Content about Event

Feature - Cluster challenge at SC08: The Tour de France of HPC The ClusterMeisters solicited support from vendors IBM and Myricom. IBM has provided a new System X iDataPlex server, designed to use up to 40% less power than similarly configured standard servers. The nodes are equipped with the latest energy efficient Intel Xeon quad core processors and memory. This cluster clips along at more than 1 TFLOP/s (1 trillion mathematical calculations per second). Myricom is providing energy-efficient, high-performance networking equipment.  The faculty advisors have been educating their students about power consumption, multi-core, multi-node systems, and performance optimization. Image courtesy of Chris Eller, IU. The Tour de France of high performance computing for undergraduates kicked off this past Monday—the second annual Cluster Challenge at SC08. Until 4:00 Wednesday afternoon, seven teams comprised of some of the best young minds in computational science are working around-the-clock. They’re building HPC clusters o

Link of the week - Straight from the horse’s mouth: GridCast from Austin Image courtesy of David Wallom An exhibitor’s eye view “My posts on this blog will try to give an exhibitor’s eye view of the conference, so I have my camera with me and will keep my Flickr updated with pictures from the floor (tagged Supercomputing08) ... I'll also be twittering and using the the #SC08 tag so keep an eye on that too for musings from me and others,” blogs GridTalk's Neasan O'Neill, of  GridPP and EGEE.To bring you more perspectives are David Wallom, technical manager of the Oxford e-Research Centre and technical director of the UK National Grid Service. Claire Devereux who manages the UK & Ireland regional consortium in the EGEE and NGS projects and is also involved in grid computing outreach and dissemination activities.Tim Rupp who works with the Computer Security Team at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois where he spends most of his time on the technical implementation of the lab’s

Announcement - 1st EDGeS Grid Training Workshop & 2nd AlmereGrid Grid Experience Workshop Images courtesy of edges-grid.eu and almeregrid.nl  On 27-28 November 2008, AlmereGrid and EDGeS with support from Gridforum.nl will organise a two-day Desktop Grid workshop in Almere, The Netherlands. This workshop will start with an overview of the current state-of-the-art of Desktop Grid technology, e.g., BOINC, XtremWEB, the EDGeS Grid Bridge, and others.The afternoon of the first day a Masterclass will address the porting of applications to Desktop Grids and Service Grids. This masterclass is part of a successful series of Grid masterclasses organised by the Dutch Gridforum Society.The second day provides hands-on training in porting applications to the Grid. Participants will have access to the large European wide EDGeS Grid to run their exercises.The workshop is aimed at:Managers in Research and Industry who want to get an overviewof the state-of-the-art in (desktop) grid computing to see what it can bring to their organisati

Link of the week - We'll always have Paris: ESFRI meets grid Research Infrastructures are at the core of the knowledge triangle. From Hervé Pero′s presentation Utilizing the full potential of research infrastructures for strengthening the European Research Area (ERA). Image courtesy of H Pero Less intimate than Ilsa and Rick, close to 100 participants attended a Reflection Group (e-IRG) workshop in Paris on 21-22 October to discuss management of massive data sets, access for users to these data sets, and access to computing resources. Projects from ESFRI, the European strategy forum on research infrastructures, representing many scientific disciplines, are important potential grid users. This was the first event where the ESFRI and cyberinfrastructure (CI) worlds came together.  ESFRI, formed in 2002 at the behest of the European Council, works to strengthen the scientific integration of Europe and its international outreach.  ESFRI facilitates policy-making on research infrastructures, the faciliti

Announcement - PRACE hosts scientific workshop during ICT 2008 Image courtesy of PRACE  Scientific Computing in the Petascale Regime: a European HPC Infrastructure PRACE, the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe, is arranging a scientific computing workshop in Lyon on 26 November, to be held in parallel with ICT 2008.The themes of the scientific workshop are applications, architectures and training needs for petascale computing. Participants will receive first-hand information outlining the current status of the PRACE project, including its progress with hardware infrastructure, software applications and training.The workshop will include a networking session at ICT 2008, an evening session and dinner. This is a unique opportunity for additional information sharing and discussions.Both the networking session and the PRACE workshop are designed for European scientists who are likely to benefit from the use of a Europe-wide supercomputing infrastructure.Participation in the first PRACE scientific workshop and dinner is f

Featurette — Molecular cuisine Preparation of lecithin gnocchi in test tubes.To reflect the science bent of the Inauguration, executive chef Ettore Bocchia has been working on what he calls his “molecular cuisine” since May. Bocchia says that he tries to “bridge the vocabulary of the kitchen and the vocabulary of science” by using new cooking techniques and novel ingredients that are based upon information he learned by collaborating with scientists at the Physics Department at the University of Parma, and the Chemistry Department of the University of Ferrara, Italy.ISGTW caught up with him in a temporary kitchen set up in Building SM18 on the day before the event, while trucks were unloading produce and the stage was being constructed.  Below are a few comments, and some photos. (All images courtesy of Mike Struik.) Fois gras with chestnuts. By the numbers It took over two dozen cooks, working all day, to produce from scratch the 30 different courses needed to feed the 1500 peopl

Feature - Celebrating the development of the LHC grid Wolfgang von Rüden unveils the cermonial globe sculpture, before an audience in CERN's globe-shaped building. Image courtesy of GridFest Last Friday, 3 October, grid-enthusiasts gathered—physically and virtually—from around the world for a special event: to celebrate the success of the Worldwide Large Hadron Collider Computing Grid. “After the very successful start of the Large Hadron Collider on 10 September, it is now the turn of the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid to celebrate the transition from a development and deployment phase into operation,” said Wolfgang von Rüden, head of CERN’s Information Technology department, in his welcome address to the 250 grid enthusiasts gathered in CERN’s ‘globe’ building. “I am very happy to tell you that we are ready to handle the unprecedented flood of data that will be generated by the LHC.”In his address “CERN and LHC: their place in global science” CERN&

Feature - Stateside celebration at the bi-continental LHC Grid Fest Upper left, Pier Oddone, director of Fermilab, opens the festivities. Upper right, from l-to-r, Miron Livny, Don Petravick of Fermilab and DOE’s OHEP, Susan Turnbull (half hidden), and Patricia McBride. Bottom, Steve Cotter at the podium, and broadcast images from CERN and other sites. Image courtesy of Reidar Hahn, Fermilab. Three weeks after the US-LHC community celebrated in the wee hours as the first beam circulated in the Large Hadron Collider across the Atlantic, staff and supporters gathered again in Fermilab’s signature high rise.  Via satellite, they co-celebrated the official start-up of the world-wide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG) with their colleagues around the U.S. and abroad.As the U.S. Tier-1 site for the CMS experiment, Fermilab has contributed significantly to the grid development for the experiment, and is an important Open Science Grid site, both in terms of resources and expertise. The same is true of Brookhaven National Lab wi

Announcement - OnTheMove federated conference, Mexico, 9-14 Nov Image courtesy of starlab.vub.ac.be  Dates: 9-14 November 2008Location: Monterrey, MexicoWeb page Registration OnTheMove (OTM) returns to the North American continent co-locating five related and complementary conferences: DOA: infrastructure, ODBASE: meaning of data, CoopIS: application in organizations, GADA: grid computing, high-performance and distributed applications, IS: information security. All five conferences share the scientific study of the distributed, conceptual and ubiquitous aspects of modern computing systems, and share the resulting application-pull created by the Web. For DOA'08, the primary emphasis will be on the distributed objects underlying the required archtitectures; ODBASE'08 concentrates on the knowledge bases and methods required for enabling semantical use; CoopIS'08 will report on the state of the art on interaction of such technology and methods within an enterprise or networked organization; and for GADA'08, the fo

Announcement - AAF Shibboleth Rollout Workshop, Oct-Nov 2008 Image courtesy of MAMS.  You are invited to free 2-day AAF Shibboleth Workshops in October/November. The workshops will provide technical information and guidance for participants to join the Shibboleth-based MAMS Testbed Federation and preparation for transition to the Australian Access Federation (AAF). The workshop will highlight tools and processes to help participants prepare for deploying Shibboleth for the AAF.When: during October and November 2008Where: various locations throughout Australia (see below)Web site: http://federation.org.au/rollout RSVP  1 week before workshop to Bruc Liong ([email protected] )Locations and Dates:October 13 - 14, Sydney, Macquarie UniversityOctober 16 - 17, Canberra, Australian National UniversityOctober 20 - 21, Queensland, University of QueenslandOctober 27 - 28, Perth, Curtin UniversityNovember 3 - 4, Adelaide, University of South AustraliaNovember 13 - 14, Melbourne, Monash UniversityThe first day of the workshop w

Announcement - NOBUGS 2008, Sydney, Australia, 3-5 November Image courtesy of nbi.ansto.gov.au  New Opportunities for Better User Group Software (NOBUGS) 2008 The next New Opportunities for Better User Group Software meeting will be held in Sydney November 3-5. The aim of the NOBUGS series of conferences is to foster collaboration for developers of computer techniques in scientific instrumentation, especially as employed at large scale user facilities. The conference seeks to improve the user's scientific productivity by focusing on the interaction between the experimenter and the facilities' infrastructures, apparatus, and data.The 7th NOBUGS Conference will feature four themes:Collaborative software development chair: Brent Fultz, CalTechData management chair: Robert McGreevy, ISISData acquisition chair: Mark Knnecke, PSIGrid portals for users chair: Steve Miller, SNSDates (early bird registration, abstract submission and application for student funding are past):Mid-Sept. Selection for presentation29 September Acco

Image of the week - EGEE 2008 this week in Istanbul iSGTW in Istanbul. Click image for a PDF file of the poster to download.Image courtesy of Andre-Pierre OlivierIt's tough to enjoy the ambiance of an Istanbul sunset via the Internet, but thanks to GridTalk’s GridCast you're not too far removed from what's happening at EGEE 08... Take some virtual tours:Neu Grid  Grid CSICEtics 2BalticGrid IIEELA 2Belief IITR-GridHealth-e-Child Read Catherine Gater’s reports on the opening plenaries and thinking about grids in Asia.    Gillian Sinclair of the U.K.’s NGS will be “podded”, as she calls it, on Wednesday. “Yes, I'm being filmed for a podcast and I’m slightly nervous as this is my first one! Must remember not to use any odd Scottish words... ”