Home
Share |

Content about grid computing

January 6, 2010
Feature - Lining up new grid users with gqsub

Feature - Lining up new grid users with gqsub

Stuart Purdie, of the University of Glasgow, receives an award for his work on gqsub, from Bob Jones of EGEE. Image courtesy EGEE09

Grid computing is often seen as the domain of big science, involving giant experiments and massive number crunching. What if you’re not working on these huge scales? What if your work is too big for a local cluster but “too small for the grid?”
Welcome to ‘mesoscale’ computing, that middle ground between the applications that use 10 minutes on your desktop and 100 hours on the grid.
Researchers who fall into this area are usually well looked after by local resources. However, for various reasons — maybe a high demand from other users, or just investigating something unusual — a user may want to move on to the grid. This move can be tricky when the user is faced with another interface they have to learn or a completely different way of getting their work done.

December 9, 2009
Case study: The GeoChronos web portal

Case study: The GeoChronos web portal

Surface reflectance and ocean temperature, an example of Earth observation science. Image courtesy of Jacques Descloitres, MODIS Land Rapid Response Team, NASA/GSFC.

When GeoChronos launches, it will serve up a buffet of scientific and social networking ingredients that together empower Earth observation scientists to collaborate and make new discoveries.
The GeoChronos recipe didn't come out right the first time, however. The path the GeoChronos team has followed provides valuable insight into the process of creating a scientific web portal.
“The idea is that scientists can come to a portal where they process and share their data without having to worry about the overall technical details of how that’s being done,” said Cameron Kiddle, a research fellow for the Grid Research Centre at the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada.
Social networking features and collaborative tools are a must for the project, and so the first GeoC

December 9, 2009
Feature - Biology group issues "challenge" to computing

Biology group issues challenge to computing

The O6-methylguanine DNA methyltransferase protein from Vibrio parahaemolyticus. This protein methylates DNA and is associated with DNA repair. Vibrio is a bacterium in the family that causes cholera. Image courtesy eNMR.

The famous Chicago architect Louis Sullivan — arguably the founder of the modern skyscraper — once said that “Form follows function.”
And what is true of architecture is true of chemistry and structural biology as well: a molecule’s function — how it behaves, and what it causes to be produced — can be deduced by its form. Knowing a molecule’s precise, three-dimensional geometry tells researcheers how and where it will bind to some other molecule, and what effects the two combined molecules will have when they are united.
Or, as Timothy Lovell, a computational chemist at a pharmaceutical company, summed it up: “Once you have the structure down on p

December 9, 2009
Feature - Observing oceans online

Feature - Observing oceans online Overview map of the NEPTUNE Canada observatory off the west coast of Vancouver Island, British Columbia. The network, which extends across the Juan de Fuca plate, will gather live data from a rich constellation of instruments deployed in a broad spectrum of undersea environments. This system will provide free Internet access to an immense wealth of data, both live and archived throughout the life of this planned 25-year project. Image courtesy NEPTUNE Canada. Although the Earth is mostly water, scientists know relatively little about the ocean floor. But with the creation of ocean observatories such as NEPTUNE Canada, all that could change. Until recently, scientists had to use cruise ships, satellites, and temporary probes to study the world’s oceans. This allowed them to take occasional snapshots of the ocean for later study. Ocean observatories are made up of more permanent installations of instruments directly on the ocean floor, along the co

December 2, 2009
Feature - Fighting money-laundering, with the grid

Feature - Fighting money-laundering, with the grid

Image courtesystock.exchng

When it comes to money laundering, crime really does pay. An estimated 1 trillion US dollars is laundered annually worldwide by criminals moving dirty money around in an attempt to cover up the origins of their cash.
The AMONG (Anti money laundering in Grid) Business Experiment from BEinGRID is set to stop such crooks in their tracks.
AMONG is helping banks to cooperate in order to improve their Anti-Money Laundering (AML) mechanisms. Currently, banks track suspicious behavior with AML systems set up within their own individual institution, with communication between banks initiated only in the case of an anomaly. But this approach can only detect simple cases of fraud.
“Money laundering cannot be dealt with when you look only within one organization,” says Kostas Tserpes from NTUA (National Technical University of Athens), a partner in the project. “By default, the person doing money l

December 2, 2009
Feature - Predicting burglary with the grid

Feature - Predicting burglary with the grid

Photo courtesy Andy Fox, stock.exchng

Superheroes like Batman are not the only ones who can make use of sophisticated technology to fight crime. Nick Malleson, a researcher at Leeds University, has designed an intricate computer model to forecast burglary rates, which relies on the UK’s National Grid Service (NGS) to provide the necessary computing power.
Predicting crime is a tricky business, because the likelihood of a burglary can depend upon numerous human and environmental factors, all of which affect one another. In an attempt to forecast general trends, Malleson’s model simplifies the complexities surrounding crime prediction by using an “agent-based” model — one in which largely autonomous individuals, or “agents,” make decisions and perform actions which are influenced by the multiple individual factors within their environment.
In his model, potential burglars make decisions a

November 25, 2009
Feature - The long view: A conversation with John Wood

Feature - The long view: A conversation with John Wood

John Wood, speaking at the EGEE 09 conference in Barcelona. Image courtesy EGEE 09

John Wood is one of the key people behind ESFRI (European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures), the organization charged with creating a “roadmap” that identifies the key infrastructure needs of researchers for the next 10- to 20- years. The roughly 44 projects that ESFRI singled out are typically pan-European; they require funding from many countries to build and operate; and require cyberinfrastructure to provide access to their data for their global user communities. The projects cover all types of subject matter, from studies of language use to greenhouse-gas monitoring, and typically require research infrastructures that can handle truly vast amounts of date. (For example, the astronomy project known as the Square Kilometer Array will transport over 5,000 times the total IP traffic of the entire AT&T US backbone.)At EGEE 09

November 11, 2009
Feature - Envirogrids: Protecting the Black Sea

Feature - Envirogrids: Protecting the Black Sea

Kız Kulesi (Leander’s Tower) in Istanbul’s harbor, whose waters feed into the Black Sea via the Bosphorus Straits. The EnviroGRIDS project will aid in protecting an area of great natural and cultural beauty. Image courtesy özhan 

The Argonauts sailed on its waters. Its eastern shores (now Georgia) marked the boundary of the known world to the Ancient Greeks. The lands along its northern shores are possibly the cradle of the Indo-European language family. The Black Sea region is rich in culture, history, natural beauty and — for the past 50 years — environmental problems.The land area containing the tributaries that feed into the Black Sea is five times the size of the sea itself (2 million square km). This “catchment basin” stretchs from near Munich in the west, the headwaters of the Danube near Moscow in the north, close to the border of Kazakhstan in the east, from the source o