The Great Plains Network Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Group is a cooperative undertaking of member Great Plains Network universities. The group seek to use existing programs and regional initiatives to advance educational and research objectives at the intersection of biology and computer science.
Virtual research environments (VREs), as one hopes the name suggests, comprise digital infrastructure and services which enable research to take place. The idea of a VRE, which in this context includes cyberinfrastructure and e-infrastructure, arises from and remains intrinsically linked with, the development of e-science. The VRE helps to broaden the popular definition of e-science from grid-based distributed computing for scientists with huge amounts of data to the development of online tools, content, and middleware within a coherent framework for all disciplines and all types of research. This article highlights some of the issues relating to the development and deployment of VREs and introduces three VRE projects in which Oxford University is leading or playing a significant role.
Virtual Machines and Types of Service for TeraGrid Computing Foundational capabilities we provide in TeraGrid, such as "roaming" access and a "coordinated" software environment, open new possibilities in terms of more specialized services, or to allow the TeraGrid, as a system, to respond to supply and demand. For example, a resource provider might elect to increase the "price" of a queue in order to improve turnaround time by reducing demand, or decrease the price to increase demand (and thus utilization).
Biomedical research is benefiting from the wealth of new data generated in the laboratory through new instrumentation, greater computational resources, and massive repositories of public domain data. Using these data to make scientific discoveries is sometimes straightforward, but can be complicated by the number and breadth of public sources available to the researcher as well as by the plethora of tools from which to choose. These articles aim to explain how to set up and administrate Core Facilities, and the benefits to researchers and institutions of so doing.
In a sharply worded speech to the Security Council this week, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev warned that Russia is "significantly behind" other countries in producing powerful supercomputers, and said the lag hurts Russia's competitiveness and its ability to defend itself.
I recently gave a presentation entitled "Cyberinfrastrucutre and its Role in Science" at IAI International Wireless Sensor Networks Summer School held at the University of Alberta on July 6th, 2009. This presentation examines some of the challenges scientists face and describes various cyberinfrastructure technologies that help address these challenges. Example projects employing cyberinfrastructure technologies that we have worked on at the Grid Research Centre, including the GeoChronos project, are also presented. Cyberinfrastructure and its Role in Science
This sixteen minute podcast features an interview with Patrick Dreher, Director of Advanced Computing Infrastructure and Systems at the Renaissance Computing Institute and Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at North Carolina State University. Along with his presentation at EDUCAUSE 2008, "Making Campus Cyberinfrastructure Work for Your Campus," this conversation is part of Dreher's effort to help campus leaders understand how cyberinfrastucture represents a fundamental shift both at the research level and at the teaching level.
A just-released series of case studies takes a close look at 12 digital projects to figure out what sustainability strategies have - and haven't - worked for them. The report, "Sustaining Digital Resources: An On-the-Ground View of Projects Today," was prepared by Ithaka S
San Francisco IDF 2008: Visual Computing Driving Innovation media type icon 06:04 | Jason Lopez | Aug 27th, 2008 10:35pm | download icon At the 2008 Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco the future was clear: visual computing. From games to television, from large systems to handhelds, the demand on hardware and software platforms will be to run large amounts of data more efficiently with less power. Some of the breakthroughs to bring video and audio more easily and seamlessly to users include the scalable Nehalem chip architecture, the Media Processor CE 3100, and the architecture codenamed Larrabee.
The Tower and The Cloud A New EDUCAUSE e-Book The emergence of the networked information economy is unleashing two powerful forces. On one hand, easy access to high-speed networks is empowering individuals. People can now discover and consume information resources and services globally from their homes. Further, new social computing approaches are inviting people to share in the creation and edification of information on the Internet. Empowerment of the individual -- or consumerization -- is reducing the individual's reliance on traditional brick-and-mortar institutions in favor of new and emerging virtual ones. Second, ubiquitous access to high-speed networks along with network standards, open standards and content, and techniques for virtualizing hardware, software, and services is making it possible to leverage scale economies in unprecedented ways. What appears to be emerging is industrial-scale computing -- a standardized infrastructure for delivering computing power, network b
iRODS, which stands for i Rule Oriented Data Systems, is a project for building the next generation data management cyberinfrastructure. There are raging discussions in our group about what the i in iRODS means? There is no consensus and even individual attribution to the letter changes day by day. Is it integrated, intelligent, intuitive, internet, invaluable or possibly incomprehensible? One of the main ideas behind iRODS is to provide a system that enables a flexible, adaptive, customizable data management architecture. Hence, we leave it to individual users to hang an explanation for the i based on their intoxicating experience, or most possibly based on irritating frustrations.
Yesterday I gave a talk to the Informatics group at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute that focused on using Cloud computing within a scientific domain.