Cyberinfrastructure News

To see past content, see the blog archive.

Call for Participation - High-Performance Clustered Computing

The Computational and Information Systems Laboratory (CISL) of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) is hosting the 10th LCI International Conference on High-Performance Clustered Computing in Boulder, March 9-12, 2009.

This year's conference examines how future large-scale system design will address the balance between inter- and intra-node parallelism.

Those interested in technical presentations for consideration should submit a 2- to 3-page abstract. For detailed information on submitting papers, presentations, or tutorials, please see the conference Web site.

Posted on: 10/02/2008 | 2 comments

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 http://newsinfo.iu.edu/news/page/print/8867.html and http://www.iuinfo.indiana.edu/bem/productions/polargrid/PolarGrid_Video.html .

Posted on: 10/01/2008 | 0 comments

Chinese-American Network Symposium in Indianapolis

Indiana University will host the 2008 Chinese-American Network Symposium (CANS) in Indianapolis October 20-22. This event brings together leading networking experts from the United States and China to exchange information, technical knowledge, and best practices for managing advanced international networks.

IU's relationship with China dates back over a century and includes partnerships with many of the top Chinese universities. As CANS has grown in size and scope, it has fostered creative collaborations among educational and research institutions and the business sectors of both nations that have generated major advances in networking technology and infrastructure development.

For more information see the CANS home page and the conference web page.

Posted on: 10/01/2008 | 0 comments

2009 AAAS Mass Media Science & Engineering Fellowship

The AAAS Mass Media Science & Engineering Fellowship offers an opportunity for senior undergraduate, graduate and post graduate science and engineering students to work as science reporters for ten weeks. From grant writing to interaction with their community, these skills will benefit a student's career and increase public understanding of science and technology.

The deadline for applications is January 15, 2009. For more information, visit http://www.aaas.org/programs/education/MassMedia/ .

Posted on: 10/01/2008 | 0 comments

Teragrid allocations submission deadline

For medium and large Teragrid allocations, the next submission deadline is October 15th, midnight local time.

Information on getting started with the Teragrid is available at http://rtinfo.uits.indiana.edu/hpa/tg/ .

Posted on: 10/01/2008 | 0 comments

Calendar - October 2009

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.

* Thursday, October 9th, 11:00am-1:00pm * IMU - Commons Literature Desk, IUB

Research Technologies Round Table

Web Services and the Web Service Resource Framework: An introduction with simple examples

This presentation will introduce Web Services, and then present its "extension," the Web Services Resource Framework, which allows web resources to "maintain state" by storing data accessible via operations standardized within the framework.

When: Wednesday, October 29th, 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

Digital Library Brown Bag Series

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

October 1, 2008
Semantic Web: Past, Now, Future
Prof. Ying Ding
School of Library and Information Science

October 15, 2008
Digital Journeys in Pursuit of an Elusive Traveler: Tracking the Life and Photographs of Charles Cushman
Prof. Eric Sandweiss
Department of History

October 29, 2008
Digital Video Scholarship: Issues collecting and using Field Work Video
Will Cowan
Digital Library Program

Posted on: 10/01/2008 | 0 comments

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.

Posted on: 09/01/2008 | 0 comments

Large Hadron Collider fires up September 10th

The first attempt to circulate a beam in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will be made on 10 September. At the IU Grid Operations Center preparation for the LHC means being ready to handle the huge amounts of data that will be produced. A 2-3 times increase in use of the Grid Operations Center's services is expected during the data-taking phases of the LHC.

Information, status, notification, maintenance, and trouble ticket services are all getting their final review for any problems that might occur during data-taking by two of the four detectors at CERN, ATLAS (http://atlas.ch/) and CMS (http://cms.cern.ch). IU has been working with CERN/LHC on this project for approximately 15 years.

More information is available from Science Daily.

Posted on: 09/01/2008 | 0 comments

OpenAFS upgrade and client configuration

OpenAFS is the software that powers the Research File System. While the Research File System is accessible via many protocols - HTTP, SFTP, and Samba - the OpenAFS client offers the most functionality.

On August 17, 2008 UITS moved some of the Research File System file servers to a different network to improve performance and prepare for the new data center scheduled for completion early in 2009. This move was performed without impacting users. However, for those RFS users using OpenAFS clients a small configuration change is recommended. Under most situations the old configuration will not impact OpenAFS clients, but in certain situations OpenAFS will not perform optimally with the old configuration. The instructions are at http://storage.iu.edu/rfs_update.shtml .

If you encounter any difficulties, please send about the problem, including any error messages, to store-admin@indiana.edu .

Posted on: 09/01/2008 | 0 comments

Call for Papers - Grid Computing Environments 2008 (GCE08)

Scientific portals and gateways are important components of many large-scale scientific computing and Grid projects. They are characterized by web-based user interfaces and services that securely access Grid resource, data, application, and collaboration services for communities of scientists. As a result, they shield science application users from the complex involved in running an application on the Grid.

Gateways and cyberinfrastructure are being heavily influenced by the so-called Web 2.0 trends in Internet computing. Examining the impact of these technologies will be the main focus of the workshop, but papers on all aspects of science gateway development are encouraged.

Important Dates:
* Papers Due: September 15, 2008
* Acceptance Notification: October 1, 2008
* Workshop: November 16, 2008

For more information, see http://www.collab-ogce.org/gce08/index.php/Main_Page

Posted on: 09/01/2008 | 0 comments

Call for Participation - IEEE 2008 eScience Conference

Organizing committees for the 2008 IEEE eScience Conference are now accepting papers and proposals for tutorials; posters, exhibits, and demos; workshops and special sessions on topics related to eScience, grid, and cloud computing. 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.

Submission Deadlines:
* Workshops and Special Sessions: June 20, 2008
* Papers and Tutorials: August 10, 2008 (EXTENDED)
* Exhibits, Demos, and Posters: September 14, 2008

For more information please visit the conference Web site at http://escience2008.iu.edu/

Posted on: 09/01/2008 | 0 comments

Call for Participation - MidWest Grid School (MWGS'08)

The Open Science Grid (OSG) is a major national grid infrastructure, which provides scientists with 70+ production sites offering over 20,000 CPUs and 4 Petabytes of storage to advance their research. The OSG invites you to an exciting 3-day course in large-scale and high-performance grid computing to take place Sep 17-19, 2008, at the University of Chicago.

The workshop offers hands-on training in the use of OSG and TeraGrid cyberinfrastructure to perform large-scale computations and data- intensive processing in different application domains. Participants will learn how to use grids of thousands of processors, and will be able to continue to use these resources for their research after the completing the course.

Undergraduate and graduate students, researchers, educators and professionals in engineering, computer science, or any scientific, data- or computing-intensive discipline may apply.

Registration Deadline: Sep 15, 2008

For more information and to apply, please visit http://www.opensciencegrid.org/workshop or send email to mwgs08@opensciencegrid.org

Posted on: 09/01/2008 | 0 comments

HPC Fellowship Applications due September 8th

The ACM/IEEE Computer Society High Performance Computing (HPC) Ph.D. Fellowship Program is accepting nominations for its second annual competition until Friday, September 8, 2008.

Students must be nominated by a full time faculty member at a Ph.D. granting institution .

For more information about the program, see http://sc08.supercomputing.org/?pg=hpcfellowships.html or send email to hpc-fellowship-questions@acm.org

Posted on: 09/01/2008 | 0 comments

Calendar - September 2009

Lunch time with SysAdmins - Talk to the experts!

* Wednesday, September 17th, 11:00am-1:00pm * Simon Hall, Linda & Jack Gill Conference Center, IUB

Research Technologies Round Table - Updates

Whether you're new to IU or returning, the Research Technologies division of UITS welcomes you. We maintain some of the most powerful supercomputers in the world, as part of a comprehensive strategy which includes computers, data storage systems, data collections, instruments and sensor networks, and technical support.

As we head into fall, we'll take an updated look at Research Technologies' research systems, including the Big Red and Quarry supercomputers, High Performance Storage Services, the Data Capacitor, and the TeraGrid.

* When: Thursday, September 25th, 12:30-2:30pm * 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_20080925.wmv

Posted on: 09/01/2008 | 0 comments

Stewart testifies before congressional committee

Indiana University Associate Dean for Research Technologies 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.

Posted on: 08/01/2008 | 0 comments

Defense in depth for research cyberinfrastructure

Indiana University has installed redundant generators to provide electrical backup for high performance spinning disk and networks, including home directories, GPFS, the Data Capacitor, LUSTRE-WAN, routers and head nodes. This cuts the time to recover from a power outage from 24 hours to 3, with failover capability to provide a robust and reliable solution.

IU's cyberinfrastructure was hit hard by storms in June, and this equipment is part of the effort to put a structure in place to prevent a repetition of that event. IU's Machine Room will move into a new, hardened Data Center early in 2009, designed as a "Tier III" building.

Posted on: 08/01/2008 | 0 comments

IU honored for innovative use of GIS technology

ESRI, a world leader in Geographical Information Systems (GIS) technology, has awarded University Information Technology Services their Special Achievement in GIS Award.

The Indiana Spatial Data Portal, built on IU's Massive Data Storage System, provides online access to over 14 terabytes of geospatial data. As part of the Statewide Digital Orthophotography Program, the ISDP archives more than 142,000 high resolution digital aerial photographs. Other archived datasets include Indiana elevation models, topographic maps, and the Indiana National Agriculture Imagery sets for 2003-2007. In 2007, users downloaded over 10.6 terabytes of geospatial data.

UITS staff realized that users needed a simple interface to access the thousands of available files. Developers created the ISDP Multi-file Download Tool, a .NET application which allows end-users to select files from a geographic area of interest, see data about available files' size and format, and download one or many files.

Posted on: 08/01/2008 | 0 comments

A High-Performance C# Library for Message Passing

The Open Systems Lab (OSL), one of the Pervasive Technology Laboratories at Indiana University, has announced the release of Version 0.9.0 of MPI.NET, a high-performance, easy-to-use implementation of the Message Passing Interface (MPI), for Microsoft's .NET environment. OSL conducts research on science and technology for large-scale and pervasive hardware and software systems.

MPI is the de facto standard for writing parallel programs running on distributed memory systems. Most MPI implementations provide support for writing programs in C, C++, and Fortran. MPI.NET provides support for all of the .NET languages, especially C#, and includes significant extensions, such as automatic serialization of objects, that make it easier to build parallel programs - whether for clusters or multi-core processors.

Another Pervasive Technology Laboratory, the Community Grid Laboratory, has collaborated with OSL to show that MPI.NET works well and runs smoothly in conjunction with Microsoft's Concurrency and Coordination Runtime [CCR] to allow multi-CCR threads with multiple MPI processes.

MPI.NET 1.0 is expected to be available in the coming months, to coincide with the release of version 2.0 of Microsoft's High Performance Computing platform. More information, and an MPI.NET Tutorial, is available from http://www.osl.iu.edu/research/mpi.net/ .

Posted on: 08/01/2008 | 0 comments

University supercomputers aid business development

Indiana University and Purdue University have announced a new web site aimed at helping Indiana businesses harness the power of one of the world's most powerful supercomputers.

The supercomputer is part of IU's Big Red and Purdue's Black, an IBM e1350 BladeCenter cluster capable of 40 trillion mathematical operations per second.

Access to the system is provided as part of the Indiana Initiative for Economic Development (IIED), a partnership designed to foster technology development and job growth. A team from both universities and the Indiana Economic Development Corporation will oversee use of the system, which is located on the IU Bloomington campus and managed by technologists from both IU and Purdue. More information is available.

Posted on: 08/01/2008 | 0 comments

Calendar - August 2008

Research Technologies Round Table

Cloud computing, virtualization, Amazon EC2, Google Apps are some of today's hottest technologies. In this month's roundtable we will be discussing cloud computing, virtualization, and one of IU's initiatives in this area, the Quarry Gateway Hosting Service. The Quarry Gateway Hosting service provides a web hosting environment to TeraGrid science gateways.

* Thursday, August 28, 12:30-1:30pm
* IUB: Radio-TV Building Room 180 ???
* IUPUI: ICTC Room 497
* Live URL: mms://wms.indiana.edu/rt_round_table

Posted on: 08/01/2008 | 0 comments

IEEE 2008 eScience Conference Call for Participation

Submission Deadlines:

Workshops and Special Sessions: June 20, 2008
Papers and Tutorials: August 10, 2008 (EXTENDED)

For more information please visit the conference Web site.

Posted on: 08/01/2008 | 0 comments

Call for Papers - Grid Computing Environments 2008 (GCE08)

Gateways and cyberinfrastructure are being heavily influenced by the so-called Web 2.0 trends in Internet computing. Ajax, JSON, folksonomies, social networking, mash-ups, REST, RSS/Atom feeds, and other developments run parallel to much that has occurred in the Gateway community. New developments such as the competing Google-led Open Social and Facebook APIs for socially networked applications, OpenID for security, and cloud computing offerings from Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and others will have a dramatic impact on the expectations that scientific users will have from Grids. These approaches provide important enhancements to the ways gateways interact with information services, provide rich user interactivity, and build social networks. Examining the impact of these technologies will be the main focus of the workshop, but papers on all aspects of science gateway development are encouraged.

Topics of interest include:

Integration of Web 2.0 technologies with science gateways
Gateways to cloud computing services
Applications of virtual world technologies
Social networks for scientific communities
Grid portals and gateways deployments
Design and architecture of portals, containers, and gateways
Tools and frameworks that make developing gateways easier
Portal security models and solutions
Middleware solutions in support of scientific portals
Non-browser gateways: desktops and mobile computing gateways
Summary and survey papers

Important Dates:

Papers Due: September 15, 2008
Acceptance Notification: October 1, 2008
Workshop: November 16, 2008

For more information, see http://www.collab-ogce.org/gce08/index.php/Main_Page.

Posted on: 08/01/2008 | 0 comments

PolarGrid Equipment Heads to Greenland

Indiana University-led PolarGrid cyberinfrastructure project will reach a major milestone this month, as researchers take the new PolarGrid computing equipment to the ice sheets of northern Greenland.

Expedition scientists from PolarGrid partner organizations, the Center for the Remote Sensing of Ice Sheets and Elizabeth City State University, 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 PolarGrid 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 methods, in which data was taken back to the U.S. for later 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. PolarGrid is funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation under award number CNS-0723054.

Watch a new video about the PolarGrid project at www.polargrid.org .

Posted on: 07/01/2008 | 0 comments

National Biorepository for Gene Therapy

Indiana University's School of Medicine will be home to the National Gene Vector Biorepository and Coordinating Center (NGVB) for gene therapy research. Researchers use gene vectors, such as disabled viruses, to carry genetic materials in the body in hopes of treating or preventing disease. For example, genes important for fighting infections may be inserted into immune system cells that have been rendered inactive by genetic mutations.

The NGVB at Indiana University will help university scientists share research information and substances to promote discoveries, patient safety and compliance with regulations of the Food and Drug Administration. The NGVB's services will include maintaining a warehouse of important reagents, disseminating the results of safety studies, and the storage of biological materials and patient specimens in accordance with FDA regulations.

Scientists are using gene transfer techniques in studies involving a broad range of diseases including cancer, heart disease, cystic fibrosis, immune disorders including arthritis, and infectious diseases. An NIH database lists more than 500 such trials currently under way.

Research Technologies staff, in collaboration with the IU School of Medicine's Bioinformatics Core, are building the web-based systems that will be used to manage and share this information.

For more information, see http://medicine.indiana.edu/news_releases/viewRelease.php4?art=887.

Posted on: 07/01/2008 | 0 comments

I-Light backbone completed

The backbone of a high-speed, fiber-optic network has been completed that will provide every public and private college campus in Indiana with digital communications at least 20 times faster than a typical home Internet connection. Known as I-Light, the network involves more than 1,000 miles of fiber-optic cable reaching every corner of the state. It is larger, per capita, than similar networks in neighboring states. More than 40 higher education institutions will use the system for educational and research purposes.

In addition to providing more bandwidth than most Indiana colleges and universities could otherwise afford, the system offers a variety of other capabilities, including:

Connecting classrooms at distant locations with high-quality video-streaming,
Allowing researchers at any location to exchange large digital data files and access supercomputers and scientific data storage facilities at IU and Purdue,
Making possible multi-campus collaborative research projects,
Enabling the use of high-definition learning tools, such as telepresence, a new way of videoconferencing that gives the users the appearance of being at the same location.

I-Light web page More information

Posted on: 07/01/2008 | 0 comments

Calendar - July 2008

Research Technologies Round Table

Thursday, July 31, 12:30-1:30pm
IUB: Radio-TV Building Room 180
IUPUI: ICTC Room 497
Live URL: mms://wms.indiana.edu/rt_round_table

The Indiana Spatial Data Portal

The Indiana Spatial Data Portal provides students, staff, researchers, and the general public access to terabytes of Indiana geospatial imagery. Geographic Information Systems staff will describe the current database and online services and their plans.

Staff from the Indiana Geological Survey and The Polis Center will also be on hand to discuss their projects which rely on these services.

IEEE 2008 eScience Conference Call for Participation

Submission Deadlines:

Workshops and Special Sessions: June 20, 2008
Papers and Tutorials: July 20, 2008
Exhibits, Demos, and Posters: September 14, 2008

For more information please visit the Conference Web site.

Posted on: 07/01/2008 | 0 comments

TeraGrid Allocation Proposal Deadline

TeraGrid proposals for the allocation period from Oct. 1, 2008 thru Sept. 30, 2009, are now being accepted. The proposal deadline is July 15th, midnight local time.

You should submit your proposals at the URL:

https://pops-submit.teragrid.org/.

Please note the availability of these new resources:

Purdue's Dell 1950 Cluster, Steele,
for Gateways, IU's IBM HS21 Bladeservers, Quarry.

This is for medium and large allocations [MRACs and LRACs]; development allocations [DACs] are accepted and approved at any time.

Posted on: 07/01/2008 | 0 comments

Source code repository service introduced

The Core Services group in Research Technologies is now offering source code repository services for Indiana University researchers' software projects. If you write your own code for research projects that you run on IU systems, and would like to manage source code revisions under subversion, you can request a project by sending email to rtadmin at rtinfo.indiana.edu.

Subversion is already installed on Big Red and Quarry. If you want to use subversion on your personal computer you will need to install subversion on your system. Documentation for subversion is available at http://svnbook.red-bean.com/.

Posted on: 07/01/2008 | 1 comments

IU's Advanced Cyberinfrastructure Systems back in service

Big Red and Quarry were placed in service last night, June 18. The Data Capacitor Lustre-WAN system is curently being used as parallel I/O filesystem while we complete recovery of the GPFS system. The Data Capacitor Lustre-WAN system has been online since Tuesday June 16th.

The Data Capacitor Project space and GPFS are currently undergoing system recovery and we expect those systems to be online in the near future. Users are now fully able to run jobs and do their work on IU's advanced cyberinfrastructure with the exception of the Data Capacitor Project space.

If you encounter any problems or need help, please send email to: researchtechnologies@iu.edu

Posted on: 06/19/2008 | 0 comments

Weather disaster impacts IU, Big Red, Quarry, and Data Capacitor

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 time from the 4th to the 15th was 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 was the most damaging since the severe weather started.

IU is renting emergency generators in order to assure reliable power to restart these systems. These arrived on site Monday (6/16), and we will have systems up and running as quickly as possible. Our best current estimate is that we will be in operation again as of the end of the week (6/21).

We recognize the impact that this downtime is having 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.

We will update the status of IU's advanced cyberinfrastructure systems each day at 9 am and 4 pm EDT, on this web site.

IU's new Data Center, currently under construction, will be a hardened facility. It is designed in such a way that it will not be subject to even the extraordinary series of weather events that brought about the current situation.

Posted on: 06/19/2008 | 0 comments

Calendar - June 2008

Research Technologies Round Table

Thursday, June 26th, 12:30-1:30pm
IUB: Radio-TV Building Room 180
IUPUI: ICTC Room 497
Live URL: mms://wms.indiana.edu/rt_round_table

Howto: Manage thousands of job submissions on Big Red

Dick Repasky, Matt Allen and Yu Ma

Some researchers need to run thousands of jobs on Big Red. For example, a recent project to annotate the Maize genome required that 25,000 jobs be run. That many jobs is difficult to manage.

The Research Technologies division is designing a facility that will allow users to manage thousands of jobs, and we want your input. RT staff will present the design goals of the project, outline how users would specify a pool of thousands of jobs, and describe plans for how users would process a pool of jobs and monitor progress.

Please note the new Radio-TV Building location for IUB. Videoconferencing equipment will broadcast to the IUPUI location.

Posted on: 06/02/2008 | 0 comments

HPC bootcamp at IU Northwest

Attend the SC08 Summer Workshop: Introduction to Modeling, Simulation, and Computational Methods, being held July 28-30, 2008 at Indiana University Northwest, in Gary, IN. The three-day workshop is designed for faculty from a broad range of disciplines: science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and also humanities, arts, and social sciences.

The material covers 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 are asked to pay a $75 registration fee which will be refunded upon completion of the workshop. Room, board, most meals and other costs are covered by the SC Education Program. Participants must cover their own travel expenses.

To register please visit

http:// sc08.sc-education.org/workshops/schedule.php

and choose the workshop held at IU Northwest in Gary, IN.

Posted on: 06/01/2008 | 0 comments

New resources to support Lustre over wide area networks

University Information Technology Services (UITS) has dedicated over 350 terabytes of new storage platforms to support collaborative research projects mounting Lustre file systems across the TeraGrid network and other national high speed networks. The ability to use Lustre over a wide area network (WAN) is a significant advancement in the ongoing struggle to meet user demand for easier and faster access to stored research data.

Indiana University has made several notable achievements related to the use of Lustre over a WAN in the past year. In November, a team led by Indiana University was awarded first place in the annual Bandwidth Challenge at the SC07 Conference in Reno, Nevada; using the Data Capacitor, the IU team achieved a peak transfer rate of 18.21 Gigabits/second (Gb/s) out of a theoretically possible 20 Gbs, nearly twice the peak rate of the nearest competitor.

More information is available.

Posted on: 06/01/2008 | 0 comments

IU named National Center of Academic Excellence in Information Assurance Research

The National Security Agency and Department of Homeland Security announced that Indiana University is among the first universities to be designated National Centers of Academic Excellence in Information Assurance Research.

The designation complements IU's selection in August 2007 as a National Center of Academic Excellence for Information Assurance Education. Fred H. Cate, director of the Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research and distinguished professor of law at the IU School of Law, Bloomington, said the designation for both research and education "reflects our twin goals of developing new knowledge and translating that knowledge into practical benefits for the public by educating students, professionals, policymakers, the press and the public."

More information is available.

Posted on: 06/01/2008 | 0 comments

Places & Spaces in Beijing

In collaboration with Chinese researchers at the Research Center for Grid and Service Computing at the Institute of Computing Technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, and with support from a grant by the National Science Foundation, the "Places & Spaces: Mapping Science" exhibit opened on May 17, 2008 at The National Science Library of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing. This will be the debut for the 4th iteration of this 10-year project, "Science Maps for Economic Decision Makers".

Weixia (Bonnie) Huang, from the Cyberinfrastructure for Network Science Center at the Indiana University School of Library and Information Science, travelled with the exhibit and will work with colleagues to introduce the maps. This is the first major showing of the exhibit outside of the U.S., and the maps have been translated into Chinese to aid in the sharing of information.

For more information, see http:// scimaps.org/nslc.

Posted on: 06/01/2008 | 0 comments

IEEE 2008 eScience Conference CFP

For more information on topics of interest, submission guidelines and deadlines please visit the conference Web site at http://escience2008.iu.edu.

Posted on: 06/01/2008 | 0 comments

Calendar - May 2008

Learn about IU's supercomputers from the experts!

Monday, May 12, 11:00am-1:00pm - ICTC Main Lobby, IUPUI

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.

You're welcome to ask questions, share ideas, or just chat in aninformal setting. This is an opportunity for you to learn how these centralized research computing resources can help support your work.

Research Technologies Round Table

Thursday, May 29, 12:30-1:30pm
IUB: Radio-TV Building Room 180
IUPUI: ICTC Room 497
Live URL: mms://wms.indiana.edu/rt_round_table

Science Gateways

Marlon Pierce

After more than a decade of development, tools for Web-based access to computing resources and data archives are now very mature. This month's Roundtable will include discussion of these Science Gateways and the Grid middleware that they access, architecture and standards used by the science portal community, component-based Web portals, Web Services, and workflow (or service orchestration) tools. Also discussed will be Web 2.0 and Cloud Computing approaches to resource and data access, and these tools' eventual merger into Science Gateways and portals.

Please note the new Radio-TV Building location for IUB. Videoconferencing equipment will broadcast to the IUPUI location.

Posted on: 05/01/2008 | 0 comments

Don't forget to optimize!

When you submit a job to one of IU's supercomputers, there will be hundreds of jobs in front of yours and more lining up behind. Optimization ensures all these jobs will run as quickly as possible.

How can you simply and quickly optimize your program? Let the compiler help. By using three types of compiler switches - machine, usage, and optimizing - you can make your program fast and sleek without a lot of work. In this article, we'll look at optimizing switches only, with a C program compiled using Big Red's IBM compilers as an example.

Not all switches improve a program's performance. Some are neutral, some will help or hurt based on combinations, and some will slow a code down dramatically on their own. Safe bets include -Q to replace function calls with the function's source code, and -qunroll to unroll loops as if they were sequentially written source code. Those that should be used with care include -qhot for combining loops.

The -O switch is a set of macros for these types of smaller optimizations. This switch optionally includes a digit (e.g., -O3) which increases optimization risks as it increases. To offset this, IBM offers the -qstrict switch, which tells the compiler not to take risks if there is some doubt. A good first test of our sample C program might be:

xlc -q64 -O3 -Q -qunroll -qstrict -qarch=ppc970 -qtune=ppc970 -qenablevmx -qaltivec -o my_project my_project.c -lm

Every program is unique, but a good compiler can typically improve the performance of even a well-written program by 1/3. Reading your compiler's man page and experimenting with a few simple optimization switches may even cut your job's run time in half.

IU's High Performance Applications group may be able to help with compiling and optimizing your programs.

Posted on: 05/01/2008 | 0 comments

Old GPFS scratch files to be deleted

Beginning June 1, 2008, files that haven't been accessed in more than 180 days will be automatically removed from IU's General Parallel File System (GPFS) scratch file system.

The GPFS scratch file system is accessible from Big Red, Quarry, and Libra.

Please be sure to back up important data stored on GPFS since it is a temporary scratch file system and is not intended for long-term storage.

For information on backing up data to the Massive Data Storage Service (MDSS), see the KB article "At IU, how do I use SFTP or SCP to access my MDSS account?."

Posted on: 05/01/2008 | 0 comments

New job type on Big Red

A recent update to Big Red's LoadLeveler resource manager includes a new job type: MPICH. LoadLeveler jobs of type MPICH, as opposed to "parallel", automatically generate host files for use with mpirun's "-machinefile" switch.

A job's host file can be referred to via the new $LOADL_HOSTFILE variable; use of the llmachinelist command and subsequent cleanup are no longer necessary!

In addition, the variable $LOADL_TOTAL_TASKS may be used with mpirun's "-np" switch. $LOADL_TOTAL_TASKS is calculated from the LoadLeveler job script keywords "node" and "tasks_per_node". As a result, changes to job geometry only need to be made with these keywords; the mpirun command's arguments will be modified automatically.

Finally, the MPICH job type provides support for some additional MPI application enhancements which we intend to implement in the coming weeks. We encourage all of our MPICH users to modify their job scripts accordingly.

Posted on: 05/01/2008 | 0 comments

System Administration

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 7-10 AM.

Outage reports are available online for Big Red, Libra, and Quarry.

How To Contact Us And Get Help

If you have questions pertaining to IU's cyberinfrastructure, or you are encountering some difficulty, there are several ways to obtain help.

An introduction and overview titled "Indiana University's CyberInfrastructure: The least you need to know" has been updated and is available along with other introductory resources.

The IU Knowledge Base is an excellent source of help on how to do things.

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 with the RT contact form.

This is an official publication of Indiana University produced by the Research Technologies division, University Information Technology Services, Indiana University.

Subscription is automatic when you receive an account on IU's advanced cyberinfrastructure. Please email comments, questions, and subscribe/unsubscribe requests, using the RT contact form.

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