Content about Project Profile

Imagine living next to a busy highway operating 24 hours a day for 365 days per year. That’s what life is like for ocean animals living next to busy shipping lanes.

Feature - Life at the extreme at the Pierre Auger Observatory The Pierre Auger Observatory has a detection area of 3,000 km², so large that it is best seen by airplane. A space-based sucessor with a detection area hundreds of times greater is already being planned: the JEM-EUSO will be attached to the International Space Station in 2013. It will use large volumes of the earth’s atmosphere to detect and observe particles colliding with planet’s magnetic field. All images courtesy Pierre Auger Observatory Some people enjoy living life at the edge, such as participants in extreme sports. At the other extreme are those who relish watching rare events.Among the latter are astronomers at the Pierre Auger Observatory, a multi-national collaboration to detect the 'light-signature' given off as these cosmic rays hit particles in our atmosphere. Based in Argentina, the observatory monitors ultra-high energy cosmic rays —  spectacular examples of some of nature

Announcement - ESFRI and e-IRG publish ‘Blue Paper’ on e-Infrastructure

Photo courtesy  ESFRI

The European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI) and e-Infrastructure Reflection Group (e-IRG) has just released a report about the current trends, issues and policy areas for users of Europe's e-Infrastructure services.
Topics that are covered include:

Networks
Computing
Middleware
e-infrastructure services to support scientific research.
e-infrastructure as a European service.
Digital research infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities.
e-science and technology infrastructure for biodiversity data and observatories.
And much more . . .

The full report can be downloaded in pdf form.

Feature - New physics in space

A C5 Supergalaxy, one of the world’s largest planes, loading the AMS-02 experiment at Geneva Airport. Image courtesy CERN Bulletin

New life was breathed into the International Space Station (ISS) this year after NASA announced it will extend the ISS from 2015 to at least 2020.The new deadline extends opportunities for science experimentation in the largest space research laboratory ever constructed. One of these experiments is the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS-02), a detector that may help scientists understand why our universe exists and why there is more matter than anti-matter.Most space-grade electronics are about ten years old, so the AMS-02 represents the newest and most advanced physics experiment in outer space to date. Currently, it is being tested and due to launch in February 2011. AMS-02 was shipped via Geneva airport to NASA this August in one of the largest planes in the world, a US Air Force C5 Super Galaxy.Once aboard the ISS, A

Feature - Achilles tendon a blessing, not a curse

Sprinters lining up for the start of the Women’s 100-meter at the Beijing Olympics. Image courtesy LIM CK, under Creative Commons license.

Compared with other runners on this planet, humans are feeble.
If Olympic sprinters competed against mammals of comparable size, they would never even qualify for the finals. The top speed for an in-shape male human is normally between 15 and 18 miles per hour (24 to 29 kilometers per hour). The world record is 27 mph (43kmh), and that was sustainable for only a few seconds.
Meanwhile, horses have been clocked at about 48 miles per hour, wolves about 42, and the speed champion — the cheetah — at 70 miles per hour. (That’s about 77 kmh, 68 kmh, and 113 kmh, respectively.)
Even warthogs are faster than us.
But in the field of endurance racing however, we leave everyone else in the dust. Over long distances, a well-trained human can outrun a horse.
What is the ke

Project profile: PL-Grid

Legacies of older architectures exist along side the new in Poland, and not just in research computing: Here contemporary architecture in Warsaw reflects the past. Image courtesy Jaime Silva, Flickr, under Creative Commons license

Beyond being at the geographic center of Europe, Poland plays a central, leading role in Europe’s grid community. In 2009, Poland became the first country to form an independent and autonomous National Grid Initiative — an operational unit, based in a single country, set up to run a national computing infrastructure to support the European Grid Infrastructure (EGI).
With the close of the Enabling Grids for E-sciencE project, the health of the EGI is dependent upon such NGIs — and the technical process developed by Poland to move away from the parent EGEE ROC is a model other countries will look to. PLGrid itself is one of a series of NGIs to form as legal entities over the last few years, particularly in South Eas

Profile - People behind the European Grid Initiative: Tiziana Ferrari

Image courtesy EGI

The European Grid Infrastructure’s role is to support research and collaboration across the continent by providing seamless, instant access to computing resources. But who has the job of making sure things actually work? Meet EGI’s Chief Operations Officer, Tiziana Ferrari. She spoke recently with iSGTW to tell us what is rewarding about her job, what is challenging and why it is important.
 
iSGTW: Describe what you do for EGI.Ferrari: I am responsible for coordinating the operations of the infrastructure across Europe. The user doesn’t care whether a resources is in Spain or in France, they just need it to work — that is my job. In EGI though, every country is responsible for its own operations.
But EGI needs to coordinate this and ensure that everyone is using the same protocols. That is my role. I need to make sure the production and accounting infrastruc

Feature - NetLogo: A low threshold, no ceiling language

Two fifth grade students use NetLogo to learn about electrical current. Image courtesy Pratim Sengupta.
Front page image: Tiling with squares whose sides are successive Fibonacci numbers in length. Courtesy Wikipedia under Creative Commons license.

Elementary school students may not be able to decipher mathematical models such as Maxwell’s Equations. But given the right visualization and computational modeling tools, they can learn the underlying concepts.
Meet NetLogo, a multi-agent programmable modeling environment authored in 1999 by Uri Wilensky, a learning sciences and computer science professor at Northwestern University, and founder of the Center for Connected Learning and Computer-Based Modeling.
Remember the turtle?
A generation of adults were introduced to functions and programming through Logo and the “turtle” - an on-screen triangular cursor - that accompanied it. Logo was first created in 1967

Link of the Week - A new twist on summer camp: computing classes in the wild

Image courtesy Carlos Jaime-Barrios Hernandez

We’ve all heard of summer camp.But SuperComputing Camp (or SSCAMP, as it is known by its acronym in Spanish) is a little different.
Starting on the 15th of August, 46 undergraduates and masters students will learn about high performance computing, grid computing, volunteer computing and cloud computing — while staying in a hacienda near Panachi National Wildlife Park, just outside the small town of Piedecuesta, Colombia.The organizer, Carlos Jaime-Barrios Hernandez, says the idea is for students to learn in a natural environment, where they can explore and enjoy the great outdoors while having access to fully up-to-date facilities, including digital resources, projectors and live-video feeds to keynote speeches and online lectures. They will remotely connect to the grid infrastructure via the web. Hernandez — a research scient

Feature: Fruitfly + flight studies + grid = flying robots?

The GUI pre-processor used to generate the geometry of the fly wings. (Click on image to enlarge.) All images courtesy Diego Scardaci, INFN

The study of the flight of a fruit fly may one day lead to the development of autonomous ‘Micro-air vehicles’ (MAVs), or independent ‘flying robots,’  if scientists in Argentina have their way.
Working in conjunction with the Italian Institute of Nuclear Physics (INFN) under the EELA-2 initiative, they are conducting the study to understand the flight mechanisms of insects and small birds. Their hope is that someday, 'flying robots' could be developed with maneuvering capabilities similar to insects — the most agile flying creatures on Earth.
MAVs could be used to study and explore places that are too dangerous or inhospitable for humans to tread; examples include search-and-rescue teams exploring buildings to detect fires, or scientists investiga

Feature - Project profile: ESFRI

Image courtesy GridTalk

So, just what is ESFRI?The European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI) is a European Commission initiative whose role is to guide policymaking on Research Infrastructures (RIs) in Europe. ESFRI projects span social and biomedical sciences, earth and physical sciences, energy, infrastructures and analytical facilities.
The ESFRI projects are detailed in the ESFRI Roadmap, which was last updated in 2008. A new version of this document is due to be released in 2010 and will include also input from the e-Infrastructure Reflection Group (e-IRG), a body which defines and recommends best practices for pan-European e-Infrastructure efforts.
But with such wide scope and vision, the ESFRI projects will place large demands on the storage, processing and networking services of Europe’s e-Infrastructures. To address this, the European e-Infrastructure Forum (EEF) has released a report addressing the future requiremen

Back to Basics – Q&A on meshes

The geometry and adapted mesh for a patient-specific abdominal aorta aneurysm. Image courtesy of Min Zhou, Onkar Sahni, H. Jin Kim, C. Alberto Figueroa, Charles A. Taylor, Mark S. Shephard and Kenneth E. Jansen.

The word “mesh” seems to pop up all over the place. What exactly is a mesh? How about an adaptive mesh? Who uses them, and for what? This week, iSGTW interviewed Mark Shephard to learn more about meshes. Mark Shephard is the director of the Scientific Computation Research Center (SCOREC) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. His primary area of interest is the development of techniques to reliably automate multiscale simulations..
iSGTW: So, what is a mesh? When do you use these?
Shephard: In the context of modeling physical behavior over complex geometric domains that can be modeled by partial differential equations (PDEs), meshes are used to support the application of methods that can provide approximate but accurate sol