Indiana University

 

Indiana University Cyberinfrastructure News

  1. March 25-27, 2009
    Indiana University is hosting an NSF-sponsored workshop on
    "Cyberinfrastructure Software Sustainability." The workshop will
    focus on sustainable models for use, support, and maintenance of
    software that is developed and used in areas related to the NSF
    mission. Workshop goals include examination of software evaluation
    practices and mechanisms for supporting sustainability via funding
    organizations, open source, and commercialization.

    The workshop will be held at the University Place Conference Center
    on the Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis campus in
    Indianapolis, Indiana. A welcome reception will be held on the
    evening of March 25th. The formal agenda will commence at 8 AM on
    the 26th, and close at 3 PM on the 27th.

    A number of leaders in software creation and sustainability are
    participating by invitation, and between 10 and 20 additional
    speakers will be invited on the basis of position papers which are
    submitted by February 15th. The entire research community is
    invited to submit position papers, following the model of the
    "TeraGrid future" process, cf

    http://teragridfuture.org/node/190
    Students are particularly encouraged to submit position papers.
    They should include one additional page indicating how participation
    in this conference would aid in their educational and career
    objectives. A limited number of $1,000 stipends will be awarded to
    student participants who are accepted, to help defray travel costs.
    For more information, and to submit position papers, see

    http://cisoftwaresustainability.iu-pti.org/

  2. The Center for the Study of Institutions, Population and
    Environmental Change (CIPEC) conducts research on the causes and
    impacts of deforestation and reforestation. This research involves
    the use of various large datasets and the collaboration of
    scientists across many departments. They use The Research File
    System (RFS) as a repository for satellite imagery and other spatial
    data files, to monitor how forest systems are changing.

    Professor Tom Evans of the Department of Geography, Co-Director of
    CIPEC, writes, "The Research File System has been an incredibly
    useful tool for our data management needs. RFS has been an
    effective solution for us, given our collaborative mode of
    research, and we have been impressed with the data access speed
    for both small and large data files compared to our previous
    in-house server."

    The Research Storage group in the UITS Research Technologies
    division manages the Research File System and the Massive Data
    Storage System. Which you should use is determined by your data's
    size and how often it is updated. You can contact Research Storage
    for advice, by sending email to store-admin@iu.edu or visit:

    http://rtinfo.uits.iu.edu/storage/

    For more information about CIPEC see

    http://cipec.org/

  3. Charles Horowitz, professor of physics at Indiana University, has
    been elected to fellowship in the American Physical Society, the
    preeminent organization of physicists in the United States.
    Horowitz was honored for his contributions to research involving
    dense nuclear matter. His work has involved structures on the
    surfaces of neutron stars, sometimes covered by liquid oceans and
    with 'nuclear pasta' collective structures inside.

    UITS is pleased to have provided programming support for Professor
    Horowitz' work, including tens of thousands of hours of computing
    using special purpose GRAvity PipE ("GRAPE") computers. Read more at

    http://newsinfo.iu.edu/news/page/normal/9629.html

  4. The Libra Cluster, which has been in service since 2005, will retire
    during the Spring 2009 semester. 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, see

    https://kb.iu.edu/data/axst.html

  5. Bioinformatics is the science of managing, mining, and extracting
    knowledge from biological sequences and structures. The goal of
    this Workshop is to present the latest research in high–performance
    computing applied to bioinformatics.

    The Parallel Bio-Computing Workshop will be held in conjunction
    with the Seventh International Conference on Parallel Processing
    and Applied Mathematics (PPAM 2009) in Wroclaw (Breslau), Poland,
    September 13-16, 2009.

    Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

    * Bioinformatic databases
    * Computational genomics and proteomics
    * DNA assembly, clustering, and mapping
    * Gene expression and microarrays
    * Gene identification and annotation
    * Molecular sequence analysis
    * Phylogeny reconstruction algorithms
    * Protein structure prediction and modelling
    * Parallel algorithms for biological analysis
    * Parallel architectures for biological applications
    * System tools that support high performance bio-computing

    Papers should be submitted by April 10, 2009. For more information,
    please visit the PBC web page:

    http://www.ppam.pl/pbc

  6. 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. The location changes each month.

    * Thursday, February 12, 11:00am-1:00pm
    * Jordan Hall Atrium, IUB

    --------

    Research Technologies Round Table

    Keith Lehigh will be discussing security best practices for servers,
    desktops and mobile platforms.

    When: Thursday, February 19, 12:30-1:30pm
    Where: IUB - IMU Maple Room, IUPUI - ICTC Room 497

    Live URL: http://tinyurl.com/cmn9s6
    Archive URL: http://tinyurl.com/avpvfk

    --------

    Digital Library Brown Bag Series

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

    February 11
    Dublin Core Metadata Initiative Abstract Model
    Jenn Riley, Digital Library Program

    February 25
    Archives of Institutional Memory at IU
    Phil Bantin, Indiana University Archives

  7. 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

  8. 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
    answers 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.