Indiana University

 

Indiana University Cyberinfrastructure News

  1. Beginning this Fall 2008, the approximately 10,000 students and
    visitors to the Brownsburg Challenger Center (BCC) are experiencing
    a bit of advanced visualization. Staff at IU’s Advanced
    Visualization Lab (AVL) designed and implemented an intuitive
    program for interactively examining geologic structures found on the
    Moon and Mars.

    This effort is part of an ongoing collaboration between the AVL and
    the BCC meant to enhance the Center in accordance with their
    mission:

    "Brownsburg Challenger Learning Center, in partnership with
    community leaders and educators, integrates science, math, and
    technology to provide a learning experience that incorporates
    communications, teamwork, responsible decision-making, and critical
    thinking skills. Our mission is to encourage curiosity, discovery,
    and the pursuit of lifelong learning."
    Indiana University (and specifically the AVL) is one of BCC's
    partners. The AVL-provided application lets students interactively
    explore high quality visual representations of rocks through an
    ease-to-use touchable interface. Specific data about the rocks is
    provided on screen via text overlays. Students use the program to
    make decisions that ultimately affect the outcome of their visit.
    The AVL seeks strategic partnerships such as this under their
    community outreach portfolio. For more information on the Advanced
    Visualization Lab, visit

    http://www.avl.iu.edu

    For more information on the Brownsburg Challenger Center,
    visit http://challenger.brownsburg.k12.in.us/

  2. Users have requested the ability to verify files uploaded to IU's
    Massive Data Storage Service (implemented on HPSS). Research Storage
    invites the public to join in beta-testing a new web service which
    computes and stores checksums on files uploaded to MDSS.

    In the past, if someone wanted to verify that a file was uploaded
    correctly and completely to MDSS, the user had to download it and
    compare. This required double the time and capacity on the users'
    local system.

    Research Storage encourages users to provide us feedback, to help
    improve this service. More information and documentation of this
    feature can be found at

    http://kb.iu.edu/data/auxl.html#checksum

    The actual service is located at

    https://www.mdss.iu.edu/beta

    Please submit suggestions or problems to store-admin@indiana.edu.

  3. In collaboration with IUPUI School of Engineering and Technology
    professors Mary Ann Frank and Jan Cowan, IU’s Advanced Visualization
    Lab (AVL) has created a virtual environment that allows students to
    interactively study lighting scenarios. The study of lighting in architectural and
    interior design education is diverse. It ranges from energy efficient lighting and
    daylighting to studies that assess the effect of illuminance upon
    finish materials and color interaction. This often leads to
    attempts to squeeze lighting into an already crowded curriculum
    and is compounded when efforts are made to develop complex study
    models of interior lighting environments. In short, there is often
    little time to explore these topics in adequate detail.Utilizing advanced graphics
    techniques and interactive virtual environments, students can quickly study many different types of
    lighting and their impact on interior spaces. The ability of
    rapid but still realistic and accurate exploration has been well
    received by the IUPUI Design and Communication students. Fall
    2008 marks the third semester of the collaboration.

    For more information on the project, please visit

    http://www.avl.iu.edu/?projects/RealisticLighting

  4. To use TeraGrid resources, you must submit a request for computing
    time or data storage space. To make such a request, you need an
    understanding of the type of codes you will be running or the amount
    and type of data storage you will need, the amount of time you’ll
    need to complete the simulations you plan to conduct, and any data
    needs that accompany a computing time request. Allocation requests
    are subject to a review process, which varies according to the size
    of your request.

    Researchers may request Startup or Education allocations, or larger
    peer-reviewed Research allocations. Applications must be submitted
    through the Partnership Online Proposal System ("POPS") at

    https://pops-submit.teragrid.org/

    The process for requesting start-up allocations is shorter than for
    Research requests. These allocations give you roughly 30,000 CPU-
    hours, on some of the most advanced hardware in the world.

    Larger allocations are handled by the TeraGrid Resource
    Allocations Committee (TRAC), which meets quarterly. The next
    submission window is December 15 - January 15.

    Information on getting started with the Teragrid is available at

    http://rtinfo.uits.indiana.edu/hpa/tg/

  5. Indiana University will participate in SC08, the premier conference
    for high performance computing, networking, storage and analysis,
    when it opens Monday, November 17, 2008 in Austin, Texas.

    IU's presence focuses on Grids and Cyberinfrastructure, Digital Arts
    and Humanities, and the Life Sciences. IU’s booth will feature video
    of artistic performances during the gala opening Monday the 17th and
    at noon each day. The Booth Schedule will be:

    The Monday night Opening Gala will feature:
    * Scott Deal - Coccoliths
    * Margaret Dolinsky - Emotive Portraits
    * Stephen Simms and Don Malone - Whorl

    Tuesday
    -------
    10AM Beth Plale -
    Provenance and Preservation in Cloud Computing: Karma
    11AM Mu Hyun Baik -
    In Search of an Understanding of Alzheimer's Disease -
    Computational Study of the Copper Amyloid-≤ Peptide Complex
    12PM Music at Lunch:
    Informatics Philharmonic
    Christopher Raphael
    1PM Scott Deal -
    Telematic Artistic Endeavors
    2PM Scott McCaulay -
    Parallel Toolkit for the Organization and Retrieval of
    Digital Audio Data
    3PM Dave Hancock -
    Radiology Workflow: Leveraging HPC in Preclinical Oncology
    4PM Travis Gregg -
    High-Resolution Audio Recording, Preservation and Access at
    Indiana University's Jacobs School of Music

    Wednesday
    ---------
    10AM Beth Plale -
    Building beyond LEAD: Impact, Education, and Future Plans
    11AM Dan Miller -
    Indiana University Data Center
    12PM Music at Lunch:
    Jacobs School of Music Performance
    Joshua Bell, violin and Jeremy Denk, piano
    1PM Marlon Pierce -
    The Open Grid Computing Environments Portal and Services:
    Software for Science Gateways (part I)
    2PM Marlon Pierce -
    The Open Grid Computing Environments Portal and Services:
    Software for Science Gateways (part II)
    3PM Dave Hancock -
    PolarGrid Cyberinfrastructure: Delivering HPC to the South Pole
    4PM Tim Mattox -
    Research for Reliable Petascale Performance

    Thursday
    --------
    10AM Josh Hursey -
    Fault Tolerance in High Performance Computing:
    MPI and Checkpoint/Restart
    11AM Steve Simms -
    Facilitating Scientific Workflow with Lustre WAN
    12PM Music at Lunch:
    Jacobs School of Music Performance
    Otto Nicolai's "The Merry Wives of Windsor"
    1PM Randy Heiland -
    CompuCell3D - An open source cellular modeling framework
    2PM Scott Michael -
    Planetary Simulations With the Data Capacitor
    3PM Russell Duhon -
    CIShell, Network Workbench, and the Scholarly Database:
    Cyberinfrastructures for Scientific Communities
    4PM Suresh Marru -
    The LEAD cyberinfrastructure:
    A technical view of lessons learned and current plans


    The "Cluster Meisters," a team of undergraduates from IUB and
    Technische Universitat Dresden, will compete in the 2008 Cluster
    Challenge. For more information on the Cluster Challenge see

    http://uitspress.iu.edu/news/page/normal/9094.html

  6. 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.

    The eScience 2008 conference will feature more than 100 papers, and
    sixty posters and demos. Workshops and tutorials are included in the
    registration price.

    eScience 2008 announces new keynote speakers:
    Daniel A. Reed, Edward Seidel, Alexander Szalay, and Rich Wolski!

    Don’t forget to register for the “Unconference”, a social event for
    registered attendees of the Microsoft e-Science Workshop and the
    IEEE eScience conference to mingle and share ideas. The event will
    take place in the evening of Tuesday, December 9. It is free for
    registered attendees of eScience 2008 but separate registration is
    required. Visit the web site to sign up.

    For more information please visit the conference Web site at

    http://escience2008.iu.edu/

  7. Network outage November 4

    There will be a 10 minute Force-10 outage at each campus between
    7-10 AM on November 4. This is the normal maintenance day for the
    research systems [Big Red, Quarry and Libra], but this will impact
    the Data Capacitor and Massive Data Storage System [HPSS].

    --------

    MATLAB seminar - Bloomington November 5, Indianapolis November 6

    Todd Schultz, Senior Application Engineer at the MathWorks, will
    present an introduction to technical and parallel computing with
    MATLAB in the Indiana Memorial Union Oak Room, IUB 1-4PM on
    November 5, and in ET006 IUPUI 9AM-Noon on November 6.

    A complimentary lunch/breakfast will be offered, and late
    registrations accepted, half an hour before the seminars. Walk-ins
    are welcome, or register early seminar at

    http://www.mathworks.com/company/events/seminars/seminar19161.html
    or
    http://www.mathworks.com/company/events/seminars/seminar19164.html

    for Bloomington or Indianapolis, respectively.

    --------

    Digital Library Brown Bag Series

    All presentations are in Wells Library E174, from 12:00-1:00pm.

    Wednesday, November 5, 2008
    Scholarly Databases
    Nianli Ma, Russell Duhon and Prof. Katy Borner
    Cyberinfrastructure for Network Science Center, School of Library
    and Information Science

    Wednesday, November 19, 2008
    An Introduction to the Open Archives Initiative
    Object Reuse and Exchange (OAI-ORE)
    Jenn Riley
    Digital Library Program

    --------

    Lunch time with SysAdmins - Talk to the experts!

    You're invited to stop by and visit with the system administrators
    who run IU's supercomputers, Big Red and Quarry, two of the most
    powerful supercomputers in the world. Ask questions, share ideas,
    or just chat in an informal setting. This is an opportunity for
    you to learn how these centralized research computing resources
    can help support your work.

    * Monday, December 1, 11:00am-1:00pm
    * Geology Atrium, IUB

    --------

    Research Technologies Round Table

    We are not going to have the usual"last Thursday" round table in
    November or December, but we will have one Wednesday, December 3rd.

    Parallel Data Mining on Multicore Clusters

    A multicore CPU combines two or more independent microprocessors
    ("cores") in a single chip. In the future, CPUs will have hundreds
    or thousands of cores. This will increase computing power for both
    research and commercial applications, but will present significant
    programming challenges.

    Judy Qiu will discuss parallel data mining on multicore clusters.
    Judy received her PhD on "Messaged-based MVC Architecture for
    Distributed and Desktop Applications" in Computer Science from
    Syracuse University in 2005. She is working for Research Technology
    of UITS researching multicore algorithms, software and performance.

    When: Wednesday, December 3rd, 12:30-1:30pm
    Where: IUB Radio-TV building, room 180, and IUPUI ICTC room 497

    Live URL: mms://wms.indiana.edu/rt_round_table
    Archive: mms://wms.indiana.edu/ip/vic/rt_round_table_20081029.wmv

  8. The maintenance window for Big Red, Libra and Quarry
    is the first Tuesday of each month, 7am - 7pm EDT.

    The maintenance window for the Mass Store and Research File System
    is every Sunday 7-10AM.

    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

  9. 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.