Indiana University

 

Indiana University Cyberinfrastructure News

  1. Congratulations to IU Jacobs School of Music musicologist Thomas
    Mathiesen, who in December 2007 took home his third Deems Taylor
    award from the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers
    for his work as an editor of the book Music and Ideas in the
    Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries.

    Mathiesen serves as director for the IU Center for the History of
    Music Theory and Literature (CHMTL), a joint venture of the Jacobs
    School of Music and the Office of Research and the University
    Graduate School. With support from UITS Core Services, which
    provides hardware and server administration, Mathiesen and
    associate director Peter Slemon maintain the CHMTL Web site
    www.chmtl.indiana.edu. The CHMTL site provides scholars from around
    the world with electronic access to doctoral dissertations in
    musicology and texts on music theory, aesthetics, history and
    literature, as well as historical music texts.

  2. For the past four years Indiana University researchers from the
    departments of Computer Science, Psychology, Anthropology, Anatomy
    and Cell Biology, and Medical and Molecular Genetics have been part
    of the Collaborative Initiative on Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders
    (CIFASD), funded by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and
    Alcoholism. CIFASD, which includes researchers from 21 institutions
    in eight countries, was recently renewed for five years.

    According to CIFASD Administrative Core Director Ed Riley of San
    Diego State University, "Fetal alcohol spectrum disorder is a major,
    worldwide public health issue and fetal alcohol syndrome is among
    the most common known causes of mental retardation in the western
    world. The work being done by the CIFASD is an international
    collaboration to study this problem using a multidisciplinary
    approach and should help define the spectrum of effects resulting
    from prenatal alcohol exposure. This includes providing better
    diagnostic protocols and an enhanced understanding of the changes in
    brain and behavior that occur following prenatal alcohol exposure,
    with the hopes of translating these findings into enhanced
    interventions."

    CIFASD researchers are collecting a wide variety of data, including
    results from questionnaires, physical examinations, neuropsycho-
    logical test batteries, three dimensional facial images, brain
    images, and ultrasound movies. Data are collected at sites around
    the world using a variety of methods and then uploaded to the CIFASD
    Central Repository at Indiana University. CIFASD researchers can
    then use the Central Repository to join data from different
    locations and of different modalities. Members of the Research
    Technologies' Biomedical Applications group created the Central
    Repository and a variety of related software. A member of the
    Research Technologies' Advanced Visualization Laboratory developed
    the procedure used to capture three dimensional facial images.

    The Central Repository for the CIFASD is hosted by the Indiana
    University Research Database Cluster, and makes use of the Indiana
    University Massive Data Storage System. The IU Research Database
    Cluster provides both an Oracle relational database management
    system and a Web application hosting environment used by the Central
    Repository. The Massive Data Storage System holds backups of the
    data in the Central Repository, providing highly resilient disaster
    recovery due to its geographically distributed nature.

    For more information on IU's Biomedical Applications group, visit

    http://biomedapp.iu.edu

  3. Students from the Indiana Academy for Science, Mathematics, and
    Humanities may be a few years away from owning their own homes, but
    six juniors and seniors, with support from Indiana University's
    Advanced Visualization Lab (AVL), are able to step into a virtual
    kitchen of their own design.
    The experience is part of an ongoing AVL project with an advanced
    computer class offered at the Muncie residential high school for
    gifted and talented students. Students from the program receive
    instruction from their computer science teacher, Susie Sechrest,
    and expert advice from IU's AVL staff, in creating a virtual
    environment of their own imagination. Using programming knowledge in languages such as
    Java and C++, the
    students work in teams to create a variety of virtual environments,
    such as a mad scientist lab, an apartment, and a village. The
    students develop their projects in Virtual Reality Modeling Language
    (VRML) on a standard personal computer, and then interact with their
    creations in immersive 3D in the AVLÕs state-of the-art virtual
    reality theater.Sechrest said her students have greatly benefited from their
    experience. "I could never relay the amount of information that can
    be absorbed through the use of the 3D glasses, the theater, and the
    big computer screen," she said. "This experience will stay with the
    students for a lifetime."

    For more information on the Indiana Academy for Science,
    Mathematics, and Humanities, visit

    http://www.bsu.edu/academy/For more information on IU's Advanced Visualization Lab,
    visit:


    http://www.avl.iu.edu/

  4. Staff from the UITS Research Technologies division have been working
    with a graduate level SPEA class this semester. The students are
    doing research on "green computing" and are studying efficiency and
    energy use in the IU data center. In an effort to learn more about
    high performance computing at IU and the people that use those
    resources, the students have put together a short survey which takes
    less than 5 minutes to complete. To request a copy please email
    hps-admin@iu.edu.

  5. June 9-13, 2008 - Las Vegas, NV, USA

    The Call for Participation for TeraGrid '08 has been extended, and
    all interested individuals and organizations are invited to
    participate. New deadlines are:

    Paper abstracts (500 words maximum) - March 18, 2008
    Full papers (7-10 pages) - April 1, 2008

    Proposals for papers on original, innovative work will be received
    and reviewed in three tracks: Science, Technology, and Education.
    All papers will be peer-reviewed. The Call for Participation is
    available at:

    http://www.tacc.utexas.edu/tg08/

  6. Tuesday, March 18, 12:00-1:00pm - MY 209
    CGB Roundtable: Marlon Pierce

    Tools for Web-based access to computing resources and data archives
    have been developed for over a decade and are now very mature. This
    talk will briefly review examples of these "gateways" and the
    associated grid middleware, and then delve into the architecture and
    standards used by the science portal community to develop reusable
    software components. Topics to be discussed include component-based
    Web portals, Web Services, and workflow (or service orchestration)
    tools.

    Systems based on heavy-weight "enterprise" standards are being
    challenged by lighter-weight "Web 2.0" approaches that incorporate
    social networks, gadgets, content syndication, rich client
    interfaces (based on the resurgence of JavaScript), and REST-based
    services. The talk will review these and discuss the eventual merger
    of these technologies into science portals and gateways.

    --------

    Thursday, March 20, 11:00am-1:00pm - Business/SPEA Library
    Meet the Quarry and BigRed SysAdmins!

    --------

    Thursday, March 27, 12:30-1:30pm - IMU Persimmon Room & ICTC 497
    RT Round Table: Why optimize my code? It works already!

    Ray Sheppard, Acting Manager of the High Performance Applications
    group, will discuss compilers and optimization. This talk will
    center on when it would be beneficial to spend time optimizing
    source code (and when it would not). Discussion of the time spent
    vs. gain realized will include case examples from users of Big Red.
    Simple tricks which may be used and some of the possible pitfalls to
    watch out for will be discussed as well.

  7. The maintenance window for all systems is the first Tuesday of each
    month, 7am - 7pm EDT.

    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

  8. 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.