The Least You Need to Know
The general introduction to Indiana University's Advanced Cyberinfrastructure has been updated. Cyberinfrastructure consists of high performance computers, massive data storage systems, data resources, advanced instruments, sensor networks, and people all linked together by advanced software and high performance networks to improve research productivity and enable breakthroughs not otherwise possible.
The purpose of this document is to introduce researchers to IU's cyberinfrastructure -- to clarify what these facilities make possible, to discuss how to use them and the professional staff available to work with you.
This item is available at http://rtinfo.uits.indiana.edu/documentation/ .
Chinese-American Network Symposium
Indiana University will host the 2008 Chinese-American Network Symposium (CANS) in Indianapolis next month. 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 CANS2008 page.
Kelley School of Business builds virtual campus
IU has built an entirely new campus, on an island in the virtual world of Second Life. It bears a striking resemblance to buildings on the IU Bloomington campus.
The Kelley Executive Partners program's virtual campus will be launched at 1 p.m. (EDT) on Monday September 15th. Speakers at the celebration will include
- Ken Hudson, managing director of the Virtual World Design Center at Loyalist College in Canada;
- David Levin, IBM TJ Watson Research Center;
- Christian Renaud, chief executive officer of Technology Intelligence Group;
- Sarah "Intellagirl" Robbins, co-author, Second Life for Dummies;
- Carolyn Wiethoff, clinical associate professor of management and entrepreneurship in the Kelley School;
- Anne Massey, a professor in Kelley's Department of Operations and Decision Technologies and a Dean's Research Professor for Information Systems, and
- John Cady, executive director of the Kelley Executive Partners program.
More information is available (including registration details for either physical and virtual attendance).
Welcome back, researchers!
The Research Technologies division can be roughly split into the groups running the hardware, and the groups supporting researchers' applications (software), for whom consulting is paramount.
- The staff of the UITS Advanced Visualization Labor is available to help you with the latest visualization techniques and technologies. Visualization allows researchers to analyze their data in whole and in detail, and to rapidly spot trends, recognize relationships, and identify anomalies.
- Bioinformatics Support provides help in biological computing, particularly in the areas of genomics, cell biology, and molecular biology.
- The Biomedical Applications group provides consulting and custom development to help biomedical researchers access and manage their data.
- The Center for Statistical and Mathematical Computing provides help with statistical and mathematical software (such as SPSS, SAS, Mathematica or Matlab), on personal computers as well as supercomputers. If you want this software for your department or personal computer, they make very favorable licensing arrangements available.
- The Digital Library Program, a joint effort of the IU Libraries and UITS, provides consulting and other services related to digital library development.
- The High Performance Applications group provides programming support, and can answer questions you may have about how to gain the advantages supercomputers can offer. They will help you to migrate, optimize, and parallelize your code, and they manage licenses for programmers' tools (such as compilers, libraries, debuggers and performance analyzers). This group will also help you use the resources of the TeraGrid.
- Core Services provides enterprise Linux licensing [RedHat, SUSE], plus public access to Free/Open Source Software, a source code repository/ version control system, and a Condor-based rendering service.
IU among 10 "IT Schools to Watch"
Computerworld has listed Indiana University among "leading-edge graduate schools moving at the pace of the IT workplace, delivering coursework that's relevant for today's IT professionals," in its August 18th edition. Read more...
A High-Performance C# Library for Message Passing
The Open Systems Lab (OSL), one of the Pervasive Technology Laboratories at Indiana University, conducts research on science and technology for large-scale and pervasive hardware and software systems. OSL 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. MPI.NET 1.0 is expected to be i available in the coming months, to coincide with the release of version 2.0 of Microsoft's High Performance Computing platform.
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 Lab, 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.
More information, and an MPI.NET Tutorial, is available from http://www.osl.iu.edu/research/mpi.net/.
IU offers award-winning geographic information systems
The Indiana Spatial Data Portal (ISDP), 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 National Agriculture Imagery sets. 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. ESRI, a world leader in Geographical Information Systems (GIS) technology, has awarded University Information Technology Services their Special Achievement in GIS Award. Read more about this award.
I-Light's backbone is complete
Indiana University President Michael A. McRobbie announced on June 20th the completion of the "backbone" of I-Light, a high-speed fiber-optic network, will provide every college campus in Indiana with digital communications at least twenty times faster than a typical home Internet connection.
"The I-Light network will allow Indiana's colleges and universities to collaborate at a much higher level than was ever thought possible," Indiana President Michael McRobbie said. "It will strengthen every aspect of the state's educational offerings, and it will greatly expand Indiana's capacity to conduct basic scientific research. It will also ensure that Indiana continues its growth as one of the nation's premier destinations for life sciences and biotechnology investment." Read more.
Scientists trace neural connections, identify central core
An international team of researchers has created the first complete high-resolution map of how the millions of neural fibers in the human cerebral cortex -- the outer layer of the brain responsible for higher level thinking -- connect and communicate. Their groundbreaking work identified a single network core, or hub, that may be key to the workings of the brain.
The work by the researchers from Indiana University, University of Lausanne, Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, and Harvard Medical School marks a major step in understanding the most complicated and mysterious organ in the human body. Read more...
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/.
Purdue-IU partnership in life sciences
Indiana University and Purdue University announced Thursday (June 19) that they will jointly ask the 2009 General Assembly to create a broad-based research alliance to help the state grow its bio- and life-sciences industries, improve public health and increase the number of physicians being trained in Indiana.
The alliance would focus on research with applications in business, including the potential to create new companies, medical and health-related fields, pharmaceuticals, bio-energy and bio-fuels, nanotechnology, health-care delivery and the environment. Research also would be directed toward improving the overall health of the state. Indiana public health ranks among the lowest of the 50 states, a statistic that is costly to businesses and a drain on economic development. More information is available.
SC08 Summer Workshop: Introduction to Modeling, Simulation, and Computational Methods
Attend this three-day workshop, July 28-30, designed for faculty from a broad range of disciplines: science, technology, engineering, mathematics (STEM), and humanities, arts, and social sciences (HASS). Topics include modeling and simulation techniques, such as 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.
Storms strike back
The Indiana University Bloomington campus has been deluged during the past month, and Big Red was forced down by off-campus water-related electrical problems. This is ironic, as Big Red is a major component of the state-of-the-art project in meteorological education, the WxChallenge collegiate weather forecasting competition, part of the LEAD project (Linked Environments for Atmospheric Discovery).
To see the forecast for the June 4-5 storm, see http://www.caps.ou.edu/wx/spc/20080604/r/spc2/wrf_04.00Z/0000Z/ -- click the "A" box on the left by Radar/MSLP to get an animation of the radar images forecast.
Data supported here
A researcher today may deal with all sorts of computer data -- from field research, from instruments, from surveys, computer-generated via simulation, etc. UITS provides specialized systems, capable of capturing and accessing terabytes of data from modern digital instruments at gigabyte/second rates.
You can contact Research Storage by sending email to store-admin@iu.edu or visit: http://rtinfo.uits.iu.edu/storage
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 nation's 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 by educating students, professionals, policymakers, the press and the public." Read more ...
IU Medical Scientist on World's 100 Most Influential People List
Indiana University neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor was selected as one of Time Magazine's "100 most influential people in the world."
One morning in 1996, a congenital malformation of the blood vessels in her brain exploded, and for four hours she watched her mind deteriorate "through the eyes of a curious scientist." Her account, My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey, describes in lay terms the anatomy underlying her experience of stroke, and her commitment during the next eight years to rebuild the left side of her brain.
Taylor teaches neuroanatomy for the IU School of Medicine and studies brain cancer cases at IU's Midwest Proton Radiotherapy Institute, in Bloomington. She also serves as president of the Greater Bloomington Area Affiliate of the National Alliance on Mental Illness, and is the Harvard Brain Tissue Resource Center's national spokeswoman for the mentally ill, for which she makes presentations nationwide -- often singing to lighten the mood -- about the human brain and brain donation. More information is available.
Next-generation wireless coming to IU
University Information Technology Services will deploy a new, improved and much larger wireless network on the two core campuses during the next few months. The IU community will find it easier to connect securely to the IU network and the Internet. Users will see the new wireless network displayed as "IU Secure."
The new system utilizes a standard called WPA2 Enterprise to replace VPN (virtual private networking) as the means for securely accessing wireless networks. It will provide an authenticated and encrypted wireless connection in a way that is significantly more user friendly than VPN, a full path to the 802.11N standard when it is officially ratified later this year, and potential access speeds exceeding 100Mbps.
$1.2 million grant to build international epidemic research tool
Katy Borner, Steven J. Sherman and Alessandro Vespignani will oversee the EpiC project, short for Epidemics Cyberinfrastructure, which they hope will make the sharing and re-using of epidemics datasets and algorithms as easy as sharing videos via YouTube.
EpiC will also provide services to researchers who may not have easy access to sophisticated analysis and visualization tools. A Web portal will allow scientists anywhere in the world to upload their epidemiological data for colleagues to see, and also have it analyzed using models of their choosing. The system will be designed to handle all sorts of epidemics, from the pathogen-based SARS to human behavioral epidemics.
More information is available.
$1.8 million grant to expand immersive learning project worldwide
The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation has granted more than $1.8 million to the Indiana University School of Education to expand the immersive learning environment Quest Atlantis, a learning and teaching tool for students between ages 9-12 that uses a 3-D, multiuser environment to immerse children in educational tasks.
Sasha Barab, Associate Professor and Jacobs Chair in Learning Sciences and Instructional Systems Technology as well as Director of the Center for Research on Learning and Technology, created the Quest Atlantis project. The MacArthur Foundation awarded Barab $500,000 two years ago to build upon the program, originally funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation. Quest Atlantis is used in the United States, China, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Malaysia, Turkey, and Singapore. The new award is designed to help Barab expand the reach of the program. At the end of three years, Barab expects the worldwide participation in it will have grown from five thousand to tens of thousands.
More information is available.
The Least You Need to Know
The general introduction to Indiana University's Advanced Cyberinfrastructure is frequently updated, and has been recast in audio and audio/video format, for those who want to learn about computing, data storage, visualization and consulting while working on their aerobics (or who prefer a non-visual modality, for whatever reason).
These items are available from http://rtinfo.uits.indiana.edu/documentation/ .
Regenstrief tapped to combat epidemics
The Centers for Disease Control has awarded the Indiana University School of Medicine a contract to accelerate the ability of local, state and regional entities to share data and information to enhance rapid response to and management of potentially catastrophic infectious disease outbreaks and other public health emergencies. Leading the CDC-supported work, which will look at diseases potentially spread naturally or by bioterrorism, are Regenstrief research scientists Dr. J. Marc Overhage and Dr. Shaun Grannis.
The funding will allow researchers from the Regenstrief Institute Inc. to build upon their groundbreaking work in health information exchange and biosurveillance to develop innovative public health informatics solutions to combat outbreaks of such public health hazards as anthrax, plague or numerous other infectious diseases. The Indianapolis-based group is one of only three chosen by the CDC for this work.
More information is available from the IU Press Release or from Government HealthIT here and here.
IU hands-on computing initiative
Just Be: Keeping IT Real is an interactive road show in which undergraduate and graduate students travel to K-12 schools in Indiana, aimed at dispelling gender and race-based myths about careers in information technology. Developed by Kay Connelly and Suzanne Menzel in the IU School of Informatics, Anne Ottenbreit-Leftwich in the IU School of Education, and Jamie McAtee, student chairperson of the Just Be initiative, the project emphasizes hands-on computer engagement for Hoosier school students.
A recent assessment pointed to the need for hands-on activities in order to inspire children not only to want to work with technology, but show them that they are capable of working with technology. "The goal of this proposal is to enhance Just Be with hands-on activities to better engage K-12 children," said Connelly. "By having children work with friends on the activity, we counter the idea that technology is a solitary and socially isolating field." Over the last three years, Just Be has reached more than 1,500 school-age children and 250 college students, nearly two-thirds of them from under-represented groups: women, low income, first generation and ethnic minorities.
For additional information contact Lisa J. Herrmann.
Advanced Visualization Support
The staff of the UITS Advanced Visualization Laboratory (AVL) is available to help you with the latest visualization techniques and technologies. Visualization tools allow researchers to analyze their data in whole and in detail, and enables them to rapidly spot trends, recognize relationships, and identify anomalies. For more information, visit their website!
Indiana awarded $16M for Telehealth Network
The Federal Communications Commission has awarded $16.1M to the Indiana Telehealth Network to connect the 35 Critical Access Hospitals throughout the state. The Indiana Telehealth Network provides an electronic health information exchange and distance care through a dedicated broadband health network to address unmet health needs for rural patients in Indiana. More information...
This has been a goal pursued by IU for several years, since the value of such a network was demonstrated during the SARS epidemic [subscrption required].
User Engagement Research Lab
Two IU School of Informatics faculty researchers, Jeffrey and Shaowen Bardzell, have received multi-year funding to report on user and media engagement with social computing (e.g., Facebook), video games, virtual worlds (e.g., Second Life) and other computer-based interactions. The two professors with the School's Human-Computer Interaction Design program have been awarded the use of a neurological/ physiological user engagement research lab (valued at $65,000), plus additional funding at more than $50,000 per year, to support their research. More ...
Research Technologies Round Table
Want to keep up with developments in IU's cyberinfrastructure? Have a question (or a complaint)? At 12:30 on the last Thursday of each month, the Research Technologies Round Table discussion is held in the "tree suites" of the Indiana Memorial Union and ICTC Room 497. It is important that the users of Research Technologies' systems engage in these discussions. The Quarry system is a direct result of user feedback at last January's meeting. Your input is valuable and we welcome your participation. Check out the archive ...
Chat with the Big Red and Quarry SysAdmins!
Wednesday, February 13, 11:30-1:30 EST
Geology Building Lobby
Chris Robb named Internet2 network operations manager
IU's Chris Robb is joining the Internet2 staff as Network Operations Manager, where he will be responsible for the day-to-day operations of the nationwide Internet2 Network infrastructure. Robb assumes this position as an assigned staff member from the Global Research Network Operations Center (Global NOC). Previously, Robb was a network engineer with the Global NOC. More ...
Special Seminar: Rick Rashid, Senior Vice President, Research, Microsoft: 10 years into the future
Thursday, January 24, 4:00 PM
Location: Jordan Hall A100
Abstract:
By looking at technologies in research labs today you can get insights into what opportunities technology will enable during the next 10 years. In this talk I will look at some exciting research technologies and their implications for the world of 2017.
Geoffrey Fox to present research to Center for Genomics and Bioinformatics Roundtable
Geoffrey Fox from the IU School of Informatics, will review the pros and cons of various approaches to non linear optimization in the presence of local minima, ill conditioned matrices and ambiguous choice of appropriate number of degrees of freedom (over and under fitting), and then present a uniform approach to data clustering and Gaussian mixture model ling that uses deterministic (not Monte Carlo) annealing to mitigate the local minima problem and naturally relates the appropriate number of parameters (clusters or mixture components) to the scale at which ithe problem is examined. More information.
Time: January 22, 2008 at 12:00 PM
Place: Myers 209
WiFi router flu
Steven Myers and his colleagues Hao Hu, Vittoria Colizza and Alessandro Vespignani have shown that wireless routers are vulnerable to "viral" attack, even if the Wireless Encryption Protocol is used. In densely populated urban areas WiFi routers form a tightly interconnected proximity network that can be exploited to launch massive attacks and affect entire urban areas WiFi networks. The infections are slowed or stopped by geographical barriers (such as a wide river) or stronger security (such as WPA, the Wi-Fi Protected Access protocol), plus changing default administrative passwords. The paper is here, and has been discussed at Ars Technica and Network World.
High performance applications support
The mission of the High Performance Applications group is to help promote scholarly research through the use of high performance computing and communication environments. A sampling of HPA activities include: user support for IU faculty, staff and students who want to get started using our supercomputers, longer term 1-on-1 consulting, support for our NSF TeraGrid users, benchmarking new or upgraded systems, and (in the future) developing services that hide the complexity of using high performance applications. Check out their web pages!
Computer scientist's toolkit for digital data collection receives NSF funding
Beth Plale in the Indiana University Department of Computer Science has been awarded a National Science Foundation grant to develop a digital toolkit to help researchers more easily capture information about their scientific work. The two-year grant totaling $432,954 will fund development of SDCI Data: New Toolkit for Provenance Collection, Publishing and Experience Reuse. Joining Plale in the project are David Leake and Dennis Gannon, also of the Department of Computer Science, and Yogesh Simmhan of Microsoft Research. Read more.
What a piece of work is man...
It's often said that there's only 1% to 2% difference between the genomes of chimps and humans, but that percentage only refers to the nucleotide differences in shared genes. Genes are also gained and lost, and the number of copies makes a big difference. Matthew Hahn and colleagues have discovered that gene turnover has been faster in primates than in dogs or in rodents, and even faster in humans than other primates. In fact, 6.4% of the 22,000-odd human genes aren't even present in chimps. Read more here.
The Center for Statistical and Mathematical Computing
The Center for Statistical and Mathematical Computing exists to help theIU community easily and effectively perform statistical and mathematical analyses.The Stat/Math Center supports statistical and mathematical software packages, making them available on research systems, in Student Technology Centers, and on personal and departmental workstations (at rates that save the IU communitymillions of dollars every year). They provide consulting support and training,and will introduce SPSS, SAS, Maple or Matlab during classes. Check them out!
IU biologists study family tree to understand genetic circuitry
Researchers at Indiana University Bloomington, Harvard University, Cambridge University (U.K.) and the University of California at Berkeley have been told by the National Institutes of Health that their request for approximately $20 million in continued funding for FlyBase has been approved. Biologists Thomas Kaufman and Kathy Matthews will oversee IUB's extensive contributions to the ongoing project. Kaufman was elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science last month.
The most recent developments in the project -- sequencing and comparing 12 fruit fly genomes -- was the cover story of the 8 November issue of Nature, and has produced at least 40 papers, over a hundred new genes and several new regulatory pathways. Thomas Kaufman, who co-led the project, remarked "One of the things we've learned is that when you compare a lot of different but related genomes, you are more likely to see the genes that are buried in all that A-C-T-G mush." Read more here and here.
IU Scholar maps scholarship
Dr. Katy Borner designs maps of science, as a new way to understand scholars' collective knowledge. Borner is curator of the "Places & Spaces: Mapping Science" exhibit, currently on on display at the American Museum of Science and Energy, Oak Ridge, TN. "The exhibit introduces people to the power of maps to navigate physical spaces, but also abstract spaces of our collective scholarly knowledge," says Borner. More information is available.
Cyberinfrastructure Newsletter
Get the technical information you need to effectively use IU's cyberinfrastructure. The monthly newsletter also provides announcements of important scholarly advances achieved through the use of IU's cyberinfrastructure. Inside this month: SC|07, IU's new disaster-resistant data center, the new Cell processor technology center at IUPUI, and science gateways. Check it out.
