Content about Project Profile

Feature - For the love of movies: recommendations from the grid Cary Grant in “North by Northwest.” Image courtesy of MGM Alfred Hitchcock once said, “A good film is when the price of the dinner, the theatre admission and the babysitter were worth it.” Tired of wasting your time sifting through DVDs at the rental store only to end up with a mediocre film? Help is on the horizon for all interested in movie recommendations. In a one-man project, Leandro Neumann Ciuffo, offers grid-powered film recommendations through a simple algorithm, his Web portal and EELA-2, the E-science grid facility for Europe and Latin America. “This is a very simple application,” he said. “It’s not going to cure cancer, but it does show that average people can use the grid.” Marilyn Monroe gets fitted for a scene with the help of Hollywood costume designer William Travilla, who custom-made Monroe’s outfits for eight of her films. Image courtesy of  The Travilla Tour Custom-tailored suggestio

Feature - Help create an earthbound sun A view of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), showing its main components, with a person for size reference. One of the pilot applications running in Ibercivis is devoted to ITER simulations. Image courtesy of ITER The dream of fusion power sounds so fantastic that one’s initial reaction might be to dismiss it as science fiction. Yet  scientists hope to bring the power that emblazons the sun, fusion, to earthbound reactors. In this type of reaction two atomic nuclei bind — or fuse — together to form a heavier atom, triggering a monumental release of energy. The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) is a joint international research and development project seeking to build a prototype fusion power plant. (The finished machine will be located in the south of France.) Aiding ITER in its computational load is Ibercivis, a volunteer computing project centered in Spain, which allows computer users citizens to donate unused computing

Feature - Anticipating "The big one" Click here or on image  to view the animation.The detailed, perspective views show the ground shaking from a viewpoint two miles (three kilometers) above the earth looking towards each location. The left panel shows a map view of the area with the fault rupture highlighted in red, the epicenter (location where the rupture starts) identified by the red ball, and the location shown in the right panel labeled in yellow. In the right panel the deformation of the ground associated with the propagation of the seismic waves is exaggerated by a factor of 1000. Simulations developed by the Southern California Earthquake Center ShakeOut Simulation workgroup. Animations courtesy of the U.S Geological Survey and the Southern California Earthquake Center. At 10 a.m. on November 13, 5.3 million people in Southern California participated in the largest earthquake preparedness activity in U.S. history. The Great Southern California ShakeOut — an earthquake drill that was a collaborati

  Image of the week - ThIS cancer therapy  ThIS is an acronym for Therapeutic Irradiation Simulator for cancer therapy, which simulates the irradiation of a patient with carbon ion beams in order to allow clinicians to compute the 3D dose distributions inside the patient for a computer-aided tomography (CT) scan.Such simulations are very computing intensive, requiring thousands of hours on a single CPU. But by putting ThIS on the EGEE Grid, one simulation can be split into independent sub-simulations executed concurrently on different CPUs, speeding up the job.The project is now being integrated into the OpenGATE project. The developers — Sorina Camarasu, Tristan Glatard, Laurent Guigues, Thibault Frisson and David Sarrut, of CNRS in Lyon, France — say “The results are promising and we are confident that this advanced submission method will help the simulator to reach a larger research and medical community. Moreover, since most users need a higher-level graphical user in

Observing the grid Peer through Grid Observatory to explore the world of the grid.  Image copyright © 2005-2008 David Opie What was once lost has now been found—and stored.Thanks to the Grid Observatory, people in the esoteric field of studying the behavior of large, distributed systems have been given a gift: a trove of data. Like astronomers who peer through a telescope to explore the solar system, researchers in grids and complex systems are able to examine Grid Observatory’s data repository to find new patterns in the global behavior of the grid. The Grid Observatory, a sub-set of Enabling Grids for E-sciencE’s applications group, opened its doors—via a Web portal—this autumn. Through the portal, researchers can access anonymous grid traces, collected and stored through the Grid Observatory application, and information about those traces, for an overall picture of the grid. Grid traces, explains Cécile Germain of Grid Observatory, are signatures of grid usage. These take many f

Feature - Divide and conquer: distributed graphics rendering   A still from Nano Factor, a game-like toolkit designed to give junior high school students the opportunity to perform virtual experiments based on real-world micro and nano technologies.Image courtesy of Nicoletta Adamo-Villani, Purdue Rendering frames in a complex animation can tie up workstations for days or weeks. A two-minute animation at 30 frames per second will typically take over 100 hours to render on a single computer. Sharing the load among hundreds or even thousands of machines dramatically reduces a job’s run time—and the time required to complete a project.Enter the Distributed Rendering Environment, or DRE, developed at Purdue University five years ago for computer graphics students. It draws on the Purdue Condor pool, a system for sharing unused computing time on more than 20,000 linked processors in computers at Purdue and its partner campuses. This pool is part of both the TeraGrid and the Open Science Grid. DRE has become a staple in

  Image of the week - GlobAerosol Aerosols are tiny particles suspended in the air, and they are a fundamental component of the Earth's atmospheric chemistry. Knowing their distribution and density is vital to improving the accuracy of air quality forecasting and predicting. But tracking where aerosols come from, where they tend to collect, and where they tend to “sink” on a planetary scale is a tricky busines. (Due to wind and weather patterns, sometimes the most pristine, remote areas accumulate the most aerosols.) However, by coordinating European Space Agency satellite data through BeinGrid, researchersat GMV are able to make maps such as the one above as part of the GlobAerosol project. (Black represents no aerosols, purple is some aerosols, and red is the most aerosols.)  Image courtesy of GlobAerosol    

Feature - Massive new digital storage library for atmospheric research  The Nested Regional Climate Model is an initiative of the NCAR in collaboration with university, government and private-industry colleagues. With added support the NRCM will be able to simulate a variety of 21st-century climates, from which statistical portraits of the future atmosphere can be produced. The simulations can give a better idea of how and where weather patterns are likely to shift from decade to decade and how specific high-impact weather events, such as hurricanes, may change in frequency, intensity, size and rainfall. Images courtesy of UCAR;NASA-GSFC, NOAA GOES The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) recently installed a massive new digital storage library planned to hold nearly 30 petabytes of data— the equivalent of more than 6 million DVDs. The new system, AMSTAR (Augmentation of the Mass Storage Tape Archive Resources), will be one of the largest archives in the world dedicated to geoscience research, and will store

Feature - Security through collaboration, part II: a framework for investigations Image courtesy of NCSA. Last week, Randal Butler of NCSA, University of Illinois, discussed cyber security in today’s world of cross-domain computing, trust relationships and sophisticated cyber attacks. This week, he follows up with a discussion of collaborative cyber security and a prototype framework for cyber investigation developed by NCSA.   In today’s cyber-climate, a single attack can affect multiple organizations, increasing the need for security professionals to collaborate in both incident prevention and response.   The challenges that cyber investigators face are very much like those of their counterparts in academic research. The data they collect often comes from many sites and in a variety of formats, making it difficult to analyze.  Cyber security at academic sites is often underfunded and understaffed. They also share benefits. In both research and security, the combination of unique problem-solvi

Feature - A fine-grained approach to “cool” simulations A snapshot of a simulation examining the interactions of six water molecules. Image courtesy of Andrew Schultz. When deciding how best to design equipment in a chemical plant that produces liquid nitrogen, designers must know the properties of a mixture of nitrogen and oxygen gas at various stages as it cools and compresses. Researchers at the State University of New York at Buffalo have developed a new simulation technique that makes calculating these properties much more efficient.OSG is “the ideal workhorse”The new technique involves running simulations on the grid unfeasible on a single computer because they require large amounts of computing power. Andrew Schultz, a SUNY-Buffalo chemical and biological engineering researcher, said Open Science Grid (OSG) is “the ideal workhorse” to run these simulations. Schultz and his team have run more than 60,000 jobs on OSG resources since January—an order of magnitude jump in productivity.

  Image of the week - CMS CMS In the world of physics, “compact” is a relative term. Here is a view of the “Compact” Muon Solenoid, or CMS, as shot by Peter McCready, who has been creating a series of panoramic views of all the large experiments. Last in the series, this shows CMS in a 360-degree, rotating view, with natural sound, when you click on the picture above. For each image, 102 separate, individual photos were shot,  then stitched together into one seamless 40MP spherical image, much like an old-fashioned cyclorama. Each image takes as much as four weeks to complete in the his digital darkroom. When coupled with ambient sound that he recorded at the site, the user gets what McCready calls a  “Virtual Reality” experience. Image courtesy of Peter McCready    

  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