Science Grid This Week

March 1, 2006

About SGTW | Subscribe | Archive | Contact SGTW

Calendar/Meetings

March

1-3, First EGEE User Forum, CERN, Geneva, Switzerland

7-8, Second CLEANER All-Hands Meeting, Arlington, Virginia

8-10, GridChem Workshop: Distributed Computational Chemistry (on the Grid), Austin, Texas

Full Calendar

Image of the Week

Installing AMANDA optical modules. (Click on image for larger version.)
Image Courtesy DESY Zeuthen

The neutrino telescope AMANDA, the Antarctic Muon and Neutrino Detector Array, extends downward more than a mile into the clear, low-noise ice at the South Pole. Scientists use the high-energy neutrinos AMANDA detects to help unravel longstanding mysteries about the origin of the highest energy cosmic rays. To detect the faint signatures of these high-energy neutrinos, researchers analyze a flood of data with the help of thousands of hours on TeraGrid resources.

Link of the Week

GARUDA
GARUDA, India's national grid computing initiative, is a collaboration of science researchers and experimenters from 45 research laboratories and academic institutions. The collaboration is building a nationwide grid of computational nodes, mass storage and scientific instruments to provide the technological advances required to enable data- and compute-intensive science for the 21st century.

PDF Version for Printing

RSS Headlines

Feature Story

The Future of Digital Data

Francine Berman

Over the last few decades, advances in information technology have led to a fundamental change in research and education, and digital data collections are at the heart of this change. These collections are rapidly multiplying in number and increasing in size, and their management, preservation and use was the focus of the "Expanding Universe of Digital Data Collections" symposium at the 2006 American Association for the Advancement of Science Annual Meeting.

"We used to look at compute only and ask what you can do in your local environment and what you need to go outside for," said San Diego Supercomputer Center Director Francine Berman during her presentation at the symposium. "Now we need to look at data like that too. One of the things we see across many communities is the desire to put together different kinds of data to answer bigger questions."

Raymond Orbach

Enabling such multidisciplinary research across different communities and digital data collections requires a comprehensive strategy for curating data sets over the long term.

"No plan for data preservation, which is currently what we have, often means that data can be lost or damaged," added Berman. "There are many kinds of questions that one must answer about these collections. What should one preserve? How should we preserve it? What kinds of formats, what kids of storage media? Who should pay for preservation?"

These and other questions were also raised in a recent report from the National Science Board titled "Long-Lived Digital Data Collections: Enabling Research and Education in the 21st Century," around which the symposium was based. The NSB provides oversight and policy for the National Science Foundation, and the report makes a series of recommendations to NSF for developing a strategy to support digital data collections.

Until now, the report notes, NSF strategies and policies governing long-lived data collections have been developed incrementally and not considered collectively. The report's recommendations to NSF, which it advises the agency to share and implement with other national agencies, include developing comprehensive agency-wide strategies for supporting and advancing long-lived collections; requiring research proposals for activities that will generate long-lived digital data to describe their data management plan, and for those plans to be evaluated by the funding agency; and ensuring education and training in the use of digital data sets.

Full article

Announcement

NEES Annual Meeting - Abstracts Due March 13

The Fourth Annual Meeting of the Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation Consortium, Inc. (NEES) will take place June 21-23, 2006 in Washington, D.C. The meeting will bring together members of the extended NEES community to share ideas and information about activities underway in the research, education and IT segments of the network. NEES cyberinfrastructure will be on display throughout the meeting.

The theme of the meeting is "Broadening Participation Throughout NEES." Abstracts are invited from members of the NEES community on the following topics: pushing experimental boundaries; sensors and instrumentation technology; numerical simulation of NEES results and data; technical advances; and NEESR new and active projects.

A special NEESit plenary session will take place on Wednesday, where staff will demonstrate end-to-end data flow processes and remote participation in research experimentation. One of the issue forums will also focus on IT strategy. "Posters on the Hill," a special poster session and reception on Capitol Hill, will take place Wednesday night.

Visit the meeting Web site for the meeting announcement, tentative program and call for abstracts. Learn more about NEES cyberinfrastructure and NEESgrid at the NEESit Web site.

—Katie Yurkewicz

Grids in the News

Decentralised search finds results
IST Results, February 22, 2006

A prototype search and categorisation engine that couples the power of powerful natural-language processing methods with Grid computing offers hope to those sifting through the mass of unstructured data distributed across a company’s networks.