Content about Technology

Image of the week -The Tadpole Galaxy Like its terrestrial counterparts, the Tadpole Galaxy will probably lose its tail as it grows older. Image courtesy of Tom Jarrett and the SWIRE team Four hundred and twenty million light years from Earth there is a tadpole-shaped galaxy, with a tail of stars that stretches across about 280 thousand light years. This Tadpole Galaxy earned its tail after colliding with a neighboring galaxy. Data leading to the discovery of the Tadpole Galaxy came from the Spitzer Wide-area InfraRed Extragalactic survey, a project which imaged nearly 50 square degrees—the equivalent of the area of 250 full moons—across six different regions of the sky.The project used infrared radiation to detect more than two million galaxies, some of them over 11 billion light years away.To process these many thousands of optical observations en masse, the SWIRE team employed astronomical image mosiac engine Montage, a grid-based application that uses workflow and data technologies to deliver science-grade mosaics o

  Opinion - Avalanche warning: the new challenges of the data grid Available disk space at Canada’s TRIUMF Tier-1 center was rapidly consumed, with users filling one year of space in just three months. More storage was again made available in November to meet demand.Image courtesy of TRIUMF and WLCG The Large Hadron Collider at CERN will produce many Petabytes of data every year; other applications in astronomy and genomics will also generate and rely on massive amounts of data. How will we manage these data? Where will we store them? The new “data grid” brings with it certain responsibilities that must be borne by the users.Managing storage for a large user base is not a new problem, but grids greatly amplify the scale. Allocating storage resources is more complicated than managing compute clusters. Upon completion of a compute job, CPUs are simply returned to the common pool; however, their output must be stored and cannot be deleted indiscriminately. Laws, limits, allocations and restraint Eve

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

  Feature - Results from the SC07 Challenges: Analytics, Bandwidth, Cluster and Storage This year saw four Challenges showcasing high performance computing resources at NovemberÂ’s SC07 conference.Image courtesy of Douglas Mansell Every year competitors in the Supercomputing Challenges thrash it out in a match of fastest, cleverest and best. The winners of NovemberÂ’s SC07 Challenges are no different. Find out who walked away with the blue ribbons:Analytics Challenge Bandwidth Challenge Cluster Challenge Storage Challenge  Analytics Challenge First place in the SC07 Analytics Challenge went to a Globus-based application for identifying attacks on cyberinfrastructure. Called Angle, or the New Approach for Protecting Cyber-infrastructure, the application uses a data and compute cloud that allows data to be left in place and computations to be performed over the data. Cloud computing has been used in the past by companies such as Google, Yahoo, Amazon and Microsoft, however, these cloud infrastructures are by and large ba

  Opinion - Anticipating futures: engineering expectations of ubiquitous computing In a 1996 presentation Mark Weiser predicted computing would become increasingly ubiquitous, disappearing “into the fabric of everyday life.” But ubicomp still has a long way to grow before living up to the trends predicted in this graph.Image © Mark Weiser/PARC Around twenty-five years ago, in an article for Scientific American, Mark Weiser laid out a lucid vision of computing in the 21st century. Central to this vision was the concept of “ubiquitous computing”: a radical proposal for spreading computers throughout our everyday environment.Weiser’s ideas, and his work at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Centre (PARC) in California, U.S., have since spawned an academic research agenda, in turn influencing innovative commercial research and development strategies.  But where is this so-called “ubicomp”? And what does it aim to achieve? Pencils and light bulbs: beyond desktop computingWhere the &ldqu

  Feature - The GridSims: real tools for simulated parallel and distributed computing Grid developers can now test and evaluate their algorithms in a controlled, simulated grid environment. Screenshot © Electronic Arts Inc.   How can you test new grid algorithms and management tools without tying up the resources of the grid you’re trying to manage? The GridSim toolkit may well be your answer. An open-source software platform that lets users simulate grid resources and networks with a variety of configurations, GridSim allows researchers to perform repeatable experiments and studies otherwise impossible in a real, dynamic grid environment. Checking realityTo evaluate the performance of grid resource management and application scheduling algorithms, researchers need to conduct many rounds of repeatable and controlled experiments: somewhat difficult given the inherent heterogeneity and dynamic nature of grids. Additionally, grid testbeds are limited, and creating an adequately-sized testbed is expensive and time

  Feature - Europe and China working together to optimize network layer The EC-GIN team, pictured here at a July 2007 conference in Greece, are working to develop tailored network technology in dedicated support of grid applications. Image courtesy of EC-GINThe Internet communication infrastructure—the TCP/IP protocol stack—is designed for broad use and as such does not account for the specific characteristics of grid applications.This one-size-fits-all approach works for a number of application domains; however, it is far from optimal and is not as efficient as customized solutions. While grid technologies and services are slowly coming of age, the corresponding network infrastructure is still in its infancy. In an effort to change this, Europe and China are working together to improve the network’s ability to support grid applications and services. Called the Europe-China Grid InterNetworking project, or EC-GIN, the project aims at developing a tailored network technology in dedicated support of grid appl

  Announcement - One petaflop and a whole lot of PLAYSTATION Since PLAYSTATION joined Folding@home in March 2007, participation by the PS3 user community has been phenomenal, providing Folding@Home with immense computing power that is helping to fast forward its research and reach one petaflop. Image courtesy of Folding@home PLAYSTATION 3 and Stanford University’s Folding@home program recently announced their achievement of one petaflop, the first time such a milestone has been reached on a distributed computing network. A petaflop is the ability to do one quadrillion floating point operations per second (FLOPS), the equivalent of every person on the planet perform 75,000 calculations every second.“The recent inclusion of PS3 as part of the Folding@home program has afforded our research group with computing power that goes far beyond what we initially hoped,” said Vijay Pande, Associate Professor of Chemistry at Stanford University and Folding@home project lead. “Thanks to PS3, we are now essential

  Feature - LiveWN and gLiteDVD: true grid scavenging solutions An artist’s impression of LiveWN as a pre-packaged grid computing product, designed by member of the LiveWN team, John Kouvakis.Image courtesy of LiveWN What if grid nodes were as simple to run as music on a compact disk player?What if a new cluster involved zero installation and only minimal—if any—configuration?What if setting up that new cluster took only a few minutes?If all this were true, we would be able to readily exploit the idle time of publicly funded computers, such as those in libraries, universities and institutes. We could share resources among arbitrary users, Internet Service Provider members or Open Source Software projects. We could rapidly multiply computing power for urgent tasks. We could quickly and easily train novice users.So, if you think it is impossible to run gLite worker nodes within virtual machines, or over dial-up lines with low-speed and ad-hoc connections, or behind firewalls and private networks, think again.

Link of the week - Facetooth? Now you can share more than ever before with your friends.Stock image from sxc.huOfficially known as Cityware, although already earning an online reputation as Facetooth, this technology is the brainchild of scientists at Bath University in the UK, who have blended Bluetooth with Facebook to produce a physical map of where your webby pals are at any time.Cityware works by using various nodes that search the local area for Bluetooth devices, grab the IDs for these devices and then match them up with Facebook profiles. Bingo! You know who it is across the street, what they did on Friday night and their favorite flavor of icecream.Nodes have been set up in Bath, University College London and the University of California in San Diego. More nodes are planned for Sweden, Hong Kong and Sydney. If not incredibly useful, Cityware is at least very interesting. It’s part of a multidisciplinary research project into distributed systems, human-computer interactions and pervasive computing in urban spac

  Technology - GridWay: interoperability without the headache The GridWay metascheduler can schedule jobs across several grids, including Open Science Grid, EGEE and TeraGrid.Image courtesy of GridWay What looks and feels like your Local Resource Management system, but lets you submit jobs to multiple heterogeneous grids? Sounds like the beginning of a bad joke or pipe dream? You might need to upgrade your metascheduler.So says Tino Vazquez Blanco, a grid technology engineer working on the GridWay metascheduler project.“GridWay allows you to do much more than your local LRM system. You can of course use GridWay to submit, monitor, and control your jobs; the added bonus is that you can do this across several different grids.”GridWay is a scheduler for other schedulers, Blanco explains. “It simulates a familiar environment, so it’s as if you’re working on a local cluster, but in fact you’re working across grids formed by heterogeneous clusters. You don’t need to worry about where the cl