Above: Screenshot of the prostate cancer treatment planning tool developed by researchers at Duke University Medical Center and RENCI

RENCI is seeking a new Duke University research team to participate in the RENCI at Duke Faculty Engagement Program in Applied Scientific and Information Visualization.

The program targets Duke faculty members and researchers in all domains and disciplines who could benefit by incorporating scientific visualization or visual analytics into their research. The program began in 2010 and one new 2012 awardee will be chosen. In addition to $12,000 in funding, the awardees will have access to the resources and staff at RENCI’s Duke engagement center in the Telecom Building on the Duke campus.

The program has two goals: 1) to expand the use of advanced visualization tools among the Duke research community and help researchers advance their work to new levels of academic achievement; and 2) to set the stage for future externally funded proposals and awards.  Successful applicants will be expected to generate concrete deliverables such as new methods, models, applications, or prototypes that can become the foundation of larger, externally funded research projects.

Applications are due March 31, 2012. For a complete set of guidelines, please see the Call for Proposals. For information about previous and continuing participants in the RENCI at Duke Program in Applied and Scientific Visualization, see the following stories:

Three Duke Research teams Selected for new campus info viz program

Matchmakers: matching medical treatment data to new cancer cases

Researchers RENCI’s UNCC Engagement Center find that recession hits harder in neighborhoods with lower quality of life scores.

Full story here: http://ui.uncc.edu/story/charlotte-neighborhoods-recession-quality-of-life

CHAPEL HILL, Dec. 9, 2011–RENCI at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and Duke University in partnership with IBM will lead a new project to build a nationwide test bed for networking and networked cloud computing.

The project is part of NSF’s Global Environment for Network Innovation (GENI) initiative, which enables researchers to explore networks of the future.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded just over $2 million to the three-year ExoGENI project, led by Ilia Baldine, director of RENCI’s networking research group and Jeff Chase, a Duke University computer science professor.

The project will deploy and operate 13 ExoGENI sites at research universities and labs across the U.S.  The project will use software based on the Open Resource Control Architecture (ORCA) to control the networked cloud infrastructure. The project team developed the ORCA platform in earlier NSF-funded research and extended it for use in the GENI initiative.

Each ExoGENI site will receive a rack of equipment with multiple IBM x3650 servers featuring dual socket Intel Westmere and Sandy Bridge CPUs, each with 6 to 8 cores and 48 gigabytes of RAM. The sites will connect to a variety of advanced research networks offering dynamic circuit capabilities and programmable control.

ExoGENI sites in North Carolina’s Research Triangle area will connect to each other using RENCI’s Breakable Experimental Network (BEN), a networking test bed that links RENCI, Duke, NC State University and UNC-Chapel Hill. The sites will link to national research networks such as National Lambda Rail (NLR), Internet2 and the Department of Energy’s Energy Sciences Network (ESnet).

The ORCA control software will enable experimenters to construct on demand private virtual networks spanning these research networks and ExoGENI sites. ExoGENI racks will use OpenFlow-enabled switches to link to OpenFlow-enabled campus infrastructures and national networks. OpenFlow technology separates a network switch’s packet forwarding, or data, path from its high-level routing decisions, or control path, thereby allowing researchers to easily deploy innovative routing and switching protocols.

When all the hardware is operational and all the sites are connected, ExoGENI will operate as a networked cloud infrastructure—a virtual laboratory for networking and computer science experiments that will help researchers advance the development of a faster, smarter and more reliable Internet, said Baldine.

“Future computer science and applied research must bring together computation, storage and network capabilities on a global scale to address emerging complex problems related to network science, large-scale distributed computations, large dataset mobility and future network architectures,” said Baldine. “With ExoGENI researchers will gain a global, elastic reconfigurable platform to conduct such research.”

ExoGENI will support a variety of experiments that will create network topologies consisting of nodes allocated from ExoGENI sites tied together with network connections that will be provisioned based on the bandwidth needed for the experiment. ExoGENI will support using custom kernels to experiment with different network protocols. To support research into high-speed protocols, some ExoGENI sites will be capable of transferring data at 10 gigabits per second (Gbp/s) and in the future at 40 Gbp/s and 100 Gbp/s.

Using ExoGENI, researchers will be able to allocate private networks spanning the continental U.S., allocate computing clusters and storage for use by scientists who collect and analyze data, and tie these experimental resources to production networks, devices or instruments. Because ExoGENI will interact with other networking and compute resources assembled through the GENI initiative, researchers will be able to create more powerful assemblies, or slices, of linked resources that include wireless, mobile and sensor networks.

In addition, ExoGENI will serve as a test environment for a global federated cloud infrastructure that can reconfigure collections of linked computational resources as needed and bring together diverse resources from multiple cloud providers. Such an environment could someday replace typical institutional computational resources, which today exist in a single lab or data center.

ExoGENI sites will be deployed over the course of the next 18-24 months and the facility will begin operation as soon as the first sites are deployed. The first four sites will be operational before the end of September 2012.

The University of Massachusetts, Amherst, leads the $2.7 million, three-year project, named ChoiceNet, which is funded by the National Science Foundation. In addition to RENCI at UNC Chapel Hill, North Carolina State University and the University of Kentucky have roles in the project. The project complements the work of the NSF program, Future Internet Architecture (FIA). FIA’s goal is to stimulate innovative and creative research to explore, design, and evaluate trustworthy future Internet architectures.

ChoiceNet is based on the fundamental idea that enabling user choice in networking services will spur innovation while making the future Internet more economically sustainable. The project will enable user choice in three ways:  by encouraging alternative services that allow users to choose from a range of services, by giving users information on the performances of those services and available alternatives, and by allowing users to ‘vote with their wallet,’ and choose the services and thereby reward superior and innovative services.

The research of the ChoiceNet team members builds on previously funded projects in the now completed NSF Future Internet Design (FIND) program. RENCI and NC State will leverage their previous work on the SILO architecture (Services Integration controL and Optimization) project. That project focused on designing an alternative Internet protocol architecture in which protocol stacks were dynamically composed out of basic services based on their ontological descriptions.

RENCI will receive $480,000 over the three-year grant period, which began Sept. 15.

CHAPEL HILL, NC – Sharlini Sankaran, formerly assistant director of the NC Department of Commerce Office of Science and Technology, has been named the first executive director of the Research, Engagement, and Capabilities Hub of North Carolina, or REACH NC.  Sankaran assumed her new duties November 14.

Sankaran will lead the continued development of REACH NC, a new statewide, comprehensive web portal to information on research expertise and capabilities at North Carolina’s universities and research institutions. While REACH NC will make it easier for university faculty and staff to locate potential collaborators for research and other scholarly activities, it also will provide businesses, entrepreneurs, state and local government, community organizations, and citizens with unprecedented access to information on university-based expertise and assets.

The development of REACH NC began in late 2009 as a collaborative effort of the University of North Carolina General Administration, NC State University, UNC-Chapel Hill, and the Renaissance Computing Institute, a multi-campus organization that develops and deploys advanced technologies to enable research discoveries and practical innovations.  In 2010, Duke University joined the REACH NC effort as a partner.  The vision is to expand REACH NC to include additional universities and research institutions across the state.  Sankaran’s work will be supported with funding from the Triangle Universities Center for Advanced Studies, Inc., and the Research Triangle Foundation.

Sankaran holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical and computer engineering from Ohio University and a doctorate in biomedical engineering from UNC-Chapel Hill.  At the NC Department of Commerce, Sankaran managed the Green Business Fund, a competitive program that awards grants to small businesses to encourage them to commercialize innovative green technologies.  She also organized the annual NC Nanotechnology Commercialization Conference, an event that features national-caliber speakers and attracts hundreds of attendees, and tracked the success of the One North Carolina Small Business Program and the Green Business Fund in creating jobs and leveraging funding.  Earlier in her career, Sankaran held positions with the Burroughs Wellcome Fund and Sigma Xi.

For more information about REACH NC, visit www.reachnc.org.

SEATTLE, Nov. 9, 2011 – The RENCI/North Carolina booth (#2942) will be one of several on the SC11 show floor to participate in a demonstration that will connect booths in the Washington State Convention Center with large data sets in the U.S. and Europe, creating a distributed, high-speed international data grid that allows researchers to share, store and manage large data sets.

The “Big Data” grid will connect the exhibition booths of DataDirect Networks (DDN, 2304), Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (2534) and RENCI/North Carolina to the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) in Austin, Texas; RENCI (Renaissance Computing Institute) in Chapel Hill, NC; and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Karlsruhe, Germany. The data grid will be built with DDN’s Web Object Scaler (WOS), a hyperscale geo-distributed cloud storage system, and will use the Integrated Rule-Oriented Data System (iRODS), a data software system that manages large, complex data sets by applying management policies to control the execution of all data access and manipulation operations.

WOS is an extremely fast and easy-to-deploy object-oriented cloud storage system that can scale to unprecedented levels while still being managed as a single entity.  It addresses the needs of organizations that have petabytes of data, which need to be archived and shared between multiple data centers.

The Data Intensive Cyber Environments (DICE) research groups at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of California at San Diego develop iRODS, with support from a U.S. National Science Foundation grant. The iRODS@RENCI research group also supports iRODS development. iRODS is the core data management software being deployed  by the DataNet Federation Consortium, an NSF-funded project to prototype a national data management infrastructure with six science and engineering disciplines.

Combining the super fast and scalable WOS with iRODS results in a grid in which data is easily shared, managed and stored in persistent archives, according to Reagan Moore, head of the DICE group at UNC-Chapel Hill and RENCI chief scientist for data grids.

“This international data grid demonstrates how researchers can participate in collaborative research while analyzing massive data collections,” Moore said. “An iRODS-based WOS infrastructure greatly minimizes the effort required to manage and distribute large scientific data sets and make them available for such research.”

Moore and DDN Chief Scientist Dave Fellinger will provide an overview of the WOS-iRODS data grid and a second international data grid connecting Kings College London to RENCI, KEK in Tokyo, Japan; Academia Sinica in Taiwan; and IN2P3 in France.  Their talk takes place at 3:30 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 15, in the RENCI booth. At 2:30 p.m. Tuesday, also in the RENCI booth, Moore will highlight iRODS and some of the research organizations using iRODS, including NASA, the National Optical Astronomy Observatory, the Australian Research Collaboration Service, and the Texas Digital Libraries.

For more on RENCI at SC11, see RENCI@SC11, Washington State Convention Center, Seattle

RENCI and its North Carolina partners at Duke and NC State universities will feature their work in an exhibit at SC11, the world’s premier conference for high performance computing, networking, storage and analysis, Nov. 14 – 17.

The RENCI/North Carolina exhibit (booth 2942) will open at 7 p.m. Monday, Nov. 14, as part of the conference’s Gala Opening. Exhibit hours for the rest of the conference will be 10 a.m. – 6 p.m., Tuesday, Nov. 15 and Wednesday, Nov. 16, and 10 a.m. – 3 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 17.

Other RENCI activities at SC11:

Birds of a Feather Session: Managing High Performance Computing Centers: Issues and Challenges, co-hosted by RENCI Director Stan Ahalt, Jay Boisseau, Texas Advanced Computing Center, and Nicholas Berente, University of Georgia.

Birds of a Feather Session: Semantic Resource Descriptions in Advanced Cyberinfrastructures, co-hosted by Yufeng Xin, RENCI, and Jeroen van der Ham, University of Amsterdam.

View the RENCI/North Carolina booth schedule.

News release: International data grids to be highlighted in RENCI SC11 booth

News release: RENCI to demonstrate on-demand resources and provisioning at SC11

But they don’t need these resources all the time.

Ideally, a scientist studying the properties of new materials for producing solar energy, for example, would be able to grab a “slice” of a high-bandwidth pipeline, set their workflow in motion, grab compute resources in the cloud and then release those resources, so they could be used by other researchers in different configurations.

At the RENCI/North Carolina research exhibit at SC11, three demonstrations by the RENCI networking research group and Duke University will use ORCA, the Open Resource Control Architecture, to bring together cyber resources from multiple providers as needed to accommodate a scientific workflow.

ORCA was developed by Duke computer science professor Jeff Chase and his students with funding from the National Science Foundation. It is one of the experimental control frameworks for the NSF’s Global Environments for Network Innovation (GENI) project. GENI is a virtual laboratory for networking experiments that will help researchers develop the tools and protocols that will define future internets. With funding from the Department of Energy Advanced Scientific Computing Research program and the NSF Software Development for Cyberinfrastructure program, researchers are adapting ORCA as an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platform for serving the diverse needs of computational scientists.

The first demonstration will execute a scientific workflow by using ORCA to allocate a slice of computational resources from multiple cloud providers and bandwidth-provisioned network connections between provider sites. The workflow, managed by the Pegasus workflow management system, will use six serial applications, which will run on Condor clusters dynamically provisioned from clouds owned by RENCI in Chapel Hill, NC, and by Duke University in Durham, NC. The two clouds are connected by the Breakable Experimental Network (BEN), an experimental network that connects RENCI and its partner institutions at Duke, UNC-Chapel Hill and North Carolina State University.

A final large MPI application will run on several thousand processors on Hopper, a Cray Xe6 system at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) in Berkeley, CA.

ORCA will provision several network resources to move data across the continent, starting with BEN in North Carolina. From the southeastern U.S., the workflow will make its way to NERSC, first via the National Lambda Rail, then to the StarLight interconnect in Chicago, and finally via ESnet, the Energy Science Network, to NERSC.

“We will set up a collection of disparate resources in multiple clouds that never existed before and won’t exist once the job is completed,” said Ilia Baldine, director of the RENCI networking research group. “We plan to show that ORCA is an Infrastructure as a Service platform suitable for both GENI experimenters and computational scientists and that it is capable of provisioning resources as they are needed and then allowing them to return to their owners to be accessed by other users.”

The science: new materials for solar energy

The scientific job will be a simplified version of a workflow used to apply effective forward design strategies to the discovery of new materials for solar energy. In inverse design, scientists start with a set of desired electronic properties for a material and then search for the best structure. A major step in the process is the calculation of a particular property that occurs as part of the forward chain. The workflow will examine the electronic structure of moieties of Ruthenium (Ru) molecules and attempt to determine their total energy. Ruthenium can absorb light in the visible spectrum, which makes it a good candidate for a material used in cost-effective solar energy cells. The work is supported under U.S-DOE SciDAC-e award DE-FC02-06ER25764, “Enhancing Productivity of Materials Discovery Computations for Solar Fuels and Next Generation Photovoltaics.”

A related demonstration will use the ORCA framework to execute a Hadoop workflow on multiple clouds connected through bandwidth-provisioned network pipelines.  Hadoop is a software framework for data-intensive distributed applications. A third demonstration will take a closer look at a part of the first demonstration: the on-demand provisioning of computational infrastructure to stand up a Condor cluster in a networked cloud environment.

The demonstrations will take place in the RENCI booth (2942).  Demonstration times are:

• Monday, Nov. 14: 7 p.m. – 9 p.m.
• Tuesday, Nov. 15: 10:30 a.m. (demo 1), 11:30 a.m. (demo 2) and 1 p.m. (demo 3)
• Wednesday, Nov. 16: 10:30 a.m. (demo 1), 2 p.m. (demo 2) and 2:30 p.m. (demo 3)
• Thursday, Nov. 17: 10:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. (demos 1, 2 and 3)

ORCA was developed at the Duke University New Internet Computing Lab by computer science professor Jeff Chase and his students. RENCI and Duke are partners in a GENI project to evaluate ORCA as a future Internet control plane framework.

For more information:

ORCA/BEN website

Networked Clouds website

GENI Project website

RENCI website

To paraphrase Marshall McLuhan, change the communication medium and you’ve changed the message.

It’s a concept that’s well understood by the students in Rebecca Nesvet’s English 102, (Writing in the Disciplines) classes at UNC Chapel Hill.

The semester, students worked in teams to develop presentations on a wide range of scientific field of inquiry. But instead of expecting the usual PowerPoint slides filled with bulleted talking points, Nesvet brought them to RENCI’s Social Computing Room and turned them loose.  The room, with a floor-to-ceiling computer desktop that projects on all four walls, allows users to immerse themselves in panoramic montages of data and images.

Suddenly, a new technology offered new possibilities for the students to tell their stories. According to Nesvet, this expanded communications toolkit enhances the learning experience.

“To adapt an old saying. if you give a student PowerPoint, he’ll eat for a day. If you give him the opportunity to inductively find the unique potential of any new communications technology, he’ll eat for a lifetime,” she said.

Unlike a typical presentation shown as flat slides on a screen, an SCR presentation allows students to present multiple ideas, facts and visualizations in a larger context. The room also makes presentations more immersive and more understandable, said Nesvet. A discussion of habitable zones in our solar system, for example, is made more powerful when the presenter stands inside a digital frame of the Mars Rover.  Graphs, charts and timelines become more clear when the presenter can move inside the frame and touch actual data points.

The room, said Nesvet, underscores the importance of working together as a team, as students take turns “driving” the displays and talking about the data on the screens. It also offers more choices on how to present, giving students the chance to be creative and to take charge of the format of their talks.

“Most importantly,” said Nesvet, the SCR enhances intellectual curiosity and student engagement.

“One of my students claimed that his SCR assignment was ‘the first presentation I’ve given that I felt was worthwhile for anything outside class,’” she said.

Next, Nesvet plans to use the SCR for a digital humanities editing project, which will project facsimilies of 16^th – 19^th-century broadside publications onto the walls.

Watch video of English 102 presentations in the SCR.

Video Credit: Adam Engel and the SITES Lab Team, department of English and comparative literature

Asheville area community members enter a portable dome to experience Living Maps: From Cosmos to Community.

Story by Nancy Foltz

ASHEVILLE, NC—Experts from American institutions known for their pioneering efforts in Earth systems research, education and evaluation have come together to turn economic literacy education on its ear, and RENCI is part of the effort.

The new initiative known as the Worldviews Network seeks to create innovative approaches for engaging the American public in dialogues about human-induced global changes.  Using immersive visualization within the nation’s 600 planetariums and other domed settings to enhance the visual experience, the Worldviews partners are creating tools and techniques for science educators that will help audiences visualize, comprehend and address complex issues from whole-systems perspectives.  The goal is to illustrate how large-scale global processes such as biodiversity loss, climate change and ocean acidification relate to the places where we live by customizing content for issues of regional importance.

Partner institutions include the American Museum of Natural History, the California Academy of Sciences, the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, the Exhibit Museum of Natural History, the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History, the Institute for Learning Innovation, the Journey Museum, the Minnesota Planetarium Society, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, NASA Ames Research Center, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Climate Program Office, NOVA/WGBH Boston, RENCI at UNC Asheville and The Elumenati, a design and engineering firm that specializes in immersive visualization.  The three-year project is funded by NOAA.

“RENCI at UNC Asheville was invited to be part of the Worldviews Network because it is at the forefront in enabling communities to understand complex interconnections and use the information to make good decisions about their natural, built, social and economic environments,” said David McConville, creative director for the Worldviews Network and co-founder of The Elumenati.

As part of their contribution to the Worldviews Network, RENCI and The Elumenati are applying what they have learned within the Uniview software platform, an interactive scientific visualization platform and storytelling tool.  As a result, experiencing Worldviews stories will be similar to playing a video game, except the data and the decision making will be real.

The timing of Worldviews is perfect for RENCI at UNC Asheville because it coincides with the center’s work as part of the Livable Communities Initiative, a three-year project to develop regional and local strategies for sustainable development, economic prosperity and quality growth in five Western North Carolina counties.

Coordinated by the Land-of-Sky Regional Council and funded by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Livable Communities Initiative will synchronize existing local community plans to integrate housing, land use, economic and workforce development, transportation and infrastructure investments.  To do this, Livable Communities participants will need to understand the potential interactions of many layers of information and that’s where RENCI comes in.  One of RENCI’s roles will be to provide visualizations to help participants understand the region’s vulnerabilities so they can make decisions that will maintain what they love most about the region and make its communities more resilient.

Since each partner in the Worldviews Network must develop regional economic education content, RENCI will reuse the content it creates for the Livable Communities Initiative for Worldviews.  The first of this dual-purpose content was revealed on September 29 in a portable dome at the Land-of-Sky Regional Council’s headquarters.  In a program titled Living Maps: From Cosmos to Community, RENCI seamlessly combined the Worldviews Network’s cosmic, solar system and Earth stories with regional stories it developed for Livable Communities.  The visualizations were followed by a discussion with the audience to set the stage for the next three years of the Livable Communities Initiative.

In future Worldviews Network programs developed to assist in the Livable Communities Initiative, audiences will see actual solutions other communities have implemented in response to challenges similar to those faced in Western North Carolina, and residents in the region will make decisions that will dramatically affect their future.

“I expect a lot of “a-ha” moments as planners and other Western North Carolina residents see visuals and hear wonderful stories about how economic, land use, energy, social, transportation and housing choices fit together,” said Jeff Hicks, a RENCI geospatial analyst.  “Just as the the Livable Communities Initiative will influence policy decisions in Western North Carolina, it will help guide the Worldviews Network project as well.  We are pleased RENCI and the UNC system are part of both important efforts.”

More photos:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/nemacstaff/sets/72157627664123407/