The ClusterMeisters, a team of undergraduates from Indiana
University and Technische Universitat Dresden, Germany was awarded
first place in the SC08 Cluster Challenge, an international
competition in energy-efficient high performance computing. The
award was presented November 20 in Austin, Texas, at SC08, the
world's largest conference for high performance computing,
networking, storage and analysis.
The goal of the Cluster Challenge competition is to showcase the
ability of clusters and open-source software to solve interesting
and important problems, and to expose undergraduates to state-of-
the-art systems and the best and brightest of their peers.
More information is available at:
http://uitspress.iu.edu/news/page/normal/9354.html
Indiana University Cyberinfrastructure News
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On October 28, over 50 IU students, faculty, and visitors had a
chance to interact with the virtual environment Surge on the HD
passive stereo display wall located at the AVL’s Lindley Hall
facility in Bloomington.
The Autumn 2008 Open House was the first time Surge had been
exhibited outside of Boston, and IU faculty and staff involved look
forward to continuing collaboration with the authors, Boston
University printmaking and music professors, Deborah and Richard
Cornell.
Surge, initially created for and featured at the 2007 Boston
CyberArts Festival, is a computer mediated art-work aimed to draw
attention to rising sea levels and climate change. It features an
eclectic ensemble of imagery and visuals including Aboriginal art,
DNA and chromosomes, diatoms, and other elements of life as well as
rich audio sources including musical instruments, wildlife, and
environmental recordings. Surge also incorporates quotes from
literature, poetry, plays, and science.
For more information about the UITS Advanced Visualization Lab,
visit
http://www.avl.iu.edu. -
The UITS Advanced Visualization Lab at IU has recently released
Effect for Mac OS X. Effect is a free tool which provides access for
architects and lighting designers to powerful new tools for
examining space, structure, and light. It is an intuitive graphical
interface to Radiance, a command-line package originally developed
at Lawrence Berkeley Labs, for producing physically-accurate
lighting simulations.
Effect was originally designed by IU Professor of Theater and
Lighting Rob Shakespeare in the mid 1990's for the SGI IRIX
platform as an instructional tool for stage lighting design. It
was ported to and released for Mac OS X Fall 2008.
For more information and to download the binary release, visit
http://www.avl.iu.edu?projects/effect -
In spring 2009, UITS will retire the Libra Cluster, which has been
in service since 2005. Accounts are available on the newer Quarry
cluster, a general-purpose Unix computing environment. The
Research Database Cluster (RDC) is not included in this retirement,
and will remain in service.
For more details on the retirement, see
https://kb.iu.edu/data/axst.html . -
To use TeraGrid resources, you must submit a request for computing
time or data storage space. The allocations process has been
slightly revised -- the Development ["DAC"] allocations have been
replaced by Startup and Education allocations, which are larger
than in the past, and explicitly support instruction.
Researchers may request Startup or Education allocations at any
time. These are treated as routine and processed immediately. These
allocations give you access to some of the most advanced hardware
in the world.
Large allocations are handled by the TeraGrid Resource Allocations
Committee, which meets quarterly. The next submission window is
December 15 - January 15. To make such a request, you need an
understanding of the type of codes you will be running, 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
requirements that accompany a computing time request.
All applications must be submitted through the Partnership Online
Proposal System at
https://pops-submit.teragrid.org/
Information on getting started with the Teragrid is available at
https://portal.teragrid.org/
under the Documentation tab. -
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.
For more information please visit the conference Web site at
http://escience2008.iu.edu/
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. -
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
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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 the Research
Technology division 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
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Digital Library Brown Bag Series
All presentations are in Wells Library E174, from 12:00-1:00pm.
* December 3, 2008
* IUScholarWorks, an Update
* Jennifer Laherty and Randall Floyd
* Indiana University Libraries -
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 -
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.
