Technologists from Indiana University Information Technology
Services will inform some of the nation's top research scientists
about advanced cyberinfrastructure at the annual meeting of the
American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) being
held next month in Boston. IU is sponsoring a tutorial and workshop
titled "The TeraGrid: An essential tool for 21st century science,"
on Sunday, February 17, from 10:30-noon.
"The AAAS meeting is among the largest gatherings of the best
scientific minds in the world," said Craig Stewart, Associate Dean
for Research Technologies and chief operating officer for Pervasive
Technology Labs at Indiana Unversity. "This workshop provides a
tremendous opportunity to inform scientific researchers across a
wide spectrum of disciplines about the TeraGrid, and to show how it
can help accelerate innovation and enable new discoveries."
Workshop attendees will learn how the TeraGrid can support virtual
organizations - distributed teams and communities of scientists
that share common interests or needs for data and computing
resources. Noted Stewart, "The NSF is promoting the concept of
virtual organizations as a way of responding rapidly to today's
scientific, medical, and security challenges. The TeraGrid's
combination of computing power, storage capability, and science
gateways offers an unparalleled mechanism for enabling virtual
organizations to solve some of the most challenging problems
facing scientists today.
This workshop will also show how the TeraGrid is becoming more
accessible to all scientists - even those without computer science
expertise - through Science Gateways, tools that make it easier to
access and use supercomputers. Any scientist whose research is
slowed or inhibited by limitations on computer power or storage
capabilities will find this workshop and tutorial valuable.
For further information:
http://www.researchtechnologies.uits.iu.edu
Indiana University Cyberinfrastructure News
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A newly established Indiana University institute is set to digitally
redefine scholarship and creative activity in literature, music,
dance, and many other arts and humanities fields.
The Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities (IDAH) will enable and
expand digitally-based arts and humanities projects by bringing
together scholars, artists, librarians and IT experts. The Institute
draws on established strengths at the IU Bloomington campus in
combining arts and humanities disciplines and information technology
such as the Variations digital music library, the EVIA digital video
archive of ethnographic music and dance, 3-D virtual reality work by
IU artists and the IU Digital Library Program.
For more information, see the the press release
http://newsinfo.iu.edu/news/page/normal/7387.html
or visit the IDAH home page
http://www.indiana.edu/~idah/ -
There were more than 19,000 accesses to the TeraGrid Knowledge Base
during the month of December, which now has 291 entries. Here's one
of the newest: "On Big Red or Quarry, why is my job sitting in the
queue, and when will it run?" The answer involves the commands
showq, checkjob, and showstart; it can be found at
http://www.teragrid.org/cgi-bin/kb.cgi?docid=awgw
or by searching the Knowledge Base for 'job queue' (for example). -
Star-P, from Interactive Supercomputing, Inc., is now available for
user access on the Quarry cluster. Star-P is a client-server
parallel computing platform thatÕs been designed to work with Very
High Level Language client applications such as Matlab or Python.
Star-P makes parallel application development much more accessible
than traditional programming models.
Vectorized Matlab code adapts well to Star-P's structures. Star-P
supports parallelism by overloading core Matlab functions, so
Matlab users should have little trouble incorporating Star-P. While
not every Matlab Toolbox has explicit support for parallelism,
seventeen commonly-used toolboxes do, including the neural network
and signal processing toolboxes. A web-based tutorial on using
Star-P with Matlab is available at
http://www.interactivesupercomputing.com/
doc/2.5.1/pdf/ISC_MATLAB_Programming_Guide_R251.pdf
Star-P's support for Python is also stable. We are interested in
contacting active Python users for testing purposes. At present R
support is in the development stage.
If you are interested in trying Star-P, the SoftEnv keyword for is
+Starp. Once this key is added to your .soft file, you can start
Star-P using a command such as
starp -j'-l nodes=1:ppn=2' -p 2
If you need additional information on Star-P, please don't hesitate
to contact the Stat/Math Center (statmath@indiana.edu). -
Lunch with a system administrator - mid-February, details in the
Message of the Day. Come and have lunch with an IU cluster admin.
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On February 4 and 5, the IBM Future Technology Solutions Center team
will be conducting a workshop on Cell/Broadband Engine programming
at IUPUI. Another workshop will be scheduled later this spring.
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Wednesday, February 27, 2008, 12:00-1:15pm - Wells Library E174
Digital Library Brown Bag:
The Digital Library Federation Aquifer Initiative
Jon Dunn and Jenn Riley
This talk is co-sponsored by the Continuing Education Committee of
the Bloomington Library Faculty Council. More information:
http://www.dlib.indiana.edu/education/brownbags/
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Thursday, February 28, 12:30-1:30pm - IMU Walnut Room & ICTC 497
RT Round Table: Grid Tools
The power of today's computing technology is in its diverse
and distributed nature. Tying together this vast cyberinfrastructure
are tools such as Globus, GridFTP, and GSI-SSH.
Research Technologies will offer a brief introduction into these
grid tools, with a goal of stimulating discussion on how they
can be used to increase research productivity. -
The maintenance window for all systems is the first Tuesday of each
month, 7am-7pm EDT. MDSS will be intermittently unavailable on
February 5 between 9AM and 1PM.
Outage reports are available online at:
* http://racinfo.indiana.edu/hps/research/bigred/outages.shtml
* http://racinfo.indiana.edu/hps/research/libra/outages.shtml
* http://racinfo.indiana.edu/hps/research/quarry/outages.shtml -
If you have questions pertaining to IU's cyberinfrastructure, or you
are encountering some difficulty, there are several ways to obtain
help.
An introduction and overview titled "Indiana University's
CyberInfrastructure: The least you need to know" has been updated
and is available at http://rtinfo.uits.indiana.edu/documentation/ .
The IU Knowledge Base (http://kb.iu.edu) is an excellent source of
help on how to do things.
If you have problems which the KB does not enable you to solve,
questions about system outages, or if you just have a problem and
you don't know who to contact, send email to
researchtechnologies@iu.edu.
