November Feature Stories
data link's NCSA SC05 Picks
Some applications, developed by NCSA researchers and their collaborators, which will be demonstrated at SC05, held November 14-17 in Seattle, WA.
NCSA to Showcase Cyberinfrastructure, Science at SC05
Scientists and engineers from across the United States will demonstrate how the cyberinfrastructure developed, deployed, and supported by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) is opening the door to discovery and innovation at Booth 1639 at SC05, the world's largest high-performance computing, networking, and storage conference.
News Stories for November
Sign Up for Scatter/Gather at SC05
New this year at SC05 (Seattle, Nov. 12-18) is Scatter/Gather, a daily series of 10-minute talks open to anyone registered for the technical program. Essentially an open mic, these sessions will provide an opportunity to present brief summaries of new or ongoing work—or even the outline of an idea. No proposals, no submission deadline, no peer-review, and no manuscript formatting. Sessions will be held at 3:30 p.m. on Tuesday, Nov. 15, Wednesday, Nov. 16, and Thursday, Nov. 17, with eight slots per session. To sign up, all you need to provide is your name and a topic. The 10-minute time limit will be strictly enforced and includes all setup time. So, if you plan to use a laptop projector, come to the session early so you're ready to start on time.
Grid Community Should 'Flock' to BoF Sessions at SC05
Grid computing will feature prominently at SC05, particularly in Birds-of-a-Feather sessions, which include well-known names like Ian Foster, Charlie Catlett, and others.
ACM/Reviews.com Project Computing Reviews Issues Call for Reviewers
Apply to become a reviewer for Computing Reviews. A collaboration between the ACM and Reviews.com, Computing Reviews publishes reviews by area experts in monthly issues and daily online. As a reviewer, you will make a significant contribution to the computing community by using your expertise in writing informed critiques of current computing literature.
New Article Details How To Use GT4 Authorization Mechanisms
Examine authorization options and architecture in Globus Toolkit 4.0 (GT4), and learn how to develop your own custom authorization module. The authors walk through the GT4 authorization architecture and module interfaces, and explain ways you can implement different authorization algorithms and scenarios.
IU Makes Storage Available for TeraGrid Users
As part of its resource contributions to the NSF-funded TeraGrid, Indiana University is now making tape-based storage available to users of the TeraGrid via Indiana University's Massive Data Storage System (MDSS), which uses the High Performance Storage System (HPSS) software. Researchers with TeraGrid allocations may store up to one terabyte of data within IU's HPSS system, and data will remain available for one year past the end of the user's allocation.
NASA Opens Columbia Supercomputer to U.S. Researchers
NASA is extending access to Columbia, its premier high-end computing system, to researchers from outside existing NASA projects. allocating 4.5 million processor-hours per year (5 percent of the total Columbia resource) to non-NASA scientists and engineers. The agency seeks computationally intensive research projects of large scale that can make high-impact scientific or engineering advances through the use of a large allocation of Columbia system time and data storage. Allocations will not be limited to just the NLCS portion of Columbia. Proposals should be for a one-year allocation and may include an option for a second year. NASA anticipates making four to eight large awards. Proposals will be rated and ranked by a panel of program managers and discipline scientists assembled from several federal agencies, along with other invited experts. The ranking will include computer science relevance (weighted more heavily), followed by computational technology and potential scientific or engineering impact. Final decisions regarding allocations will be made by NASA's Columbia Board of Directors. The submission deadline is midnight EDT Monday, January 16, 2006.
Software Releases
Databridge 2.0
Databridge is an educational application developed by NCSA's Education Division that easily organizes data into common file formats for visualization. New in 2.0: a redesigned interface giving users more control over data visualization, interpolation for 2-D and 3-D data, and the ability to perform a coordinate transformation.
NMI R-8
NMI-R8, released October 18, 2005, marks two important "firsts" for the NMI program: the addition and integration of Ninf-G, the first non-U.S. developed component included in the GRIDS Center software suite; and GridShib, the first software enabling interoperability between the Globus® Toolkit and Shibboleth® federating software.
Rocks 4.1
Researchers at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) and their collaborators have released version 4.1, code-named "Fuji", of the Rocks Clustering Distribution for immediate download. Rocks supports i386 (Pentium/Athlon), single and dual-core x86_64 (Opteron/EM64T) and ia64 (Itanium) CPUs. The major new feature in this release is the addition of the Avalanche Installer, which integrates peer-to-peer package serving mechanisms into the de facto standard Kickstart system to dramatically improve installation scalability.
Conferences, Workshops, and Training Events
HiCOMB 2006 Call for Papers
The Fifth IEEE International Workshop on High Performance Computational Biology will take place April 25, 2006 in Rhodes, Greece, also in conjunction with IPDPS 2006. The goal of this workshop is to provide a forum for discussion of latest research in developing high-performance computing solutions to problems arising from molecular biology. The deadline for submissions is November 15; see website for details.
Grid Application Planning and Implementation Workshop - Early Registration Open
A SURA Cyberinfrastructure Workshop on grid application planning and implementation will be held December 6-8, 2005 at the Texas Advanced Computing Center at the University of Texas at Austin. The workshop is focused on faculty, researchers, developers, funding agencies, and planners from universities, research institutions, and funding agencies interested in the deployment and use of grids and grid applications. The deadline for early registration at a discounted rate is November 22.
HiPC 2005 Registration Now Open
Advance registration is now open for the 2005 International Conference on High Performance Computing, to be held December 18-21 in Goa, India. The deadline is November 7.
Seminar on the Mathematics of Causal Reading November 8
Judea Pearl of the Department of Computer Science at UCLA will review concepts, principles, and mathematical tools that were found useful in applications involving causal reasoning. The seminar will take place November 8 at 3 PM in 2405 Siebel Center.
HPGC 2006 Call For Papers
The Third High-Performance Grid Computing Workshop will be held April 29, 2006, in Rhodes, Greece, in conjunction with the International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS'2006, April 25-29, 2006). The HPGC workshop provides a forum for presenting research results on most aspects of grid computing, with a focus on performance, in the areas of applications, benchmarking, infrastructure, management and scheduling, partitioning and load balancing, and programming models. The deadline for paper submissions is November 18; authors will be notified by December 20. More details are available at the website.
Pre-Registration for HDF Workshop Now Open
NASA, NCSA, and the National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System (NPOESS) Integrated Program Office will hold a joint workshop to discuss the use of NCSA's Hierarchical Data Format (HDF) standards in satellite observations of the Earth and related applications. The workshop will be held Nov. 30 to Dec. 2 in San Francisco.
NMPDR Fall Tutorial
The National Microbial Pathogen Data Resource (NMPDR) announces a fall tutorial on the use of the NMPDR resources for pathogen genome data mining, subsystem analysis and annotation, to be held December 14-15, 2005, at Argonne National Laboratory. Formal registration is required for entry to Argonne's site; a photo ID is also required. The deadline for registration is December 1.
PAPP 2006 - Call for Papers
The Third International Workshop on Practical Aspects of High-level Parallel Programming (PAPP 2006), a part of The International Conference on Computational Science, will take place May 28-31, 2006, at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom. A call for papers has been issued, and submissions are due by Dec. 2. The PAPP workshop focuses on practical aspects of high-level parallel programming: design, implementation, and optimization of high-level programming languages and tools applications in all fields of computational science, benchmarks, and experiments. Research on high-level grid programming is particularly relevant.
Register for the Linux Clusters Institute Workshop at UIUC by January 20
The workshop will be held February 28-March 3, 2006 at NCSA at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. As always, the earlier you register, the better. The deadline is January 20.
