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Link of the Week - Watching the clock Image courtesy of CERNHow much time is left until the official moment when the Large Hadron Collider is turned on?When will it be?If you get confused, you can now go to a clock that counts down to the LHC startup, on one of the public pages of CERN. Of course, at this point, it is measured in days. But soon enough, it will be counting the hours, and then the minutes . . .  

Link of the week - Life sciences database Image courtesy of lsdb.bii.a-star.edu.sg  Directory service systemThe Life Science Database Directory aims to be a one-stop directory service for Life Science related databases. This effort is coordinated by the Life Sciences Virtual Grid Community (chaired by Dr. Patrick Tan, NCC) under the umbrella of Singapore's National Grid, with contributions from many organizations.Find:Life sciences mirrored databases Post publication databases  Read more.  

Link of the week - People behind the projects Clockwise from top left: Andoena Balla, University of Cyprus; Aaron Pondayi Masina, Chinhoyi University of Technology; Asterios Katsifodimos; University of Cyprus; Peter Hobson, Brunel University.Images courtesy of GridCafe Grid computing isn't faceless, nameless, sterile technology. Real people make it tick.  Who are these people and what makes THEM tick? Find out on CERN's GridCafé Web page People behind the projects. You'll find dancers, runners, music lovers, doting parents, cyclists, shoppers and pilots. People who felt their drive towards computers early in life and others who at the age of five envisioned a life under the hot sun in a tractor. People who want to bring opportunities and prosperity to their part of the world. People who love computers and think the grid is cool. People looking for the quickest path to discovery. People inspired by Ian Foster, by brain drain, by the Matrix.It really takes all kinds.  And what kind are you?  GridCa

Link of the Week - Username: Bond, James Bond. Password: 007 Image courtesy of Vinicitrice, sxc.hu This week’s Link of the Week is a secret. So secret, in fact, that we’re not even sure what its real website address is.Sure, you’ve heard of Wikipedia, the site where users can upload and download information from any remote location, adding to the body of knowledge about almost any given topic. But have you heard of . . . Intellipedia?Don’t be surprised, we never heard of it before either. Briefly put, it’s a Wikipedia for the James Bond crowd. Funded by various government agencies—including the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency—the idea is that this is a clearing house of information for . . . well . . . spies. According to the on-line press and a lecture given by Intellipedia operatives at a public conference in Boston on 10 June, there are three layers of access—some of which involves distributed computing—open to those with the right kind of clearance to Confidential, Se

Image of the week - A slimmer Milky Way Our sun lies about 25,000 light years from the center of the Milky Way galaxy, roughly halfway out in the galactic disk. The new mass determination is based on the measured motions of 2,400 “blue horizontal branch” stars in the extended stellar halo that surrounds the disk. These measurements reach distances of nearly 200,000 light years from the galactic center, roughly the edge of the region illustrated above.The visible, stellar part of our Milky Way in the middle is embedded into its much more massive and more extended dark matter halo, indicated in dim red. The 'blue horizontal branch stars' that were found and measured in the SDSS-II study, are orbiting our Milky Way at large distances.From their speeds the researchers were able to estimate much better the mass of the Milky Way's dark matter halo, and found it to be much “slimmer” than thought before.Image courtesy of SDSS Collaboration, Axel Quetz, Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics, HeidelbergThe

  Link of the week – The grid: separating fact from fiction Image courtesy of DEGREE. Grid computing revolutionizes the way scientists share and analyze data by enabling researchers to share computer power and data storage over the Internet. Grid projects already help researchers search for new wheat genes, predict storms, and simulate the Sun’s interior, among other things. The 7000-odd physicists working on experiments at the Large Hadron Collider will rely entirely on grid computing, specifically on the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid, to connect them with LHC data.But recent reports on “the Grid” being developed for the Large Hadron Collider have promised much more than the technology can now—and in some cases will ever—deliver. Find out what about grid computing is fact, and what is fiction.

Link of the week - Salute to SALUTE

The Bulgarian team in charge of the SALUTE project is developing algorithms for studying quantum effects in semiconductor structures. These effects influence the design of nano-devices with improved performance.Images courtesy of SALUTE and Obscura

SALUTE—or Stochastic ALgorithms for Ultra-fast Transport in sEmiconductors—is a pilot grid application developed to solve computationally intensive problems in semiconductor physics.
Semiconductors—materials that can both conduct and insulate electricity—are invaluable to modern electronics. Their ability to conduct depends on the ability of “carriers”—electrons or phonons—to transport electrical charge.This carrier transport occurs on a quantum level: the temporal scale is so short it is measured in femtoseconds, where one femtosecond is 10-15 seconds, or one millionth of a nanosecond.
Simulations on this sort of scale rely on complicated integral eq

Link of the week - The world’s most powerful computer? Luis von Ahn explains some brilliantly simple ways of harnessing the human mind for sophisticated computing.Image courtesy of Google engEDU, larger version onlineLuis Von Ahn thinks he could build the Empire State Building in 6.8 hours, or the Panama canal in less than a day. King of the CAPTCHA, Von Ahn’s research interests include encouraging people to work for free, catching cheaters online, and exploiting the parasitic relationship he says humans have with computers. “Tasks like image recognition are trivial for humans, but continue to challenge even the most sophisticated computer programs,” Von Ahn writes. “This talk introduces a paradigm for utilizing human processing power to solve problems that computers cannot yet solve.” Where many of us would turn to new and sophisticated software, Von Ahn thinks we each come pre-packaged with the software—and, it seems, the time—to perhaps even change the world.

Link of the week - B.U.R.P This animation, intended to run in slow motion, was rendered using BURP, a project that uses BOINC software to gather spare CPU cycles in to a working professional-grade render farm.Animation by Schosch ProductionsBURP—or the Big and Ugly Rendering Project—is an alpha-phase project using BOINC-powered distributed computing to create a large, shared and publicly accessible render farm for generating 3D animations. The BURP render farm will be powered by its participants: artists who contribute their spare CPU cycles can themselves benefit from distributed access to the farm of spare cycles contributed by colleagues. The result? Professional, computer-generated rendering from your desktop, without the need to invest in expensive specialist equipment: animations that would take months to render on a single CPU can be completed in just days, and for a fraction of the price.The BURP Web site went online on 17 June 2004 and the project has since worked its way through several test phas

Link of the week - Defibrillation of the heart What happens to the heart under the influence of electric shock? Defibrillation may be well used in hospitals, but the mechanisms behind it are still not fully understood.Image courtesy of National Grid ServiceStep inside the heart as part of the Integrative Biology Project, a consortium of researchers using e-science to combat fatal diseases.Members of this project, Blanca Rodriguez and her colleagues from the Computational Biology Group at the University of Oxford, are using the National Grid Service to power simulations of the application of electric shocks to both healthy and diseased hearts.Rodriguez hopes the simulations will help improve understanding of exactly how defibrillation, a common but poorly understood medical technique, works.The research involves running many sequential simulations, including parameter sweeps of variables such as shock strength and timing.250 milliseconds of data; 28 CPU hours of workTo obtain just 250 milliseconds of animated data, Rodriguez chu

Link of the week - Statistics from the 3rd EGEE User Forum As promised, the EGEE User Forum, held in Clermont-Ferrand, France, delivered great food, great wine and smelly cheese.Image courtesy of Y. Legré, HealthGrid, 2008Last month’s 3rd EGEE User Forum, held from 11-14 February in Clermont-Ferrand, France, attracted more than 300 attendees to more than 100 presentations, 19 demos and 36 posters. Plenary sessions included presentations on the European Grid Initiative Design Study , the High Energy Physics Grid and the SHARE project.The 19 demonstrated grid applications ranged from mathematical models of living cells to bioinformatics portals, as well as tools to make using grids simpler and easier to control. The Health-e-Child project, represented by Jerome Revillard and David Manset, won the prize for the best demonstration with their Gateway and Case Reasoner, a concrete implementation and use-case of a gLite-based healthgrid for European paediatrics. “EGEE plays an active and invaluable role by supporti

Link of the week - SHARE: who, what, when, how and in what order Tony Solomonides speaks on behalf of the SHARE project at the opening plenary of this week’s EGEE User Forum in Clermont-Ferrand, France.Image courtesy of Yannick Legré, HealthGrid More than physics, more than astronomy, it is human health that captures the imagination of people across the planet. Whether it’s cancer or AIDS, aging or depression, health-related issues have an immediate and universal appeal that has powered the rise of several healthgrid-related projects. Now, a new project has arrived to bond and unite heathgrid projects from around the globe.SHARE and share alike  Called SHARE, or Structuring and supporting Healthgrids Activities and Research in Europe, the project unites collaborators working towards a common goal: better healthcare through the development of grid-powered e-science. “SHARE aims to develop a roadmap for the wide adoption and deployment of grid technology for health in Europe,” explain