Science Grid This Week

July 27, 2005

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Calendar/Meetings

July 2005

24-27, 14th IEEE Int'l Symposium on High Performance Distributed Computing, Research Triangle Park, North Carolina

25-29, 11th Annual San Diego Supercomputing Center Summer Institute, University of California, San Diego, California

26-28, 2005 Commodity Cluster Symposium, Greenbelt, Maryland

August 2005

1-2, First DIALOGUE Workshop: Applications-Driven Issues in Data Grids, Columbus, Ohio

Full Calendar

Image of the Week

Three-dimensional brain image obtained from an MRI scan. (Click on image for larger version.)
© 2004 Morphometry BIRN

The Biomedical Informatics Research Network is a National Institutes of Health initiative that fosters distributed collaborations in biomedical science using information technology innovations.

Learn more...

Statistic of the Week

1 million
Estimated number of people killed every year by malaria. The Drug Discovery application running on the Enabling Grids for E-Science production service aims to find potential new drugs to combat this disease. Read more about the Drug Discovery application here, or learn about malaria here.
Source: EGEE Press Release

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Feature Story

Second Successful Summer Grid Workshop

Students hard at work at the 2005 Summer Grid Workshop.

Undergraduate and graduate students from 23 universities and four countries attended the 2005 Summer Grid Workshop to learn the basics of grid computing and its applications to scientific research.

"This year's workshop went very well," said organizer Soma Mukerjee from the University of Texas at Brownsville. "The goal is to disseminate distributed computing knowledge to students from diverse backgrounds and to develop interdisciplinary collaborations in the future. Feedback from the students and interest from the local and national community indicates that we are working well toward that goal."

The workshop was held July 11–15 at the UTB facility on South Padre Island, Texas. Participants spent ten hours per day listening to lectures and completing hands-on activities. The students, who hail from the U.S., India, Russia and Argentina, represented fields from computer science and engineering to physics and atmospheric science. To encourage collaboration, the 42 students were divided into teams of two, with each team containing one computer science student. Eight lecturers and six teaching assistants were on hand to help students and monitor progress.

In 2004, the workshop received attention from local media, which resulted in more applicants and attendees this year from students in the local Brownsville community. The 2005 workshop received an increased number of applications and increased attention nationwide from grid computing organizations and computing centers.

Sao Paulo Joins STAR GRID

The nuclear physics group at the Instituto de Fisica da Universidade de Sao Paulo.
Image Courtesy Alexandre Suaide

Students, postdocs and faculty at the Instituto de Fisica da Universidade de Sao Paulo will soon use the grid to study the quark-gluon plasma—a state of matter formed fractions of a second after the Big Bang. The plasma is re-created in nuclear collisions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, a particle accelerator located almost 5000 miles away at Brookhaven National Laboratory.

The Sao Paulo physicists are part of an international collaboration of more than 600 physicists and skilled specialists using the Solenoidal Tracker at RHIC detector. The Sao Paulo group already leads two STAR detector subsystems and is active in a broad range of physics areas, and they now join BNL and the Parallel Distributed Systems Facility at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in the experiment's distributed computing infrastructure, the STAR GRID.

"The grid is the best way to share resources," said Professor Alexandre Suaide from Universidade de Sao Paulo. "Right now almost the whole collaboration connects to the BNL computer farm to do data analysis, so it is often very heavily loaded. Very soon we will upgrade our own computer farm with more processors and a large storage capacity, and we intend to be fully integrated in the grid, running simulations, reconstruction and analysis for the entire collaboration."