On the river near Dubna, Russia, 228 people from 20 countries and 48 universities and scientific institutes presented 38 plenary reports for the GRID2008 international conference. And since it took place from 30 June to 4 July, these pictures provide a peek into what Russians do on the all-American holiday known as the Fourth of July. Images courtesy of Tatiana A. Strizh, Joint Institute for Nuclear Research, Dubna, Russia