data link's NCSA SC05 Picks
User-friendly cyberenvironments make it possible for researchers to more easily and effectively take advantage of high-performance computing resources, both locally and remotely, reducing the amount of "under-the-hood" tinkering required. Showcasing cyberenvironments for science will be a major emphasis in NCSA's booth at SC05 this year. Some particularly significant cyberenvironment demonstrations are highlighted here.
A number of individual applications developed by NCSA researchers and their collaborators from UIUC, Indiana University, and other institutions will also be demonstrated at SC05—applications which are also focused on reducing the amount of effort required to manage large-scale research on high-performance computing resources, both local and remote. In many cases, one goal in developing these tools is to make it possible for them to be adapted for use within cyberenvironments. Here we highlight some applications you shouldn't leave NCSA's SC05 booth without seeing in action.
Evolution Highway
Developed to visualize the results of a comparative, multi-species mammalian genome analysis, this bioinformatics tool uses the D2K ("Data to Knowledge") environment components created by the Automated Learning Group at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Evolution Highway is a set of D2K components created to load, correlate and map chromosome and species data to a visual chromosome metaphor for comparative analysis. The D2K framework enables the Evolution Highway to be used as both a desktop application and a web service application. The demonstration will introduce features such as selection of reference genomes for multi-species comparison (in this case, human or mouse), alignment of species homologous synteny blocks (HSBs), assignment of centromere and telomere positions, overlay of chromosome HSBs from any of the five reconstructed ancestral genomes and use of user-defined custom tracks.
Date and Time: Tuesday, November 15 at 3 PM
More information: http://evolutionhighway.ncsa.uiuc.edu/
NLANR/DAST Network Performance Advisor
The NLANR/DAST Network Performance Advisor measures, displays, and analyzes network metrics. Targeted for both end users and network engineers, the Advisor integrates existing diagnostic tools into a common framework; for network engineers and administrators, it provides a customizable interface to monitor network metrics; for end users, Advisor attempts to emulate a junior-level network engineer with its Analysis Engine. The Advisor conforms to the Global Grid Forum's Network Measurement Working Group schema, and thus is able to communicate with third party databases based thereon. Current capabilities of the Advisor for live reporting, analysis, and archive retrieval will be demonstrated.
Date and Time: Tuesday, November 15 at 4:30 PM
More information: http://dast.nlanr.net/projects/advisor/
Teuthis
Teuthis is a tool to help computational scientists efficiently manage numerical simulations and the data they produce. It consists of a control panel from which a user can remotely configure and build applications from local source code, then submit jobs based on those applications, track their progress, and transfer the data they produce to other machines. Teuthis dramatically reduces the labor required to manage large numbers of independent calculations, allowing parameter studies to be created with a few simple operations. It is also a notebook which organizes calculations so that they may be examined later within the context of the projects that motivated them. They may be assessed, continued, or repeated as desired. While the development of Teuthis has been motivated by the requirements of astrophysical simulations on high-performance computers, it is suited to any computational task that takes a set of input parameters from a file and runs noninteractively. How Teuthis can be used to simulate astrophysical problems will be demonstrated and plans for its public release and future development will be discussed.
Date and Time: Wednesday, November 16, at 10:30 AM
More information: http://mazama.ncsa.uiuc.edu/projects/teuthis/
Open Grid Computing Environments (OGCE)
A collaboration between researchers at NCSA, TACC, Indiana, Michigan, San Diego State, and ANL, the Open Grid Computing Environments (OGCE) collaboration is an NSF NMI funded project that develops general purpose portlets and services for science gateways. The demonstration will showcase new OGCE software, including enhanced grid portlets, metadata management, science application management, collaboration portlets using Sakai services, and audio/video collaboration tools. We will also discuss current OGCE work that is concentrating on simplifying the development of portlets from reusable widget components. The software will be illustrated using live demos from several OGCE related projects, including the TeraGrid User Portal, NCSA portal work, the LEAD project, and the VLAB computational chemistry portal.
Date and Time: Thursday, November 17, at 1 PM
More information: http://www.ogce.org/index.php
