Indiana University Associate Dean for Research Technologies Craig
Stewart testified before the United States House of Representatives
Committee on Science and Technology on July 31, on the conclusions
published in the 2007 President's Council of Advisors on Science and
Technology report: "Leadership Under Challenge: Information
Technology R&D in a Competitive World."
In his testimony, Stewart, who chairs the Coalition for Academic
Scientific Computing, states that with regard to networking and
information technology, our current challenges are without
precedent, and asserts that the United States must improve its
networking and information technology ecosystem in order to
maintain its competitive advantage.
"Without strong investment, the U.S. is at risk of losing its
longstanding position of global leadership in networking and
information technology, and the consequences of this would be
catastrophic," Stewart testified. He urged adoption of the
recommendations set forth in the Council's report, saying that to
do so will improve America's prosperity, health, and security.
The "Leadership Under Challenge" report is available at
http://www.nitrd.gov/pcast/reports/PCAST-NIT-FINAL.pdf
Indiana University Cyberinfrastructure News
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Indiana University has installed redundant generators to provide
electrical backup for high performance spinning disk and networks,
including home directories, GPFS, the Data Capacitor, LUSTRE-WAN,
routers and head nodes. This cuts the time to recover from a power
outage from 24 hours to 3, with failover capability to provide a
robust and reliable solution.
IU's cyberinfrastructure was hit hard by storms in June, and this
equipment is part of the effort to put a structure in place to
prevent a repetition of that event. IU's Machine Room will move
into a new, hardened Data Center early in 2009, designed as a
"Tier III" building. -
ESRI, a world leader in Geographical Information Systems (GIS)
technology, has awarded University Information Technology Services
their Special Achievement in GIS Award.
The Indiana Spatial Data Portal (ISDP), located on IU's Massive Data
Storage System, provides online access to over 14 terabytes of
geospatial data. As part of the Statewide Digital Orthophotography
Program, the ISDP archives more than 142,000 high resolution digital
aerial photographs. Other archived datasets include Indiana
elevation models, topographic maps, and the Indiana National
Agriculture Imagery sets for 2003-2007. In 2007, users downloaded
over 10.6 terabytes of geospatial data.
UITS staff realized that users needed a simple interface to access
the thousands of available files. Developers created the ISDP
Multi-file Download Tool, a .NET application which allows end-users
to select files from a geographic area of interest, see data about
available files' size and format, and download one or many files.
More information on this award is available at
http://events.esri.com/uc/2007/sag/list/?fa=Detail&SID=585
The Indiana Spatial Data Portal is located at
http://gis.iu.edu -
The Open Systems Lab (OSL), one of the Pervasive Technology
Laboratories at Indiana University, has announced the release of
Version 0.9.0 of MPI.NET, a high-performance, easy-to-use
implementation of the Message Passing Interface (MPI), for
Microsoft's .NET environment. OSL conducts research on science and
technology for large-scale and pervasive hardware and software
systems.
MPI is the de facto standard for writing parallel programs running
on distributed memory systems. Most MPI implementations provide
support for writing programs in C, C++, and Fortran. MPI.NET
provides support for all of the .NET languages, especially C#, and
includes significant extensions, such as automatic serialization of
objects, that make it easier to build parallel programs - whether
for clusters or multi-core processors.
Another Pervasive Technology Laboratory, the Community Grid
Laboratory, has collaborated with OSL to show that MPI.NET works
well and runs smoothly in conjunction with Microsoft's
Concurrency and Coordination Runtime [CCR] to allow multi-CCR
threads with multiple MPI processes.
MPI.NET 1.0 is expected to be available in the coming months, to
coincide with the release of version 2.0 of Microsoft's High
Performance Computing platform.
More information, and an MPI.NET Tutorial, is available from
http://www.osl.iu.edu/research/mpi.net/ -
Indiana University and Purdue University have announced a new web
site aimed at helping Indiana businesses harness the power of one of
the world's most powerful supercomputers. The new Web site,
http://www.iiecdev.org
guides businesses in how to apply to use the supercomputer, and
provides technical information to those using the system. The
supercomputer is part of IU's Big Red and Purdue's Black, an IBM
e1350 BladeCenter cluster capable of 40 trillion mathematical
operations per second.
Access to the system is provided as part of the Indiana Initiative
for Economic Development (IIED), a partnership designed to foster
technology development and job growth. A team from both universities
and the Indiana Economic Development Corporation will oversee use of
the system, which is located on the IU Bloomington campus and
managed by technologists from both IU and Purdue.
More information is available at
http://newsinfo.iu.edu/news/page/normal/8562.html -
Scientific portals and gateways are important components of many
large-scale scientific computing and Grid projects. They are
characterized by web-based user interfaces and services that
securely access Grid resource, data, application, and collaboration
services for communities of scientists. As a result, they shield
science application users from the complex involved in running an
application on the Grid.
Gateways and cyberinfrastructure are being heavily influenced by
the so-called Web 2.0 trends in Internet computing. Ajax, JSON,
folksonomies, social networking, mash-ups, REST, RSS/Atom feeds, and
other developments run parallel to much that has occurred in the
Gateway community. New developments such as the competing Google-led
Open Social and Facebook APIs for socially networked applications,
OpenID for security, and cloud computing offerings from Amazon,
Microsoft, Google, and others will have a dramatic impact on the
expectations that scientific users will have from Grids. These
approaches provide important enhancements to the ways gateways
interact with information services, provide rich user interactivity,
and build social networks. Examining the impact of these technologies
will be the main focus of the workshop, but papers on all aspects of
science gateway development are encouraged.
Topics of interest include the following:
* Integration of Web 2.0 technologies with science gateways
* Gateways to cloud computing services
* Applications of virtual world technologies
* Social networks for scientific communities
* Grid portals and gateways deployments
* Design and architecture of portals, containers, and gateways
* Tools and frameworks that make developing gateways easier
* Portal security models and solutions
* Middleware solutions in support of scientific portals
* Non-browser gateways: desktops and mobile computing gateways
* Summary and survey papers
Important Dates:
* Papers Due: September 15, 2008
* Acceptance Notification: October 1, 2008
* Workshop: November 16, 2008
For more information, see
http://www.collab-ogce.org/gce08/index.php/Main_Page -
Organizing committees for the 2008 IEEE eScience Conference are now
accepting papers and proposals for tutorials; posters, exhibits, and
demos; workshops and special sessions on topics related to eScience,
grid, and cloud computing. The conference is being hosted by Indiana
University in partnership with Microsoft Research and will take
place on December 7-12, 2008 at the University Place Conference
Center in Indianapolis, Indiana.
Submission Deadlines:
* Workshops and Special Sessions: June 20, 2008
* Papers and Tutorials: August 10, 2008 (EXTENDED)
* Exhibits, Demos, and Posters: September 14, 2008
For more information please visit the conference Web site at
http://escience2008.iu.edu/ -
Cloud computing, virtualization, Amazon EC2, Google Apps are some of
today's hottest technologies. In this month's roundtable we will be
discussing cloud computing, virtualization, and one of IU's initiatives
in this area, the Quarry Gateway Hosting Service. The Quarry Gateway
Hosting service provides a web hosting environment to TeraGrid science
gateways.
* Thursday, August 28, 12:30-1:30pm
* IUB: Radio-TV Building Room 180 ???
* IUPUI: ICTC Room 497
* Live URL: mms://wms.indiana.edu/rt_round_table -
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 -
If you have questions pertaining to IU's cyberinfrastructure, or you
are encountering some difficulty, there are several ways to obtain
help.
The IU Knowledge Base (http://kb.iu.edu) is an excellent source of
help on how to do things.
An introduction and overview titled "Indiana University's
CyberInfrastructure: The least you need to know" is available at
http://rtinfo.uits.indiana.edu/documentation/
For more information, go to:
http://rtinfo.uits.indiana.edu/
http://racinfo.indiana.edu/hps/
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.
