Content about People

  Images of the week - Scenes from SC07 Pumping at the pinnacle of energy, innovation and computing power, SC07 is serving up the latest and greatest in IT to a record crowd this week in Reno, Nevada.Image courtesy of Douglas Mansell The Stony Brook University team are all smiles just prior to beginning their 44-hour race against the clock and five other undergraduate teams as part of the Cluster Challenge.Image courtesy of Douglas Mansell The Enabling Grids for E-sciencE stand showcases the achievements of EGEE, a project which brings together partners from 45 countries to create a grid strongly focused on interoperability and accessibility.Image courtesy of Jerry Newton Photography The Fermilab team, members of Open Science Grid, are demonstrating high bandwidth Tier-1 to Tier-2 LHC data transmission. The OSG duck can be found on OSG member stands throughout the exhibition.Image courtesy of John Urish Projects including AstroGrid, OMII, National Grid Service, NaCTeM, the London e-Science Centre and GridPP are highl

  Opinion - Me, my friends, our grid: bringing people together for great science “The biggest challenges in grid technology are not technological; they’re social. Building new communities is as important as building new computer centers.” Image courtesy of Graham Ramsay Frank Würthwein is a particle physicist with University of California San Diego and a user of Open Science Grid. He is also the OSG applications coordinator and a member of the CMS collaboration at the Large Hadron Collider, and says grids are as much about sociology as they are about science.As the clock ticks towards startup for the Large Hadron Collider, particle physics draws ever closer to what many hope will be a revolution for the field: a giant step forward in our understanding of the universe.For many physicists, the greatest fear is that we will find the Higgs Boson, and that in the wake of this success, nothing will change. More exciting, more fascinating, is the possibility that finding the Higgs will bring with it a new pa

Resources - Women in information technology Help turn traditional stereotypes on their head.Sticker image and design © Jinx, Inc The percentage of women in IT has declined from 41 percent in 1996 to 32 percent in 2004,1 with women comprising only 3 to 5 percent of senior management positions.2 What's going on? Find out more, access new resources and be inspired:GHC Women in Computing conferenceFocused on the research and career interests of women in computing, the 2007 conference was held last month and attracted 1400 women and men from 22 countries. The 8th GHC Women in Computing conference will be held 1-4 October 2008 in Denver, Colorado, U.S. Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology“Writing women into technical history,” the Anita Borg Institute coordinates a number of activities including the TechLeaders program, the Women of Vision Awards and the Systers email community, which comprises 2700 members in at least 54 countries. Also on offer are some great mentoring resources and inform

  Feature - Electing for transparency: politics, grid computing and partisan gerrymandering Ternary plot of Bush versus Gore as run in the precincts constituting Texas Congressional District 24 in 2000.  Larger dots indicate more populous precincts; brighter shades indicate a greater Gore share of the two-party vote.  If one drops an imaginary vertical line from the Hispanic vertex to the bisector of the triangle’s bottom leg, one sees that, generally, most non-Hispanic voters in predominantly Hispanic districts were white voters.  If white voters in predominantly Hispanic precincts voted more Democratic than white voters in predominantly white precincts, aggregation bias could affect the estimates of the preferences of Hispanic voters, who turned out in low percentages.Image courtesy of Crimson Grid A few months after arriving at Harvard Law School, Assistant Professor Jim Greiner turned to computer scientists at the nearby School of Engineering and Applied Sciences for some legal power—of a sort. H

  Announcement - David Moses joins PSC as executive director Image courtesy of Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center David Moses, co-founder and former chief operating officer of Gaussian, Inc., has joined the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center as executive director.Moses fills the position vacated by the March retirement of Beverly Clayton, who was PSC’s executive director since its founding in 1986.Moses will manage the day-to-day internal operations of PSC, overseeing a scientific and technological staff of about 75 people.“I welcome the opportunity to be actively involved in this innovative and challenging work,” said Moses. “PSC is a leader in high-performance computing and networking and a vital resource in the Pittsburgh region and the state of Pennsylvania.”The Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center is a leading partner in TeraGrid and is a joint effort between Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh together with Westinghouse Electric Company.   

  Announcement - CNRS launches Institut des Grilles The new Institut des Grilles will federate CNRS work on production and research grid computing. Image courtesy of CNRS The French Centre National De La Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) has just announced the creation of a new Institut des Grilles (Grids Institute), which federates all CNRS actions concerning computing grids and distributed computing systems. More than 15 CNRS laboratories from four scientific departments and two national institutes are taking part in the new institute, which aims to consolidate the existing grid production infrastructures, to reinforce research in grid computing and to increase synergy between the various stakeholders.  

Link of the week - SciVee: YouTube for scientists? Science publishing goes podcast: SciVee provides the chance for scientists to communicate their results via webcast video.Image courtesy of SciVeeYour moment of scientific pop-glory could be here!Your research results need no longer be hidden away in university libraries or relegated to inch-thick papers. Instead, you can tout your breakthroughs directly to the masses using what some are describing as a YouTube for scientists: SciVee. Using SciVee, scientists have the chance to upload short videos along with their papers, publish podcasts featuring their work, join science groups and create professional profiles.The videos and podcasts provide the opportunity for researchers to bypass any offputting jargon and technical dressing by communicating their results directly—person to person.In this way, visitors to SciVee can get a quick overview of a variety of scientific research, delivered by the researchers themselves, making it easier for fellow scientists and the general publi

Link of the week - FennoGrid: gridding with the people Assembly is billed as a four-day non-stop party for computer enthusiasts. This shot shows participants in the FennoGrid challenge, battling wits in a huge multiplayer game that took place while the animation was rendering.Image courtesy of Antti Hartikainen What happens if you gather 5000 gamers, with almost 3000 personal computers, and ask them to hook together an ad-hoc grid at a massive gaming festival?FennoGrid recently found out.FennoGrid is a Finnish non-profit organization set up to share information about grid and peer-to-peer research.Our most recent event took place at Finnish computer festival Assembly, a great place to raise awareness of grids with computer-savvy future users.Mission: possible? The challenge: to build and operate a huge ad-hoc cluster for 15 minutes, recruiting as many participants as possible to help render a 3D animation, all while playing a big-screen multi-player computer game. The technology: We used Blender software to render the anim

Feature - Picture this: visualization as a tool for data analysis This is one image from a 3000-frame visualization showing air movement around Osprey rotors. It is one of visualization expert Kelly Gaither’s all-time favorites.Image courtesy of Kelly Gaither Transformers are no longer just toys from the 1980s.Bell-Boeing Ospreys are a real-life example of a transforming machine; they can begin flight as a helicopter, with rotors on top, and change mid-flight to operate like an aeroplane, with rotors in front. A few years ago, however, after two Osprey accidents, the United States government grounded the fleet. “The planes were having problems during the rotor transition,” says Kelly Gaither. “Our job was to figure out why.” Gaither is a visualization expert at the Texas Advanced Computing Center. She and her team simulated, visualized and created a 3000-frame movie to show air movement around the Osprey during transition.Where art meets science“When creating this movie, I had a chance to be jus

  Feature - More than just computing power: earth science on EGEE Monique Petitdidier: grid technology has more to offer than computing power.Image courtesy of EGEE You have a good chance of meeting Monique Petitdidier at any event that combines earth science with computing. Although officially retired, Petitdidier continues in her role as a senior scientist with French institutes IPSL and CNRS: she coordinates the Earth Science contingent of the Enabling Grids for E-sciencE community, and is a driving force behind the DEGREE project (Dissemination and Exploitation of GRids in Earth Science)Petitdidier says scientists in the Earth Science Research Virtual Organisation view grids as simply a computing means to their research end.“Most institutes cannot afford intensive computation, such as that required to run millions of jobs or very large data archive exploration,” Petitdidier points out. “This means that their science is limited by the computing power they have available.”“We mainly have rese

Image of the Week - Wim Klein  Wim Klein, known as one of the fastest “human computers” in the world, gives a demonstration of his mathematical prowess.Image courtesy of CERNPut down your high powered computers for just a second to pay homage to Willem (Wim) Klein, a man whose incredible calculation abilities earned him the nickname of “human calculator.”A quirky part of early computing history, Wim was recruited to CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, in 1957. He was tasked with the challenge of double-checking the results of CERN’s early computer programs.Wim not only checked the computer’s results, he regularly beat them to the answer. His mathematical prowess was such that hundreds of physicists and mathematicians would gather from around the world to watch him at work.During one such demonstration, in September 1973, Wim calculated the 19th root of a 133-digit number in one minute and 43 seconds. Unsatisfied with this tremendous feat, he went on to improve his time, con

Link of the Week - Gridcast.org Go to Gridcast.org this week to hear the latest from the OGF20/EGEE User forum. Gridcasts share the excitement of the emerging developments in the grid field with the public. This week Gridcast.org will be casting from the joint 20th Open Grid Forum and the Enabling Grids for E-sciencE User forum in Manchester, England. Gridcasts are a combination of blogs, podcasts and videos. This week’s Gridcasts will from eight people with different backgrounds participating in the meetings. They will share ideas, experiences, feelings, impressions, anything helpful to make the public “feel like they were there.”Check it out at www.gridcast.org.