Registration is now open for the Open Science Grid Campus and National Cyberinfrastructure Workshop, which will take place April 22-23 at the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI), 100 Europa Drive, Chapel Hill. A registration form is available at http://indico.fnal.gov/confRegistrationFormDisplay.py/display?confId=2504

Researchers and IT administrators, managers and staff at Triangle area campuses and beyond are invited to attend the workshop to learn about large-scale distributed and high throughput computing and how they can
enhance research practices and enable discoveries. The workshop will introduce techniques used in large-scale computational research through hands-on training. Participants also will be introduced to the national community of technical experts that provide this computational infrastructure at campuses across the U.S.

Day one will focus on using the infrastructure and day two will address how campuses can contribute their computational resources to the infrastructure, both at the local campus level and by participating in
national cyberinfrastructure efforts. Attendees can attend day one, day two or both days of the workshop based on their interests and their campus roles.

The Open Science Grid (OSG), a major national grid infrastructure, gives scientists access to more than 80 production sites offering over 30,000 CPUs to advance their research. OSG users and members include
researchers in particle and nuclear physics, astrophysics, bioinformatics, gravitational-wave science and computer science, all contributing to the development of the OSG and benefiting from advances in grid technology. Researchers and software developers in other disciplines, such as mathematics, medical imaging and nanotechnology can also gain from interacting with the OSG community through its partnership with local and regional grids or through their communities’ use of the Virtual Data Toolkit software stack.

Day one, April 22, will be aimed mainly at users and potential users of OSG resources. The focus will be on using campus Condor grids and the national OSG to perform large-scale computations and data-intensive processing. Participants will learn how to use grids of thousands of processors and will be able to continue to use these resources for their research after completing the course. Topics to be covered include:

- Overview of distributed computing concepts and tools
– Concepts, tools, and techniques of grid computing
– Discovering and using grid resources
– Grid scheduling and distributed data management
– Web service and grid service concepts
– Techniques for workflow and collaboration

Day two, April 23, will be aimed primarily at the resource providers. Participants will learn how to build a local campus grid, and share resources at the national level. Day two topics include:

- Overview of campus-level and national-level cyberinfrastructure
– Building a campus grid using Condor
– Joining a campus grid to the OSG

Attendees should have at least intermediate programming skills (one to two semesters experience in C/C++, Java, Perl and/or Python) and hands-on experience with UNIX or Linux in a networked environment.

For questions about the workshop, please email Mats Rynge at rynge@renci.org.

The research team will hold appointments in Carolina’s nationally recognized School of Information and Library Science with research space in Chapel Hill’s Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI). The award-winning research group brings expertise in development of digital data technologies, including open source software that enables sharing of data in collaborative research, publication of data in digital libraries, and preservation of data in persistent archives for use by future generations, along with a research portfolio exceeding $10 million.

“The opportunity to recruit an entire group of active researchers with an international reputation for vision, innovation and accomplishment is rare, perhaps even unprecedented in information and library science,” said Chancellor Holden Thorp. “Their work is closely aligned with the school’s efforts in the areas of digital libraries and archives, databases, institutional repositories, information retrieval and information management. Our students and many others across campus will have an extraordinary opportunity to learn from and collaborate with this world-class research team.”

Research team leaders Reagan Moore, Ph.D.; Richard Marciano, Ph.D.; and Arcot Rajasekar, Ph.D.; are in the process of being appointed as full professors in the School of Information and Library Science (SILS), recognized by U.S. News and World Report magazine as the top school of its kind in the nation. Other members of the DICE group will move to Carolina in the next few months.

“The DICE group will function as a magnet for students and collaborators,” said José-Marie Griffiths, school dean. “The group will help us further extend the research computing infrastructure at UNC that will benefit us all, improve our capacity and capability to conduct larger-scale research projects, while inspiring new generations of students to understand that considerable attention and deliberate effort are needed to ensure both effective and long-term access to information.”

Group members will interact with colleagues in the school and other campus units on academic digital library and preservation research efforts, initially focusing on current collaborations such as the National Archives and Records Administration Transcontinental Persistent Archive Prototype and the National Science Foundation Software Development for Cyberinfrastructure project, along with others such as the Library of Congress Video Archiving project.

“A major challenge for the next several decades will be managing the enormous amount of digital data we create in science and research,” said Alan Blatecky, RENCI’s interim director. “The DICE group has years of experience and an international reputation for developing innovative systems for managing distributed digital data. This will be a huge advantage for Carolina as the wave of new data rapidly becomes a tsunami. We will have the opportunity to extend our leadership nationally and internationally in managing, sharing, publishing and archiving research data.”

Other potential areas for collaboration include biomedical and health data management, grid computing and cyberinfrastructure with Carolina’s Translational and Clinical Sciences Institute and its recently announced National Institute of Health Clinical and Translational Science Award, visualization of large-scale data sets with the College of Arts and Sciences’ department of computer science and with RENCI, as well as shared institutional repositories and digital library systems with RENCI and the Triangle Research Libraries Network. Additional collaborations in the sciences, social sciences and humanities are expected.

“The DICE group, in collaboration with SILS, will pursue development of undergraduate, master’s and doctoral level courses on data grids and preservation environments,” Moore said. “The opportunity to teach academic courses strongly influenced the decision to move to SILS and UNC. We are also interested in pursuing collaborations for the creation of campus cyberinfrastructure and participating on data management projects in support of education, patient medical records and emergency preparedness.”

For more than 10 years the group’s Storage Research Broker (SRB) data grid has been used by research teams worldwide to automate all aspects of manipulation of large, distributed data files, including discovery, access, retrieval, management, replication, archiving and analysis. DICE most recently developed iRODS, the open source Integrated Rule-Oriented Data System, which introduced user-settable rules that automate complex management policies, helping users tame today’s mushrooming collections of digital data.

The team has worked on national and international projects, providing data management systems for major grid and distributed research projects, including the Southern California Earthquake Center, the TeraGrid, the Worldwide University Network, California Digital Library-Digital Preservation Repository, the Laboratory for the Ocean Observatory Knowledge Integration Grid, the Biomedical Informatics Research Network and the Geoscience network.

On Thursday (Aug. 29), the DICE group will receive the 2008 J. Franklin Jameson Archival Advocacy Award from the Society of American Archivists during the group’s annual meeting in San Francisco. A society news release said the award honors “an individual, institution or organization that promotes greater public awareness, appreciation or support of archives. The DICE group was selected for its long-time support of and involvement in the archives profession’s work to address the challenges of managing, preserving, and providing access to electronic records.”

School of Information and Library Science Web site: http://sils.unc.edu/
RENCI Web site: http://www.renci.org/
DICE Web site: http://diceresearch.org
iRODS Web site: http://www.irods.org

Contacts:
School of Information and Library Science contact: Wanda Monroe, (919) 962-8366, wmonroe at unc.edu
RENCI contact: Karen Green, (919) 445-9648, kgreen at renci.org
DICE contact: Paul Tooby, (858) 822-3654, ptooby at diceresearch.org
UNC News Services contact: Lisa Katz, (919) 962-2093, lisa_katz at unc.edu

The National Science Foundation awarded RENCI $995,796 over three years to assist research communities and campuses in using the distributed resources of the Open Science Grid (OSG). The award, effective April 1, calls for using an embedded immersive engagement (EIE) effort to immerse teams of researchers in the concepts and technologies needed to become skilled users of OSG resources, a nationwide collection of large-scale computing systems and analytic tools made accessible through standardized procedures for managing and processing jobs.

OSG is a consortium of universities, national laboratories, scientific collaborations and software developers dedicated to meeting the ever-growing computing and data management requirements of scientific researchers. Supported by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science and the National Science Foundation, it provides access to its members’ independently owned and managed resources through a common grid infrastructure that uses high performance networks to connect computing systems scattered across the country.

“This award will help many more researchers become regular users of CI, and for them, that means the ability to use powerful resource at sites across the country to do the kind of research that can lead to breakthrough discoveries,” said John McGee, engagement coordinator for the OSG and manager of CI development at RENCI.  “By using national-scale, shared CI, scientists and educators also have more opportunities to be involved in national, multidisciplinary projects.”

RENCI’s partner in OSG engagement activities is Clemson University. Sebastien Goasguen of the Clemson Computing and Information Technology group will lead the Clemson engagement team and work closely with McGee’s RENCI team.

The EIE concept embeds a team of CI experts into a research team or IT group at a university, laboratory or similar research organization. This CI team works closely with the researchers, teaching them about CI concepts, tools and methods for using distributed resources. After a period of hands-on mentoring, the research team has the knowledge, experience, and tools to become regular OSG users.

“We look forward to continuing to work closely with John, Sebastien and their colleagues to help research communities across the nation become fully proficient participants in, and users of, the shared capabilities we call cyberinfrastructure,” said Ruth Pordes, OSG executive director and an associate head of the computing division at Fermilab.

The OSG engagement plan calls for assisting at least six new research teams in becoming accomplished users of OSG resources and helping at least six university campuses develop production-quality, shared distributed infrastructure.  The engagement team also will work to make CI more accessible and easy to use and to develop best practices for CI experts who embed themselves into research teams.

RENCI…Catalyst for Innovation
The Renaissance Computing Institute brings together teams of talented researchers, engineers, technologists and leaders in government, business, the arts and humanities to attack major research questions and community issues in ways that accelerate discovery and drive innovation. RENCI has nationally significant expertise and capabilities in high performance computing, visualization, collaborative tools, networking, device prototyping, and data systems as well as engagement sites across the state. Founded in 2004 as a major collaborative venture of Duke University, North Carolina State University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the state of North Carolina, RENCI is a statewide virtual organization.  For more, see www.renci.org.

Sponsored by the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI) and the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), the BoF will address a variety of topics, including:

• scaling properties of benchmark suites
• scalable machine models
• application modeling to predict scaling for future machines
• the challenge of preparing applications for petascale environments
• the importance of all these issues to petascale acquisition decisions

Representatives of large-system vendors, funding agencies, infrastructure operators, application development groups, and others with a stake in the successful design, operation and use of petascale systems are invited to attend.

The BoF is related to the efforts of the National Science Foundation Cyberinfrastructure Evaluation Center, which is led by researchers at RENCI and SDSC. The Cyberinfrastructure Center uses a wide range of analysis tools to predict and evaluate the effectiveness of innovative and future systems in addressing scientific problems of interest to the NSF. The project seeks to advance the development of cyberinfrastructure by creating and validating performance models of strategic NSF computational science applications and by assessing the interdependence of alternative hardware, middleware and software implementations on application performance.

The BoF session will be used to begin planning for a series of workshops on petascale performance and application scalability issues.

RENCI, Catalyst for Innovation
RENCI brings together computer and discipline scientists, artists, humanists, industry leaders, entrepreneurs, state leaders and educators for collaborations designed to reshape science, the economy, the state of North Carolina and the world. RENCI leverages its expertise and resources in leading edge computing, networking and data technologies to ignite innovation and find solutions to previously intractable problems. Founded in 2004 as a major collaborative venture of Duke University, North Carolina State University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the state of North Carolina, RENCI is a statewide virtual organization.  For more, see www.renci.org.

And cyberinfrastructure requires people; not just technology experts, but also students, educators, business people, government workers, scientists, artists, everybody. Give people access to world-class technology and the results will be exciting: new scientific discoveries, innovative educational practices, students collaborating across continents, small businesses selling in international markets.

Engaging People in Cyberinfrastructure (EPIC), a group that builds human capacity by creating awareness of the opportunities afforded through cyberinfrastructure, understands that technology is a tool, a means to a wide range of ends rather than an end in itself. EPIC members hail from colleges and universities across the U.S., including the Renaissance Computing Institute.

This May, an EPIC planning group, made up of representatives from the Minority Serving Institutions Network (MSI Network), met at RENCI’s Chapel Hill offices. Their aim was a frank discussion of the state of  science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) disciplines and strategies for using the Access Grid, a multicast system that allows real-time collaboration among multiple groups and sharing of data, applications and scientific instruments. First and foremost, EPIC’s MSI planning group seeks to broaden the user base for high-end technologies such as the Access Grid (AG). Most represent institutions where high-end technologies are relatively new resources or where access is limited. Through EPIC, they hope to establish a diverse, energized community of cyberinfrastructure users that both use and develop new technologies and tools.

“Our aim is to look at collaborative technologies, especially the Access Grid (AG), and determine how we can generate broader participation,” said Stephenie McLean, RENCI’s director of education and outreach. “We also want ideas on creation of new content that can be used across disciplines and over great distances. Our MSIs are a great place to cultivate these new uses of technology.”

Far-reaching, wide-ranging ideas

Participants at the meeting presented a plethora of ideas for new and innovative uses of the Access Grid:

Carolyn Anderson (pictured left) of Winston Salem State University in Winston-Salem, NC, wants to use the AG to help students involved in the National Science Foundation’s Alliances for Broadening Participation in Science Technology Engineering and Math (STEM). STEM scholars, undergraduates from MSIs across the U.S., need to collaborate, but often can’t afford to travel. The chance to take part in virtual conferences and present research projects over the grid would enrich their educational experiences. It also would assist the overall goal of the STEM scholars program: to encourage students from underrepresented groups to pursue careers in science, technology and engineering.

Garrett Love of North Carolina Central University (pictured lower right) wants to get an Access Grid node up and running at the Durham-based school. NCCU is developing curricula for a degree program in computational science and the ability to use an AG node would enhance this new program.

Graig Gilham of Blackfeet Community College, a Tribal College in Browing, MT, plans to expose Blackfeet students “to all that the grid can offer.” He also hopes to work with students to develop a curriculum on Blackfeet culture and offer it to others via the Access Grid.

Alson Been (pictured right) of Bethune Cookman University in Daytona, FL, will encourage his university’s faculty to developed grid-based curricula and to offer it to any  educators with the ability to use the AG. He also sees the AG as a tool to help students learn to do formal presentations and to allow faculty to conduct collaborative research with other institutions.

Azeez Aileru, a neuroscience researcher at Winston Salem State, envisions using the AG to expose more students to the research that takes place in his lab. Not all students can take part in lab experiments on site, he noted, but via the AG and visualization and modeling tools, they can learn much about human anatomy, neurology, molecular biology and other fields.

Other institutions represented at the meeting were  Clark-Atlanta University, Atlanta, GA; North Carolina A&T State University, Greensboro;  Florida A&M University, Tallahassee; and Prairie View A&M University, Prairie View, Texas. By summer, group  members will focus their ideas into a plan of action for the coming year.

EPIC also sponsors conferences, training sessions, and virtual institutes and develops and evaluates new technology tools. For more, see http://www.eotepic.org/.

The MSI Network works to increase access to, awareness and utilization of advanced computing and communication technologies within communities that have been traditionally underrepresented.