Content about Project Profile

Feature - Finding a clue in a data-stack

Data-mining techniques can give law enforcement agencies the edge they need to catch criminals and stop terrorists, but they also raise concerns about respecting personal privacy and civil liberties. New research at Rutgers University has lead to the creation of DI-HOPE-KD, a suite of tools that integrate powerful data mining tactics while guarding civil liberties and due process. Image courtesy Jupiter Images; caption information courtesy of the National Science Foundation

Thanks to a distributed data analysis system under development at Rutgers University, New Jersey, the time it takes police to connect the dots between illicit activities across the globe could go from months to minutes.
Imagine that law enforcement officers in Los Angeles are investigating labs that manufacture the illegal drug methamphetamine. Meanwhile, investigators in Chicago are looking into the illegal sale of large quantities of the drug pseudoephedrine, manufactured i

Feature - Predicting burglary with the grid

Photo courtesy Andy Fox, stock.exchng

Superheroes like Batman are not the only ones who can make use of sophisticated technology to fight crime. Nick Malleson, a researcher at Leeds University, has designed an intricate computer model to forecast burglary rates, which relies on the UK’s National Grid Service (NGS) to provide the necessary computing power.
Predicting crime is a tricky business, because the likelihood of a burglary can depend upon numerous human and environmental factors, all of which affect one another. In an attempt to forecast general trends, Malleson’s model simplifies the complexities surrounding crime prediction by using an “agent-based” model — one in which largely autonomous individuals, or “agents,” make decisions and perform actions which are influenced by the multiple individual factors within their environment.
In his model, potential burglars make decisions a

Feature - A tool for reaching the cloud

There are a many different clound providers to choose from. Image courtesy UCAR

Utility computing is a way for potential clients — whether they are a business or an academic researcher — to match the cost of their computing and storage needs to their demand for these resources. Suppose you need the resources of 1,000 computers, but for only one day per week. Using on-demand utility computing such as clouds allows you to purchase the resources just for the one day, which can result in substantial cost-savings.
Faced with the challenge of developing dynamic, service-focused infrastructures for the media and financial sectors — where data is often subject to rapid peaks and troughs in demand (consider how quickly breaking news develops and how traders on Wall Street react to it) — the Belfast e-Science Center BeSC found that to best exploit the benefits of cloud technology daily, the user needs the opti

Feature - Big science facilities meet the cloud

Dylan Maxwell explains the Science Studio system to a bystander at Summit 2009 in Banff, Alberta. Photo by Miriam Boon.

Lab notebooks are so passé. In the brave new world of cloud computing, the entire experimental process will take place in your web browser.
And if a team of Canadian researchers at the University of Western Ontario and the Canadian Light Source in Saskatchewan has anything to say about it, researchers around the world will be using a web platform called Science Studio.
“One of the aims of Science Studio is to be able to access big science facilities such as the Canadian Light Source,” said Marina Fuller, a chemistry researcher with the project. “It’s a complete experiment management system.”
The test case for Science Studio is the VESPERS beamline at the Canadian Light Source synchrotron. When Science Studio is complete in 2011, researchers will be able to use the platform to apply

Feature - iPlant: A new paradigm for a scientific field

Image courtesy of Asif Akbar.

iPlant is going to solve the grand challenges of plant biology. It’s a big bite to chew, but the creators of iPlant think big.
“One of the really neat things about this project is that it was funded to exist by, for, and of the community,” said Dan Stanzione, co-director of the iPlant project. “The idea was to be collaborative from square one, and not to take the ‘if you build it’ approach.”
That’s why the developers behind iPlant didn’t propose specific tools or structures. Instead, they created a process whereby the plant biology community could come together and decide what the field’s grand challenges are.
Stanzione estimates that over 100 faculty members from forty different institutions worldwide participated in the grand challenge process. “Most everything was done remotely,” said Stanzione. The tools used included telecon

Feature - Here to help: embedded cyberinfrastructure experts

It isn’t easy designing software that can run on a cluster like Fermilab's Grid Computing Center. That’s why advanced technical support is so essential. Photo by Reidar Hahn, Fermilab Visual Media Services.

Although much of today’s scientific research relies on advanced computing, for many researchers learning how to adapt and optimize applications to run on supercomputers, grids, clouds, or clusters can be daunting.
To help newcomers, many cyberinfrastructure providers offer in-depth support tailored to fit each user’s needs. This is much more than the typical technical support that helps users write scripts to enable their jobs to run. Instead, cyberinfrastructure experts are embedded directly into a user team to provide longer-term assistance.
One example is TeraGrid User Support and Services, led by director Sergiu Sanielevici.
“The designation of a supercomputer is that it’s basicall

Feature - Supercomputing code helps develop new solar cells

Image courtesy of Patrick Moore.

If scientists could use simulations to zoom in on the atomic level of solar cells, the insight they gain could launch solar power into the next energy orbital.
Unfortunately, those simulations would require an exorbitant amount of computational power.
“Typically we need to simulate tens of thousands of atoms,” said Lin-Wang Wang, a scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. “For the conventional code, if the number of atoms increases by a factor of ten, the computational load increases by a factor of a thousand.”
In fact, the same problem arises with nano-scale simulations of a wide variety of materials. That’s why Wang and his research team came up with the LS3DF code.
“We were thinking about how to improve the algorithm and have linear scaling,” said Wang. When an algorithm scales linearly, the computational cost increases at the same rate

Feature - Grid in a cloud: Processing the astronomically large

This is Westerlund 2, a young star cluster in the Milky Way which contains some of the hottest, brightest and biggest stars known. (Click on image to enlarge.) Image courtesy NASA/CXC/Univ. de Liège/Y. Naze et al

(Editor’s note: Alfonso Olias is part of a European Space Agency team working on a project that involves processing data from one billion stars — with some individual stars surveyed multiple times. Their solution? To run a grid inside a cloud. Here, he gives a first-hand account on their effort.)
 
We recently experimented with running a grid inside a cloud in order to process massive datasets, using test data drawn from something astronomically large: data from the Gaia project.
Gaia is a European Space Agency mission that will conduct a survey of one billion stars in our Galaxy — approximately 1% of the Milky Way galaxy. Over a five-year period, it will monitor each o

Feature: MANGO-NET - Helping to bring African ICT up to speed

Mangoes are cultivated in African countries such as Nigeria, MANGO-NET aims to cultivate an ICT infrastructure. Image courtesy Amr Safey, stock.xchng 

While computing technology is ubiquitous and increasingly powerful, its availability in developing nations remains limited. African universities struggle to participate in cutting-edge research because they do not have access to a widespread computer infrastructure, so their ability to conduct experiments and share results is compromised. As more science becomes “e-science,” the problem gets worse.
To help solve this, MANGO-NET (Made in Africa NGO NETwork), was launched. This project seeks to boost information and computing technology (ICT) throughout Africa, by establishing a network of schools and production labs to train ICT students to build their own computers. Because components are bought in bulk, it should reduce hardware costs, decreasing African depe

Video of the Week - Quantum Loop Gravity

This movie illustrates how excitations of geometry change as dictated by the Quantum Einstein Equations. Image courtesy Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics

Just one of the things that supercolliders such as CERN’s Large Hadron Collider and Fermilab’s Tevatron might find is evidence for something called “Quantum Gravity Loops” — which we won’t even try to explain in this short space, but which theoreticians say could explain a lot about the force known as gravity.
What could such things look like?
To try to illustrate the concept, the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics made the accompanying movie of “Quantum Spin Dynamics in Loop Quantum Gravity.” It depicts the quantum evolution of geometry in Loop Quantum Gravity, with the colors of the faces of the tetrahedrals indicating where and how much area exists at any given moment.
It’s also pretty cool to

Feature - Calming the wakefield

A snapshot of a simulation of the wakefield generated by a particle bunch moving through a series of ILC cavities, from three different perspectives. The colors represent the magnitude of the fields, with warmer colors representing the strongest fields.

For the International Linear Collider to run at maximum performance, each of its 27,000 cavities must be designed as precisely as possible.
It is very time consuming and costly, however, to produce physical prototypes, so researchers at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory decided to use a supercomputer to create and test virtual prototypes of the cavities.
The ILC, which is in its design phase, will use superconducting cavities to accelerate electrons and their antimatter partners, positrons, to nearly the speed of light before colliding them. By studying these collisions, researchers will be able to probe more deeply into the subatomic world.
As particle bunches travel through the accelerator cavities,

Feature – Superlinks to identify genetic culprits

A graphic map of a particularly complex family tree. The squares represent males, while the circles represent females. Individuals affected by a genetic mutation are represented with red squares or circles. Yellow lines indicate a marriage between relatives. Image courtesy of Kwanghyuk (Danny) Lee, Baylor College of Medicine.

Once scientists know which mutation causes a disease, they can apply that knowledge in their search for a cure. Likewise, doctors can recommend lifestyle changes that will alter the course of the disease. But the computer analysis used to identify these mutations would take years to complete on a single computer.
Superlink-online, a distributed system developed at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, helps researchers perform their analyses in a matter of days by distributing the computations over thousands of computers worldwide. Geneticists submit their data through the web portal with a single click