Science Grid This Week

March 8, 2006

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Calendar/Meetings

March

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

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

13-15, ISSSE 06: International Symposium on Secure Software Engineering, Washington, D.C.

26-28, PRAGMA 10: Pacific Rim Applications and Grid Middleware Assembly Tenth Workshop, Townsville, Queensland, Australia

Full Calendar

Image of the Week

Indian President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam using VRVS at CHEP06. (Click on image for larger version.)
Image Courtesy Phillipe Galvez

On Feburary 17, Indian President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam visited the Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP06) conference in Mumbai, India. The President's speech to the conference highlighted grid computing in India and around the world, beginning with the MonALISA monitoring system. The President also viewed a demonstration of the VRVS/EVO collaborative system, through which he interacted with scientists in Geneva, Slovakia and California.

Statistic of the Week

126,458
Number of computer hosts running the BBC Climate Change experiment as of March 8, 2006. The BBC has teamed up with Oxford University, BOINC and Climateprediction.net to create the world's most ambitious climate modeling experiment using distributed computing.
Source: BBC Experiment User Map

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RSS Headlines

Feature Story

Simulating Supersymmetry

The ATLAS detector under construction.
Image © CERN

One of the discoveries eagerly anticipated by particle physicists working on the world's next particle collider is that of supersymmetry, a theoretical lost symmetry of nature. Supersymmetry, often called SUSY, predicts the existence of a superpartner particle for every known particle.

Why the big hunt for SUSY's "sparticles"? Recent experiments have suggested that most of the matter in our universe is not made of familiar atoms, but of some new sort of "dark matter." Discovering a hidden world of sparticles will shed light on the nature of this dark matter, connecting observations performed at earth-based accelerators with those performed by astrophysicists and cosmologists.

Physicist Sanjay Padhi, a Chancellor Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, searches for SUSY using the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider. Although the LHC and ATLAS won't start collecting experimental data until 2007, he and his colleagues are already hard at work generating the simulated data that is equally important to particle physics discoveries.

Full article

Announcement

Call for Submissions for First Annual TeraGrid Conference

The first annual TeraGrid Conference—
TeraGrid '06, Advancing Scientific Discovery—will be held June
12-15 in Indianapolis, Indiana. The conference will offer presentations, working groups, and activities for those already familiar with the project, and an in-depth orientation to the community and its technologies for prospective collaborators. All interested individuals and organizations are invited to participate.

Proposals for presentations, demonstrations, poster sessions, and birds-of-a-feather sessions are now being accepted. Abstracts must be submitted by March 29, with full paper submissions due April 19. These sessions should address the development of new grid computing capabilities and the application of TeraGrid to research and education.

Attendees will include scientists, researchers, faculty, postdocs, graduate and undergraduate students, high school teachers, representatives from federal agencies, business and industry representatives involved in grid computing products and services, and TeraGrid resource providers.

The Conference is also calling for student entries in two competitions, the TeraGrid CI-Impact Student Contest and the TeraGrid Student Research Competition, and will be looking for student volunteers.

Visit the meeting Web site for more information.

—Faith Singer-Villalobos, TACC

BBC Project Takes on Climate Change

Image Courtesy Climateprediction.net

It seems like new distributed computing projects are popping up every day, and it seems like the world is catching on to the possibilities made possible by harnessing the power of thousands of connected PCs. Case in point: Last month, the British Broadcasting Corp. teamed up with ClimatePrediction.net to launch a distributed computing project that is running, initially at least, concurrent with the channel's "Climate Chaos" season of programming.

Dubbed the "BBC Climate Change Experiment," this project, according to ClimatePrediction.net chief software architect Carl Christensen, is a little different than other similar projects. Unlike other distributed computing experiments where user computers will perform a "workunit" before moving on to another task, computers on the BBC experiment run the entire climate model—from start to finish. The experiment takes three months "on the fastest PCs out there today," he said, whereas tasks on other projects can be completed in a matter of hours.

There is a twofold reason for this difference, Christensen said. Climate models require high CPU usage and large file I/O, he said, which would demand too much bandwidth to send files around from computer to computer. Also, he added, "We felt it was more and interesting for people to follow 'their Earth' from start to finish."

Full article

This article, by GRIDtoday editor Derrick Harris, originally appeared in GRIDtoday.

Grids in the News

UNL to participate in physics experiment
The Daily Nebraskan, March 8, 2006
By Lucas Jameson

What gives matter mass? What is dark energy? ... Last fall, UNL participated in a test of the first worldwide grid computing infrastructure, said Kenneth Bloom, UNL physics and astronomy assistant professor.