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Feature - BOINC gets social with Facebook

A screen shot of Progress Thru Processors.

For the first time, Facebook users are signing on to volunteer grid computing, thanks to a new application called Progress thru Processors.
“For all the promise of volunteer computing, the problem is that no one’s ever heard of it,” said Matt Blumberg, executive director of Grid Republic, “and that’s a big deal for a technology where the utility of the thing is a function of the number of people who participate.”
Progress thru Processors could change all that. The project was developed jointly by Intel, Grid Republic, and the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing. BOINC, which was originally created at University of California at Berkeley to assist in analyzing data in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), is the platform on which Grid Republic’s software is based. Progress thru Processors is an adaptation of Grid Republic’s so

Link of the Week - EELA-2 NA3 Application Support

Image courtesy EELA-2

Where should you go if you’re looking for information about porting applications to the E-science grid facility for Europe and Latin America, alias EELA-2?
Or how about on-line tutorials or user guides?
What about finding answers to the most common asked questions raised by grid users when trying to run their jobs on the EELA-2 Grid infrastructure, using either gLite or OurGrid?
The answers are at the newly released EELA NA3 application support website, which is in charge of providing technical support to researchers wanting to port their applications on the EELA-2 grid infrastructure.
This is the first version of the website, which will be continuously updated in the next months.

Announcement - Research3 workshop paper submissions due 21 August

A workshop covering the impact and influence of Web 2.0 on e-Research will take place on 13 October 2009 at Open Grid Forum 27 as part of the Summit09 conference in Banff, Alberta.
The event website states, “This workshop aims to assess, evaluate and explore the emerging Web 2.0-based services and applications that are up-and-coming, and being used for development purposes.”
Topics covered will include:

Infrastructure and Services

The use and development of Cloud-based services,
Using RESTful services for communication,
The applications of mash-ups and using other Web 2.0 technologies,
Web 2.0 security versus existing security,
Using virtualisation technologies for application and services,
Compare and contrast existing services with emerging Web 2.0 technologies,
Combining the Semantic Web with Web 2.0.

Applications

Using data and services mash-ups,
The development

Feature - Flip-flopping of black hole accretion disks scrutinized

Clues to an astrophysical mystery from Renaissance Computing Institute on Vimeo.

Do whirlpools of gas flip-flop as they are sucked into black holes? According to a new simulation powered by TeraGrid, the answer is “Yes.”
The accretion disk of a black hole forms from gas attracted by the black hole’s massive gravitational pull. For the last 20 years, astrophysicists have debated whether the whirlpool-like motion of the accretion disk will periodically reverse motion, a behavior called ‘flip-flop.’
When flip-flopping first turned up in a 1988 numerical simulation, some scientists argued that it explains recurrent x-ray flares observed by the European X-Ray Observatory in 1985. But in subsequent years, although some simulations showed flip-flop, others did not, casting doubt on the existence of the phenomenon.
“The earlier work was criticized for a wide variety of reasons, but I think the chie

Feature - Common cheap chips get jobs done faster

Although much of today’s most interesting research requires immense amounts of computational power, many scientists don’t have the funds to access expensive supercomputers or clusters. Now, a commonplace computer chip may provide a thrifty way to get those jobs done.
Graphics processing units (GPUs) are found in most computers and are designed to render 3-D computer graphics. They contain hundreds of processing cores on a single chip, and several chips can fit into a single desktop. Computational geneticists Marc Suchard of the University of California Los Angeles and Andrew Rambaut of the University of Edinburgh were able to use GPUs to speed up their computations by a factor of 100.

This tree shows how a population of viruses evolved over a 10-year period within an infected patient. The branch colors reflect relative rates of evolution along each branch.
Courtesy of Marc Suchard of UCLA.

Suchard and Ramba

Feature - Computing enables identification of microbe DNA in soil

Jonathan Eisen collects samples gathered by the Alvin submarine during a recent trip to the ocean floor.
Image courtesy of J. Eisen, UCD.

The traditional method for studying a microbe is to cultivate it in the lab and examine its biology in detail. However, lab cultivation is possible for only a small fraction of microbe species. Scientists have thus turned to metagenomics – the computation-reliant study of DNA extracted from environmental samples rather than from cultivated organisms.In metagenomics, scientists grind up samples containing many different organisms and extract all the DNA they can, not knowing which pieces of DNA came from which organisms. A one-gram soil sample can contain up to several million species of microbes all mixed together. The scientists sequence small, random fragments of the DNA to identify species and determine how they function, explained Jonathan Eisen, University of California,

Opinion — EELA in Latin America: a conversation with Bernard Maréchal

EELA-2 aims at building a high capacity, production-quality, scalable grid facility, providing round-the-clock, worldwide access to distributed computing, storage and network resources needed by the wide spectrum of Applications from European - Latin American Scientific Collaborations. Image courtesy EELA News

iSGTW and BELIEF have teamed up to find out what the speakers at the 4th BELIEF International Symposium think about the state of e-infrastructures in Latin America. We spoke to Bernard Maréchal, EELA-2 (E-science grid facility for Europe and Latin America) Project Coordinator, who shared his thoughts on the challenges of implementing grid technology.
What do you do?
I’m the EELA-2 Project Coordinator. While my actual role is “restricted” to the overall coordination of the project, one of the main EELA-2 objectives is to plant the seeds of the long-term sustainabil

Feature - Conserving bio-diversity at Peru’s CIP

A few of the many varieties of potatoes. CIP maintains the world’s largest genetic bank of potatoes, including 1500 samples of 100 wild species collected in eight Latin American countries, as well as samples of 3800 traditional Andean cultivated potatoes. The collection is maintained under the auspices of the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization, and is available to plant breeders worldwide free upon request. (Click to enlarge.) Image courtesy International Potato Center

What do the objects at right have in common?
They’re all potatoes.
And their continuing variety will be partly because of the grid.The International Potato Center (known by its Spanish acronym, CIP) seeks to ensure the genetic diversity of this staple food crop. The organization also seeks to reduce poverty and achieve food security on a sustained basis in developing countries through scientific research and related activities —

Image of the week - It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s . . . 

Image courtesy Pierre Auger Observatory 

. . . it’s an artist’s conceptual simulation of two independent ways to see cosmic rays coming in from space.
At the Pierre Auger Observatory in Argentina, an array of surface detectors is used, as well as a collection of air fluorescence telescopes. The two systems complement each other, allowing researchers a better chance of being sure to see their rare, high-energy quarry.

Profile - Craig Lee, president of Open Grid Forum

Craig Lee
Image courtesy Craig Lee

iSGTW and BELIEF-II (Bringing Europe’s eLectronic Infrastructures to Expanding Frontiers - Phase II) teamed up to find out what the speakers at the 4th BELIEF International Symposium think about the state of e-infrastructures in Latin America. Here, we interview Craig Lee, who is giving a presentation on “Future Trends and e-Infrastructure application: towards sustainable development.”What is your job?I’m serving as president of the Open Grid Forum. In this capacity, my role is not only to be the “public face” of OGF, but more importantly to understand all of our stakeholders’ requirements, and to promote all possible synergies among our current — and new — stakeholders.How is your job related to the development and application of grids and e-infrastructures?Obviously my job is to promote the development and use of all manner of distri

Image of the week - A VAPOR-ous view

Passage of a cold front on 18 February 2008 over Georgia. The convergence of moisture ( colored flow lines with red corresponding to high moisture content and green color with low moisture content) along the front is presented using three dimensional vorticity. Image courtesy Thara Prabhakaran, University of Georgia.

The image at right shows a  3D image of a cold front, created with software from VAPOR,  the Visualization and Analysis Platform for Ocean, Atmosphere, and Solar Researchers.VAPOR provides:

A visual data discovery environment tailored towards the specialized needs of the geosciences CFD community
A desktop solution capable of handling terascale size data sets
Advanced interactive 3D visualization tightly coupled with quantitative data analysis
Support for multi-variate, time-varying data
Close coupling with powerful interpretive data language,\.
Support for 3D visualization of datasets.

VAPOR runs on most

Feature - EVO powers communication for global collaborations

Image courtesy caltech.edu.

For the Large Hadron Collider collaborators who are spread across the globe, staying connected presents challenges. The Enabling Virtual Organizations (EVO) system, a worldwide network designed for institutions participating in the LHC experiments and other high-energy physics collaborative programs, makes international collaboration easier by providing a reliable and secure system for real-time virtual meetings.
EVO, winner of the 2009 Internet2 IDEA award for applied advanced networking “at its best,” hails from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). In 2008 it hosted more than 9,100 virtual LHC collaboration meetings with a total of over 4,200 users. The combined time each user spent in EVO LHC meetings last year totals more than 86,300 hours. Unlike commercial networks, EVO poses no restriction on the number of participants in a meeting. On September 10, 2008, about 1,250