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Link of the week -  Global Grid User Support comes of age GGUS provides user support 24 hours a day, seven days a week to users of the EGEE grid across the planet.Stock image from sxc.hu  Providing a system that supports users of computing grids may not sound like the most exciting of challenges, but the team at Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe in Karlsruhe in Germany think otherwise, and is proud of their service: the Global Grid User Support System, or GGUS, pronounced “jee-guss.”“Helpdesk systems that work across a single enterprise are well understood,” explains Torsten Antoni, leader of the GGUS team. “However, the scale of grid computing means that the helpdesk system must work across many enterprises and span administrative domains, which is a very different challenge.” GGUS began in 2004 as an EGEE project designed to make it easy for grid users to find someone to deal with their needs, whether requesting a digital certificate or asking why the proxy server in Outer Mongolia is no

Link of the week - ORBIT Open Access Radio Grid Testbed The Rutgers University Wireless Information Networking Laboratory hosts the ORBIT facility, including this indoor lab with 400 programmable radio transceivers laid out in a rectangular pattern. It is used to test new mobile computing and communications technologies.Image courtesy of Carl Blesch, Rutgers University A unique facility for testing new mobile computing and communications technologies, known as the ORBIT Open Access Radio Grid Testbed, has scooped the Alexander Schwarzkopf Prize for Technological Innovation, recognizing a research team at the Rutgers University Wireless Information Networking Laboratory (WINLAB).The winning facility features a 400-node programmable radio transceiver emulation laboratory and an outdoor field trial system of short- and long-range radios on the university’s New Brunswick Campus.The ORBIT facility is the world’s largest open, programmable wireless network facility for use by academic and industry researchers worldwide.

  Feature - National, regional, global, industrial: EU-IndiaGrid takes its place in the grid computing world Groups throughout India are collaborating via EU-IndiaGrid to develop a regional coupled atmosphere-ocean model system for the prediction of the Indian summer monsoon. Images courtesy EU-IndiaGrid Last month, while snow fell on much of Europe and the U.S., things stayed pretty hot in Bangalore, India, where 150 grid experts gathered as part of the EU-IndiaGrid conference, held from 13-14 December in conjunction with e-Science 2007. EU-IndiaGrid, a project supporting the e-science community between Europe and India, provides an infrastructure comprising 1200 core processors and 50 terabytes of disk space, with access to a one gigabit per second link through the Indian Department of Atomic Energy Grid Project. Biology breakthroughsDecember’s conference emphasized recent EU-IndiaGrid successes and the introduction of several new tools for biological simulations, including the use of computer-based surrogate bacteria

  Technology - XtreemOS: a Linux-based operating system to support next-generation grids At November’s SC07 conference XtreemOS was represented in the INRIA’s booth and also organized a well-attended Birds of a Feather session on grid operating systems.Image courtesy of XtreemOS While grids allow organizations to significantly increase their computational power, they can also threaten to be a significant headache. That’s where it can help to have an operating system designed to keep things simple. “Tools developed for grid use, like the Globus Toolkit, can be demanding and complex,” explains Christine Morin of INRIA Rennes Bretagne Atlantique in France, “especially because they are based on operating systems that are not designed to manage distributed and versatile resources.” Morin is the scientific coordinator of XtreemOS, a four-year research project that aims to develop a grid operating system to simplify the usage, management and programming of grids. “XtreemOS will pro

Announcement - ParaMEDIC enables worldwide supercomputer for bioinformatics Wu-chun Feng, associate professor in the departments of computer science and electrical and computer engineering at Virginia Tech (left) and Pavan Balaji, post-doctoral researcher in the mathematics and computer science division at Argonne National Laboratory.Images courtesy of Virginia TechParaMEDIC, a general software-based framework for large-scale distributed computing developed by Argonne National Laboratory and Virginia Tech, is set to have significant impact on the study of genomics.The GenBank database, a collection of all publicly available DNA sequences, doubles in size approximately every 12 months. Yet the computational capability of a compute node doubles only every 18 months. Consequently, searching for similarities between new protein or nucleotide sequences with the database of known sequences is becoming increasingly difficult. This problem becomes even more insidious when attempting a large-scale sequence-searching problem, like identifyi

Image of the week - DILIGENT crunches Flickr over EGEE The DILIGENT team used the EGEE computing grid to process 37 million images from the online Flickr database in just 16 weeks. Approximately 1,000 grid jobs were submitted per day, with each job processing around 1,000 images. Image courtesy of SAPIREver wished for a more reliable way of searching for images on the Web?  Grid-enabled digital library project DILIGENT has recently completed a data challenge on image feature extraction that has taken us one step closer to just that: next-generation image searching.Executed on the EGEE infrastructure, the recent DILIGENT challenge has created one of the world’s largest collections of multimedia metadata to be made publicly available for research purposes.37 million Flickr images in a flashThe DILIGENT team used the EGEE computing grid to process 37 million images from the online Flickr database in just 16 weeks. This computation generated approximately 112 million text and image objects—nearly 5 terabytes of

Announcement - Maine students to benefit from new scientific grid portal The University of Maine Ice Sheet Model, developed by Jim Fastook, will soon be available to researchers from around the globe via a new grid portal in the pipeline at UMaine.Image courtesy of UMaineStudents in Maine schools soon will have an opportunity to experiment first-hand with variable climate change scenarios by accessing the University of Maine’s environmental modeling programs from their own classroom laptops.The UMaine Department of Computer Science has received two U.S. National Science Foundation grants, one for $200,000 to buy a second university supercomputer, and a second, for $300,000, to develop new supercomputer software to improve the transfer of massive data files.The new supercomputer, and an access portal being developed for it, will allow Maine middle school students to access the University of Maine’s Ice Sheet Model for environmental experiments. It also will enable the university to engage in much larger outreach and res

Image of the week - Journey to the center of the Sun Simulations of the action occuring on our Sun shows downflows: plumes of cooler gas that sink away from the surface of the Sun. Image produced using VAPOR Like many 2000 yotta-ton balls of hot gas, the Sun isn’t exactly 100 percent stable. In fact, its outer third is constantly on the move, a churning jumble of convective motion, driven by huge heat production in its interior and heat loss from its outer regions. And just as hot gas rises, cool gas sinks, resulting in the formation of downflow plumes: currents of cooler gas that move towards the solar interior.  These plumes play a crucial role in the dynamics of the convective flows occurring all over the solar surface.Very high resolution computer simulations suggest that these plumes interact to form larger convective scales, and that the cool gas sinks all the way to the base of the highly stratified solar convection zone. Their coherency suggests such downflows play a key role in the transport of heat, momentum and

  Feature - Achieving interoperability between Shibboleth and gLite The Short Lived Credential Service allows users to access the grid with easy-to-use credentials.Image copyright Marcel Reich Grid security has long relied on public key infrastructure (PKI) technology, yet in recent years other security models have become widespread, most notably the concept of federated identity. Can these models achieve interoperability? Grid users are traditionally authenticated using X.509 certificates, which are issued by accredited Certification Authorities and are valid for one year. When interacting with grid services, these users typically present a short-lived proxy certificate, derived from this longer-lived X.509 certificate. In an environment based on federated identity, users identify themselves differently. This newer process comprises two clearly decoupled steps: authentication, which takes place at an Identity Provider; and authorization, which occurs at the Service Provider. Each Service Provider is free to decide whether to

  Feature - The path more travelled by: grids help track human migration Nicolas Ray uses Approximate Bayesian Computation—developed in 2002—to track the migration of humans through the centuries.Images courtesy of Rakesh Rampertab Today, families interested in an intercontinental move will probably go by plane, train or automobile. Several thousand years ago, adventurers had a harder time of it. Thanks to the plucky, pioneering efforts of early families, humans have managed to explore and settle every habitable region of the globe. Surviving the “bottlenecks” Two ancient migrations have particularly affected the shape of future generations: the “Out of Africa” event and the North to South colonization of the Americas. These migrations left traces in our genes still observable today. Described as “bottlenecks”—events where only a few individuals get through—the migrations may have caused a drastic reduction in population size and a corresponding drop

  Feature - PRIUS: a global university for a borderless future Susumu Date coordinates the PRIUS project, which aims to create strong leaders for next-generation distributed IT.Image courtesy of iSGTW Grid computing is as much about people as it is about computers, and international success requires leaders who can work globally and cooperatively in their field.This is the philosophy behind the PRIUS project, an initiative led by Osaka University, Japan, with the aim of promoting internationalization in grid education.PRIUS, or the Pacific Rim International UniverSity, relies on hands-on practical collaboration with research institutions and universities from Pacific Rim countries, mainly through the Pacific Rim Application and Grid Middleware Assembly, better known as PRAGMA. “PRIUS aims to develop competent leaders in integrated science,” says Associate Professor Susumu Date, who is heavily involved in the project. “We are developing an educational framework that will allow our students to learn advanced

  Editorial - Snapshot of the future from the floor of SC07 Congratulations to the dedicated teams who have gathered at SC07 from universities and institutions across the globe to present their grid technologies to the rest of the cutting edge IT world.Images courtesy of iSGTW and John UrishThree hundred and fourteen exhibitors, more than 9000 attendees, over a billion dollars in equipment, and a collection of the world’s fastest, newest, most innovative and futuristic information technologies: welcome to Supercomputing 2007.Buzzing with discussions, demonstrations and the blaze of super-sized LCD screens, the exhibition floor is home to everyone who’s anyone in high performance computing. To one side of this massive mini-city is a fleet of undergraduate student teams, working around the clock in a race to build a cluster powerful enough to earn top billing in the inaugural SC07 Cluster Challenge.Opposite these caffeine-fueled innovators are the Disruptive Technologies, a collection of futuristic technologies bille