Content about Project Profile

  Feature - To bee or not to bee? Bee society and the human condition The honey bee’s “waggle dance” is the only symbolic language found beyond the primates. New genomic data yielded by grid-powered research could help reveal the basis for this and other social interactions.Stock image from sxc.hu The humble honey bee: pollinator, producer of honey, and potential key to unlocking the secrets of human social interaction. Why is it some bees can be queen? How can a nurse bee suddenly transform into a forager, just when foragers are needed most? And how can these furry flying insects cast light on our own human behaviors? The answers lie in the interactions of genes in the honey bee genome. And Saurabh Sinha needs grid computing to seek these answers out. “The honey bee can be a model to understand complex societies,” explains Sinha, a professor of computer science and affiliate of the University of Illinois’s Institute for Genomic Biology. “By studying the social regulation of gene ex

  Feature - Kiwis just love being the BeST Maori language is just one of more than a thousand languages making up the Austronesian language family, currently being documented with the help of BeSTGRID.Stock image from sxc.hc Anyone who has ever been on the wrong end of an All Black rugby scrum can tell you: Kiwis don’t like to play second best. A nation of innovators, New Zealand has a proud history of scientific excellence, perhaps beginning way back in 1908 when Kiwi physicist Ernest Lord Rutherford won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry. Over the last ten years, the amount of research and development carried out in New Zealand has nearly doubled; the number of scientific positions has increased by 60%. New Zealand is ramping up its already productive R&D sector. Paul Bonnington, director of New Zealand’s BeSTGRID and of eResearch at the University of Auckland, says now is also the time for New Zealand to tackle e-science.“A great deal of scientific research is now computational,” he says, “invo

  Feature - Taiwan’s Tier-1 Connects Asian-PacificThe Academia Sinica Grid Computing team in front of the Institute of Physics, Academia Sinica, Taiwan.Image courtesy of ASGCTaiwan may be small, but its contribution to the global grid effort is increasingly large. This is the message of Simon Lin, Project Director of Academia Sinica Grid Computing, the dedicated grid computing center of Taiwan’s most influential academic research institution.Taiwan’s ASGC already plays a pivotal role: since December 2005 it has functioned as a Tier-1 Center for the Worldwide Large Hadron Collider Computing Grid, or WLCG, making it one of only eleven such centers around the globe. Tier-1 centers like the ASGC are responsible not only for maintaining their own operations, but also those of the many Tier-2 centers that depend on their services. In the case of the ASGC, these Tier-2s are becoming increasingly far-flung.“We coordinate around 20 sites across the Asia-Pacific, and we’re keen to bring the entire Asia-

Feature - Experiment Dashboard for the LHCA snapshot of the ATLAS distributed data management monitoring from Experiment Dashboard. Click for full image.Image courtest of Experiment Dashboard“This project started from some users saying that the grid does not work,” says Julia Andreeva, who works in CERN’s IT department.Andreeva coordinates a project that aims to show, from the user perspective, exactly what is working in a grid and what is not. The prototype for this project—Experiment Dashboard—began running in October 2005, monitoring jobs for the Compact Muon Solenoid physics experiment at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. The Experiment Dashboard now provides monitoring service for all four main LHC experiments. With it, researchers can access information about job processing, data management, test transfers and site efficiency. At the beginning of this year the project reached significant milestones: putting a data management monitoring system for the ATLAS experiment into product

Feature - GridPP: the UK grid for particle physics Simulated event of the collision of two protons in the ATLAS particle physics experiment.Image copyright CERNParticle physicists in the United Kingdom have built the country’s largest grid as part of the GridPP project. Developed to analyze data from the upcoming Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the grid currently spans 17 UK sites and includes almost 10,000 CPUs and more than 500 terabytes of data storage, with available storage reserves on disk and tape of 1.5 petabytes. It is also an integral part of the Enabling Grids for E-sciencE project, contributing most of the computing power for the UK and Ireland regions.GridPP is a collaboration of all the UK universities with particle physics departments. It also includes Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, in Oxfordshire, which acts as the UK Tier-1 center for LHC computing. Steve Lloyd, GridPP’s chairman from Queen Mary, University of London, explains the structure: “Apart from the Tier-1, the GridPP sites are joined into

Feature - NYS Grid: Spreading the WordImages of a cholestosome model, generated with NYS Grid resources.Image courtesy of Mary McCourt, Niagara UniversityLast summer a collection of universities and labs in New York State gathered with the goal of creating a cyberinfrastructure initiative to make it easy for regional scientists to manage data and use imaging software. This seven-month-old cyberinfrastructure, with New York State Grid as its foundation, may be in its infancy but it is growing, with lofty goals. “We are trying hard to get users in New York state to take the plunge and use the Grid,” says Russ Miller, professor at SUNY-Buffalo and executive director of the cyberinfrastructure initiative. NYS Grid uses the Open Science Grid software stack; Miller and his team are developing middleware to run on top of OSG software to support applications in biomedical computing, molecular structure studies and structural biology. Mary McCourt, Niagara University’s chemistry department chairperson, uses NYS Grid in her

Feature: LEADing Weather Research This spring LEAD will launch fine-scale forecasts automatically in response to tornado-watch conditions. This experiment, the first of its kind, will cover the southern Great Plains during tornado season.  Severe storms in the United States take the lives of hundreds of people and cause more than 13 billion dollars in damage every year. Researchers who seek to improve storm forecasting, and to lessen some of the social cost inflicted annually, are hampered by the complexity of their task. The atmospheric models and data collection tools used today run essentially independent of weather conditions, they do not respond to rapid changes as they occur.“Could we do a better job forecasting and understanding the weather if we adapted to the weather as it evolves?” asks Kelvin Droegemeier, the project director of Linked Environments for Atmospheric Discovery, which explores that very question. Currently, weather models run in a static mode—independent of changes in temperature, wind

Feature: Caltech and TeraGrid See the Big Picture    The Samuel Oschin telescope at the Palomar Observatory in California.Courtesy of Palomar Observatory. The Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles recently unveiled a spectacular new display during its grand re-opening. The “Big Picture,” an image of the Virgo Galaxy Cluster 150 feet wide and 18 feet high, recorded for posterity on porcelain-enameled steel tiles, was created using data from the Palomar-QUEST sky surveys that were processed using TeraGrid resources.“The observatory came up with this idea five or six years ago, that a single image of the sky would cover the main wall of their new exhibit hall,” says Caltech astronomer George Djorgovski. “Palomar-QUEST surveys 1.25% of the entire sky each night, and covers the same areas multiple times. By the end of the survey we’ll cover 15,000 square degrees, or 40% of the entire sky.” Even the Big Picture, huge by

Feature: Bringing Arts and Humanities into the Grid Image from a virtual gallery created with the CITRIS Collaborative Gallery Builder, a project associated with HASTAC. Image courtesy CITRIS and the University of California Since 2003, the HASTAC consortium has worked toward the novel objective of developing software and hardware solutions for the worlds of the arts and humanities. HASTAC — which stands for Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Advanced Collaboratory — also advocates the inclusion of thought on the social, ethical and access issues of technology in parallel with its creation. “The idea was for humanities professors to look at ways to incorporate technologies like grid computing into their research,” says HASTAC Project Leader Jonathan Tarr. “They needed to save humanities from becoming a group of scholars who only work on physical text and weren’t going a

Feature: The Earth System Grid: Climate Data for the Global Community Results from the Parallel Climate Model depicting wind vectors, surface pressure, sea surface temperature and sea ice concentration, prepared from data published in the Earth System Grid.Image courtesy of Gary Strand, NCAR For the past two years, the Earth System Grid has helped scientists around the world study, analyze and predict all facets of the Earth’s climate. This U.S. data grid provides almost 160 terabytes of climate-related simulation data to scientists worldwide through two portals. Through the first portal, more than 3,000 scientists can find and download 130 terabytes of data hosted at four U.S. supercomputing centers: The National Center for Atmospheric Research; and Oak Ridge, Lawrence Berkeley, and Los Alamos National Laboratories. The data represents six years of U.S. earth system and climate modeling simulations. “This is Comm