Brownsburg Challenger Center employs interactive visualization to assist with simulated geologic analysis

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.

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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, visit the Brownsburg Challenger Center and Advanced Visualization Lab web pages.

IU sends innovative technology to Antarctica

Environmental scientists studying the world's shrinking polar ice sheets will soon get a substantial boost in computing power thanks to IU's Polar Grid Project. Funded by a $1.96 million grant from the National Science Foundation, Indiana University and Polar Grid partners Elizabeth City State University and the NSF's Center for Remote Sensing of Ice Sheets, headquartered at the University of Kansas, are poised to deploy this week a collection of customized computational resources to Antarctica. These servers will allow scientists to more securely and efficiently process data collected during field expeditions. For more information, see the press release and Polar Grid video.

IU Researchers Launch Social Networking and Research Management Tool for Scientists

Indiana University researchers have introduced Laboratree, a web- based solution to the complex problems of scientific collaboration. Designed to enhance collaborative social networking for the science community, Laboratree will enable scientists to securely manage research papers and data, organize groups and projects, send group messages, author blogs, and customize personal and group profiles.

Scientists create groups for their labs and manage individual projects, each with their own unique profile, and every colleague has an individual profile to access any part of his or her network. Colleagues will have access to all versions of a document. An intuitive check-in, check-out system eliminates conflicting changes.

Sean Mooney, assistant professor of medical and molecular genetics, developed Laboratree with colleagues at the Center for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics. Mooney notes that the system is still in development, and people interested in learning about and testing the system are encouraged to learn more and register at the Laboratree home page. For more information, see the press release.

Stewart testifies before congressional committee

Indiana University Associate Dean for Research Technologies and Pervasive Technology Labs Chief Operating Officer 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.

• Oral remarks
• Full written testimony

Polar Grid Equipment Heads to Greenland

The Polar Grid project will reach a major milestone this month, as researchers take the new Polar Grid computing equipment to the ice sheets of northern Greenland.

Expedition scientists from Indiana University's Polar Grid partner organizations, Elizabeth City State University and the Center for the Remote Sensing of Ice Sheets, will collect data from Greenland's shrinking ice sheets, in an effort to better understand the effects and implications of rising global temperatures.

The new Polar Grid equipment will allow scientists to process data in the field during the course of the expedition and use the results to direct their data collection strategies. The ability to analyze data while still in the field will also help the research team assess the quality of the data and adjust sensors as needed. This is a significant improvement over past practice, when data was taken back to the U.S. for analysis.

Technologists from Indiana University have been working throughout the spring to prepare the field equipment, which includes IBM servers and storage arrays, as well as Dell and Panasonic laptops, designed to withstand hard use in extremely harsh conditions. The equipment recently left Indiana University, and is expected to arrive in Greenland later this month. Polar Grid is funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation under award number CNS-0723054.

Watch a video about the Polar Grid project at www.polargrid.org .

Weather Disaster Impacts Cyberinfrastructure

IU Bloomington has faced a series of severe weather events that started June 4, and extended to the 15th. The repeated severe weather events have resulted in a series of failures in the electrical power infrastructure supporting Bloomington generally, including IU's advanced computing systems. The events were so severe that Bloomington and surrounding counties have been declared a federal disaster area.

IU's major research computing systems — Big Red, Quarry, and the Data Capacitor — were out of service after the initial power outages on June 4. The period from June 4th to June 15th saw a repeated cycle of putting systems back in production, facing additional weather-related power events, and starting over again. The power event on the 14th of June caused the most equipment loss since the severe weather started.

IU rented emergency generators in order to assure reliable power to restart these systems. These arrived on site Monday, June 16th. The Data Capacitor Lustre-WAN system was online Tuesday, June 17th. The Data Capacitor Lustre-WAN system was used as parallel I/O filesystem for Big Red, Quarry and Libra while we completed recovery of the GPFS system.

Quarry returned to service Wednesday, June 18th. Big Red was in full production Thursday, June 19. GPFS became available on Friday, June 20. On Tuesday, June 24th, the Data Capacitor was mounted on Big Red and LEAD project filespace made available. The Data Capacitor was restored completely and remounted on all Big Red and Quarry nodes during scheduled maintenance on Tuesday, July 8.

We recognize the impact that this downtime has on researchers within IU and nationally. Our teams are working as hard as we can, with all the resources we can bring to bear to get IU research systems running again as quickly as possible.

If you face deadlines in the next few days, please contact us at researchtechnologies@iu.edu and we will work with you to find alternate solutions for your immediate computing needs.

IU's massive new Data Center, currently under construction, is a hardened facility, designed to withstand even the extraordinary series of weather events that brought about the current situation.

Photo: aerial view of construction site, May 13th

SC08 Summer Workshop: Introduction to Modeling Simulation, and Computational Methods, July 28-30 at IUNW.

Attend this three-day workshop designed for faculty from a broad range of disciplines: science, technology, engineering, mathematics (STEM), and humanities, arts, and social sciences (HASS). Topics include a broad range of modeling and simulation techniques, including cellular automota, dynamic systems, agents, and Monte Carlo methods. An introduction to using large-scale computational resources will be provided along with credentials and support for continued use of the computational resources after the workshop. Participants pay a $75 registration fee which will be refunded upon completion of the workshop. Participants cover travel expenses but room, board, most meals and other costs are covered by the SC Education Program. To register visit http://sc08.sc-education.org/workshops/schedule.php and choose the workshop held at Indiana University Northwest in Gary, IN.

IU Open Systems Lab Researcher Receives Microsoft Award

Congratulations to Joseph Cottam of the Open Systems Lab (OSL) on recently receiving the first ever Microsoft award from the International Network of Social Network Analysis (INSNA) for his paper "Extended Assortivity and the Structure in the Open Source Development Community", co-authored with OSL director Andrew Lumsdaine. The award includes a $1,000 cash prize provided by a donation from Microsoft given to authors of outstanding papers that address social relations aspects of software development. Cottam and Lumsdaine introduce a set of tools they call "Developmetrics" to investigate community formation and product development in the open source software community. Read the paper.

UITS Provides Support for Award-Winning IU Musicologist

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.

Mathiesen serves as director for the IU Center for the History of Music Theory and Literature (CHMTL). With support from UITS Core Services, which provides hardware and server administration, Mathiesen and associate director Peter Slemon maintain the CHMTL Web Site. 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.

TeraGrid Knowledge Base achieves important milestones

Based on the same technology and infrastructure as the award-winning IU Knowledge Base, the TeraGrid Knowledge Base now includes more than 250 articles and during 2007 was accessed by U.S. researchers and information technologists more than 140,000 times. See the story in Inside Indiana Business.

Workshop: TeraGrid for 21st Century Science

Ten years into the future with Microsoft's
Rick Rashid

What opportunities will technology enable in the coming decade? Rick Rashid, Senior Vice President of Research for Microsoft looks at some exciting research technologies being used in labs today, and their implications on the world of 2017.

Attend the talk: Thursday, January 24, 2008 from 4:00 PM-5:00 PM in Jordan Hall, Room A100 on Indiana University's Bloomington campus.

Team led by IU wins Supercomputing Bandwidth Competition

Congratulations to Indiana University's Data Capacitor Team, winner of the 2007 Supercomputing Bandwidth Challenge! IU's team took first place at the SC07 conference held in Reno, Nevada November 12th - 15th. The winning team was led by individuals from the UITS Research Technologies division.

• See the news release.
• See related stories in Inside Indiana Business and HPC Wire.
• Learn more about the Data Capacitor.

IU Research Technologies at Supercomputing 2007 Conference

Visit the IU SC07 research exhibit Foundations for Innovation: Gateways to Insight November 12th-15th in Reno, Nevada to explore IU's advanced cyberinfrastructure and learn how IU-developed science gateways are helping researchers move from computation and data collection to insight and discovery.

See highlights from SC07!

IU Breaks Ground on Disaster-Resistant Data Center

IU has broken ground on a new disaster-resistant data center on the Bloomington campus. Three 10,000-square-foot machine rooms will house crucial computing, networking, and storage equipment. Learn more ...

Tutorial: IU Resources on the TeraGrid

Attend an introduction to IU's Big Red Power PC Cluster and IU storage resources via the TeraGrid, being offered October 14 in conjunction with the IEEE 7th International Symposium on Bioinformatics & Bioengineering (BIBE 2007) in Boston. For more information about this tutorial, see: http://racinfo.indiana.edu/BIBE/.

Call for Papers: BIBE-2007

Workshop on progress toward petascale applications in-bioinformatics and computational biology, to be held in conjunction with the-IEEE 7th International Symposium on Bioinformatics & Bioengineering (BIBE-2007). For more information about this workshop, see: http://racinfo.indiana.edu/
BIBE_call_for_papers.pdf.