Special Features:
HIGHLIGHTS OF THE UPCOMING NPACI
ALL-HANDS MEETING
The annual NPACI All-Hands Meeting will be held at UCSD from March 18
through
March 21, and it features tutorials, talks, posters, and demonstrations
devoted to the overall theme: Making Grid Computing Real.
Real Tutorials
Eleven tutorial sessions cover the aspects of working with advanced
cyberinfrastructure that are important for computer and computational
scientists alike. They range from an introduction to the Globus toolkit to
methods for data integration and mediation. If you are after an existential
experience, you can try Zen (and the art of designing secure software and
networks) or meditate upon ROCKS (the NPACI tool for building, monitoring, and
using state-of-the-art computational clusters, now in use at more than 200
sites). Just want to have a geeky good time? Get an overview of the newest
NPACI architecture (Power4, AMD, and IA64) and cool visualization packages (3D
Vis and Python Molecular Viewer). Hands-on demonstrations of new methods and
techniques are emphasized (bring your wireless laptop). Tutorials will be held
all day Tuesday, March 18.
Real Talks
On Wednesday, March 19, NPACI/SDSC Director Fran Berman leads off with a
talk
titled "From PACI to Cyberinfrastructure." She'll focus on the goals and
accomplishments that will need to be in place in just the next few years to
form a solid foundation for the evolving national cyberinfrastructure.
Peter Freeman, assistant director for the Computer and Information Science
and
Engineering Directorate at NSF, will talk about plans for that
cyberinfrastructure now being developed at the national level, with an
emphasis on the opportunities now open for the scientific community.
Carl Kesselman of USC's Information Science Institute will open the second
plenary session with a talk focused on the software fabric that has been woven
for the NPACI infrastructure and the plans to share it with the research
community via NPACKage, a supported bundle of NPACI-developed tools. Peter
Beckman of Argonne National Laboratory, who is engineering director for the
TeraGrid, will follow up with a report on the status of the TeraGrid, one of
the most ambitious collaborative grid projects ever undertaken. With its 40
Gb/s optical fiber network in place, the work of testing from end to end has
begun, and Beckman expects to reveal some early performance statistics.
After the two plenary sessions, there will be parallel sessions on
knowledge
management, grid experiences, and the biomolecular science infrastructure,
with panels of experts on various aspects of these topics.
A third plenary session will be a talk by Mark Ellisman, UCSD
neuroscientist
and leader of the NPACI Neuroscience thrust area, about the new Biomedical
Informatics Research Network, an NIH-funded effort to strengthen neuroscience
research by using grid technologies and massive data resources. Ellisman will
give details about the structure of the BIRN endeavor and the new kinds of
questions it will be able to answer. This suprainstitutional collaboration is
breaking new ground in neuroscience and providing a model for other
disciplines to follow.
Afterward, there will be three more parallel sessions, also with
knowledgeable
panelists, on the management of data collections, tools for scientific
visualization, and adaptive computing (ranging from the immersed boundary
method to an adaptive Poisson-Boltzmann solver).
Real Posters, Real Demos
At the end of the day on Wednesday, gather in the SDSC Auditorium and
VisLab
for an exhibition of research posters and computer-based demonstrations
(including a whiz-bang BIRN demo), sponsored by IBM. Drink, nibble, nosh, and
mix with colleagues.
More on Thursday
The NPACI alpha project on grid computing for energy and environmental
applications will be the first topic at the morning plenary session on
Thursday, March 20, with University of Texas scientist Mary Wheeler and Ohio
State University researcher Joel Saltz. Henri Casanova of UCSD will talk about
the NPACI alpha project/NSF ITR project centered on the MCell application, a
"virtual instrument" project that exemplifies the promise of collaboration
between computer scientists and scientists from other research domains.
There will be a set of parallel sessions on educational technology,
clusters,
and the NPACKage, followed by another set reporting on national data projects,
new communities of computationally oriented researchers, and applications of a
variety of programming tools.
The afternoon sessions are devoted to voyages of discovery, industry grid
strategies, and performance optimization. A final plenary session will cover
large-scale visualization techniques, the building of the Red Storm
infrastructure at Sandia National Laboratories, and the experiences of
researchers in the Department of Energy's Advanced Simulation and Computing
Initiative.
And Real EOT on Friday
The most successful efforts within the PACI Partnerships have been
education,
outreach, and training projects. These have been built from sometimes small
beginnings into projects of national reach and scope directed at improving
entrée into the scientific community for nontraditional and underrepresented
populations and at bringing schoolchildren a glimpse of the excitement of
scientific research. Friday, March 21, is entirely devoted to these important
activities: reaching out, building a digital library for hands-on science
education, bringing in new communities, and evaluating the results of programs
completed or still under way.
For registration information, see
www.npaci.edu/ahm2003/cgi-bin/register.cgi
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