Content about Technology

Scientific computation is a research field with an excellent track record when it comes to technology and knowledge transfer. Now, with the global economic crisis taking its toll on public science budgets, the need for other research communities to learn from this example has never been greater.

Read about how the EpiCollect application can help field researchers gather data.

Announcement - Last chance, Data Center Infrastructure Management, Nov. 16-18, MERIT network

Photo courtesy Merit

The three-day "Data Center Infrastructure Management" online learning class will be available November 16-18 through Merit's Professional Learning program. Merit is a nonprofit corporation, owned and governed by Michigan's public universities, providing high-performance networking solutions to public universities, colleges, K-12 organizations, libraries, state government, healthcare, and other non-profit organizations.
Instruction will be entirely online — you can attend from anywhere where there is an Internet connection. You can also attend at Merit's offices if you need a space away from your daily demands. The course will provide knowledge about the professional management of data facilities, which is increasingly important for organizations of all types and sizes. It is of interest to individuals who manage data centers or server rooms, IT staff with hardw

Feature - The 1970s in the 21st century: synthesized music returns (via parallel processing)

This Arp 2500 analog modular synthesizer from 1971 had hundreds of inputs and outputs for control of the synthesis processes. Image courtesy of discretesynthesizers.com.

Curtis Roads is a professor, vice chair, and graduate advisor in media arts and technology, with a joint appointment in music at the University of California at Santa Barbara. He also was the editor of the Computer Music Journal (published by MIT Press), and co-founded the International Computer Music Association. He is often a featured speaker at conferences such as Supercomputing. 
 
Music is an interactive, concurrent process. A note or a chord sounds, then is replaced, gradually or sharply, softly or powerfully, by the next one. For electronically produced or enhanced music, real-time technical advances are critical to continued progress and exploration. In the 1970s, I fondly remember learning my first parallel

Project Profile - From grids to clouds and beyond: GRNET supports Greek researchers

The Acropolis from Philipapou Hill at sunset, Image courtesy Tim Rogers, stock.xchng

All Greek universities get their internet from one source: GRNET (Greek Research and Education Network), a company supported by the Greek state, which connects them both to each other and to the larger pan-European academic network, GÉANT.
GRNET’s mission is to get universities on line, to provide computing power and storage, and to develop services for researchers. Not the least of which is providing technical know-how and supporting schools and universities in Greece. “GRNET is actually a human network — this is the most important thing about it,” says Kostas Koumantaros, member of GRNET in Athens. “We transfer know-how between universities throughout Greece. It is a good vehicle to both promote research in Greece and for us to learn from our international collabora

Feature - Ultra-fast networks: The Final Frontier A network researcher in awe of the billions of dark matter particles simulated on 15 ultra-high definition monitors. Image courtesy Freek Dijkstra Researchers from Holland have demonstrated a network infrastructure that could potentially help scientists save time and even transform the movie business. This could be done without the need for large computer clusters or grids, just off-the-shelf hardware components combined with human ingenuity and one of the world’s fastest research networks. The team were from SARA, a Dutch supercomputing and e-science support center. Threshold The SARA researchers wanted to show the practicalities of streaming video between two institutions (from SARA, Amsterdam to CERN, Geneva) at 40Gb/second (5GB/s). This link, if successful, would be 16 times faster than the TEIN3 network, which streamed Malaysian dancers over 9,000 kilometers away to a live orchestra performance in Stockholm at 2.5 Gb/s. Th

Announcement - New European Petaflop supercomputer available in 2011

Photo courtesy PRACE

In 2011, the 1.6 Petaflop French supercomputer, Curie, will be installed and available for use. Powered by more than 90,000 processor cores, it will be exclusively dedicated to European research and available for all fields of science, including high-energy and plasma physics, climatology and much more.
“It is crucial to have high computing power to simulate, with the most possible realism, the past of our climate, the current conditions and its future evolution according to various scenarios,” said Jean Jouzel, vice-president of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change).
Scientists and engineers will also be able to use Curie’s simulations to explore the properties of various materials, improve aircraft and car construction, design better drugs, understand the intricate molecular functions of the human body and conduct simulations that are impractical in reality.
Cur

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

Profile – Domenico Vicinanza, master of fusion Musicians play ancient instruments live in Stockholm while dancers in Kuala Lumpur about 10,000 kilometers away simultaneously perform on the display above the stage. (Click on image above to see video of entire performance.) All images courtesy Domenico Vicinanza Domenico Vicinanza combines the worlds of science and music by using his talents as an engineer and a musician to bring ancient musical instruments back to life. In December 2009 Vicinanza and the 'Lost Sounds Orchestra' gave a unique performance. While playing ancient Greek music live in Stockholm on a virtual instrument, an ultra-fast, high-quality video-feed of dancers from Kuala Lumpur was displayed — simultaneously bringing two distant cultures and locations into one place. iSGTW caught up with Vicinanza for an interview.   iSGTW: What’s your job? Vicinanza: At DANTE I support international projects that use the GÉANT network, the pa

Feature - A lasting ocean observatory

A map indicates the location of the four major ocean arrays, as well as the two minor ones. Click for a larger version. Image courtesy of OOI - CEV at University of Washington.

Agile architecture is essential if a large-scale infrastructure like the Ocean Observatories Initiative is to last three decades, as mandated.
“The Ocean Observatory has been in planning for fifteen years and more,” said Matthew Arrott, OOI’s project manager for cyberinfrastructure. “It is our anticipation, over a 30 year lifespan, that we need to account for user needs and the technology that we are using all changing.”
That’s why they’ve focused their attention on creating an infrastructure that can interface with a wide variety of software packages and computational resource providers.
“The observatory supports a broad range of analysis with the expectation that the majority of the analysis capability will be provided a

Link of the Week - GPU Technology Conference

This photograph was taken at the 2009 GPU Technology Conference.
Image courtesy nVIDIA.

Last week, computing expert Greg Pfister told us why he thinks that cheap GPU-based supercomputing is coming to an end. And as iSGTW readers from around the world read that article, other computing experts gathered in San Jose for the GPU Technology Conference, an event with a very different underlying perspective.
Sponsored by nVIDIA, the GTC offered separate streams for researchers, developers, and industry.
NVIDIA created daily video recaps for the three-day event. The source aside, they are a quick and convenient way to find out about some of the most interesting presentations from the event.
You can go directly to video one, two, and three to watch them, or read more about the conference by browsing VizWorld posts tagged as “gtc” at our link of the week.

Announcement - Free HPC event, 30 September

The event will take place in Long Beach, California, pictured above.Image courtesy of Jon Sullivan, under Creative Commons license.

You are invited to attend a free day-long event on high performance computing technology in Long Beach, California, USA on 30 September 2010.
The event, which is sponsored by nVIDIA, Intel, HP, Mellanox Technologies, Adaptive Technologies, and CB Technologies, will take place from 8:30am to 3:00pm.
Agenda:

"CPU Processing" - Intel
"Accelerating HPC with GPU Computing" - Nvidia, Dale Southard
"Paving the Road to Exascale Computing" - Mellanox,
"Managing HPC with intelligent policies/HP Cloud" - Adaptive Computing
"Parallel File Storage Solutions" - DataDirect Networks
"HPC CHARACTERIZATION AND OPTIMIZATION" - Hewlett-Packard Company

 Confirmed Speakers:

HP, Logan Sankaran, System Tuning and Application Optimization for HPC
Nvidia, Dale Southard
Mellanox, Gilad Shainer, Sr. Director of HPC an