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

This visualization starts with particles from a nuclear collision that are compressed and heated up to create a Quark-Gluon-Plasma (QGP), which looks like a “blob” in the video. Once the QGP expands and cools down, it decays again into particles that can be measured by the research team’s experiments. This is a so-called “hybrid’ model, that basically uses the Ultrarelativistic Quantum Molecular Dynamics model (UrQMD), a microscopic model used to simulate (ultra)relativistic heavy ion collisons, to model very early and late reaction stages in the process. The model has been combined with a relativistic fluid dynamics calculation to depict the formation and evolution of a Quark-Gluon-Plasma.

Duke University physicist Steffen A. Bass uses big chunks of computing time to study the behavior of some of the universe’s most fundamental particles—quarks and gluons, which existed in an unbound state up until about a micro-second after the Big Bang.

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.

CHAPEL HILL–RENCI’s networking research group is part of a team that will design a blueprint for a future version of the Internet.

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. 

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.

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.

SEATTLE, Nov. 1, 2011–Scientists studying data or compute-intensive problems require high bandwidth and computational resources, often from heterogeneous systems at different sites.

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.

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.

Understanding data often requires understanding the geography associated with it.

Hurricane and storm surge models mean little unless tied to a specific location.  Trends in diseases and public health can be spotted and analyzed by comparing data from different counties, regions or states.