Science Grid This Week

March 15, 2006

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Calendar/Meetings

March

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

28-30, Main Street Supercomputing: The Convergence of HPC and Grid Computing, Newport, Rhode Island

Full Calendar

Image of the Week

Muon traversing the ANTARES detector. (Click on image for larger version.)
© Aart Heijboer/ANTARES

The ANTARES Collaboration is opening a new window on the universe with a large-area water Cerenkov detector in the deep Mediterranean Sea. Scientists will use the detector to observe and measure muons from high-energy astrophysical neutrinos. The ANTARES collaboration uses the INFNGrid and EGEE to simulate atmospheric muons interacting with the detector, one of the main background sources in neutrino telescopes. This animation shows a muon with energy 1.2 TeV interacting with the full ANTARES detector.

Statistic of the Week

239,820
The new Internet2 Land Speed Record in the IPv4 category is 239,820 terabit-meters per second. A team from the University of Tokyo, WIDE Project, Microsoft, Pacific Northwest Gigapop, JGN2 and other institutions collaborated to transfer data at a rate of 7.99 Gbps over a network path more than 30,000 kilometers long, in the process crossing eight international networks.
Source: Internet2 Press Release

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RSS Headlines

Feature Story

Students Connecting Science
and Cyberinfrastructure

What's the best way to expand the scientific reach of grid computing and cyberinfrastructure beyond big international projects? At Florida International University, leaders of the CyberBridges project are betting on cyberinfrastructure-trained students as a way to integrate advanced technology into university research.

The goal of the CyberBridges program, now in its pilot year, is to bridge the divide between the cyberinfrastructure community and different scientific disciplines by giving students the opportunity to explore applications of these new technologies within their domains. The program would eventually create a new generation of scientists and engineers who approach scientific problems in a new way.

"We hope that the graduate students will act as a conduit to bring cyberinfrastructure into the different science and engineering areas on campus," said FIU's Heidi Alvarez, one of the program's organizers. "Feedback from the students and their faculty advisors has already been very enthusiastic, and we hope that our first set of students will continue their research after the year is over."

Full article

Announcement

Abstracts Due March 24 for Geoinformatics 2006

Discovery, integration, management and visualization of geoscience data, with the goal of improving our understanding of the processes that have shaped the earth and our environment over time, will be highlighted at the Geoinformatics 2006 conference. The meeting will take place May 11-12, 2006, at the USGS Headquarters in Reston, Virginia.

Geoinformatics 2006 will provide a national forum for researchers and educators from geoscience and information technology/computer science to present new data, data analysis or modeling techniques, visualization schemes, or technologies related to developing cyberinfrastructure for the geosciences. Abstracts are invited on a broad range of topics, including advanced computation and visualization technologies, application of knowledge engineering for discovery and integration of complex data and innovative educational methods.

The registration deadline for postdocs and graduate students is April 3 to be considered for student travel support. The final registration deadline for all others is May 1. There will be no on-site registration for this meeting, and space is limited to 250 attendees, so interested participants are encouraged to register promptly.

Visit the meeting Web site for more information.

Profile

Bringing Nanotechnology to
the Grid

Steve Clark

Steve Clark helps thousands of students, faculty and researchers explore nanotechnology. From intuitive, interactive simulations for undergraduates to complex, computation-
intensive simulations for advanced researchers, Clark gets simulation applications running on the nanoHUB gateway and works to interface them with grid computing resources.

Clark is a member of the Scientific Gateways team at Purdue University's Rosen Center for Advanced Computing. He joined the team just over a year ago, returning to his alma mater after a 20-year career at a small software company.

"The job posting talked about making applications available to people for research and learning, and I thought that would be interesting," said Clark. "It was also a chance to return to Purdue, where I received my degrees. It's been pretty amazing—when I joined there were six people in the group, and now it's up to 27, and that doesn't include everyone working on the nanoHUB."

Clark's new position was a bit of a culture shock. After two decades of working with a handful of people in a small company, he was thrust into a growing nanoHUB group and the international world of grid computing.

Full article

Grids in the News

iGrid 2005 Receives CENIC Networking Innovation Award
Calit2 Press Release, March 14, 2006

A demonstration of more than four dozen scientific applications running on very-high-bandwidth optical networks—many of them linking different countries on different continents—has won the CENIC 2006 Innovations in Networking Award for Experimental/Developmental Applications.