April 02, 2010
BATON ROUGE, La., April 1 -- Donald Vandal, previously deputy commissioner for Finance and Administration at the Louisiana Board of Regents, is the new executive director of the Louisiana Optical Network Initiative, or LONI.
In this role, Vandal, whose prior work experience includes financial and administrative duties with the Board of Regents, the University of Louisiana System and the Louisiana Legislature, will lead and coordinate LONI activities statewide.
"I am honored to have this opportunity to work directly with LONI, which is a crucial part of our state's efforts to establish a technology-based infrastructure that positions us favorably for future research and economic development initiatives," Vandal said.
LONI , administered under the authority of the Louisiana Board of Regents , is a high-speed, fiber optic network that connects supercomputing resources among six universities -- LSU, Southern University, University of Louisiana-Lafayette, Louisiana Tech University, University of New Orleans and Tulane University, along with the two LSU health sciences centers in New Orleans and Shreveport.
LONI connects Louisiana to major national research networks, including Internet2, and is one of 11 resource providers on TeraGrid, the backbone of national cyberinfrastructure. Four Mississippi universities -- Jackson State University, Mississippi State University, University of Mississippi and University of Southern Mississippi -- are also LONI customers. These universities use the LONI network resources to conduct research at these sites and to connect with also national networks.
"Mr. Vandal has a wealth of experience working with various state agencies that focus on higher education, and we are pleased to have someone with his qualifications in this role as we continue our work to establish Louisiana as a leader in applying high-performance networking and computing technology to both education and industry," said Les Guice, LONI management council chairman.
Vandal replaces previous LONI Executive Director Charles McMahon, who became chief technology officer for Tulane University in early 2009. LSU Professor Joel Tohline served as interim LONI executive director while the LONI Management Council conducted a search for an executive director to replace McMahon.
In addition to overseeing all administrative tasks for LONI, Vandal will work with the universities that contribute high-performance computing resources to the network to establish inter-university partnerships and research collaborations.
"I am extremely pleased that Donnie is assuming this key leadership position and I am looking forward to working closely with him as part of the unique relationship LSU has with LONI," said Brian Voss, LSU's chief information officer and vice chancellor for Information Technology. "Donnie brings remarkable business acumen and perspective to the role, which I believe will be crucial to the next phase of LONI's evolution."
"LONI is an integral part of LSU research efforts involving advanced computational science and high-performance computing, and we believe Donald Vandal's understanding of how to work with different groups statewide will help us more effectively connect computational resources across campuses, providing more opportunities for faculty, staff and students to gain experience working in multi-institution research teams," said Stephen David Beck, interim director of the LSU Center for Computation & Technology.
More information about LONI is available at http://www.loni.org.
-----
Source: Louisiana Optical Network Initiative
In quieter times, sounding the bell of funding big science with big systems tends to resonate further than when ears are already burning with sour economic and national security news. For exascale's future, however, the time could be ripe to instill some sense of urgency....
Read more...
In a recent solicitation, the NSF laid out needs for furthering its scientific and engineering infrastructure with new tools to go beyond top performance, Having already delivered systems like Stampede and Blue Waters, they're turning an eye to solving data-intensive challenges. We spoke with the agency's Irene Qualters and Barry Schneider about..
Read more...
Large-scale, worldwide scientific initiatives rely on some cloud-based system to both coordinate efforts and manage computational efforts at peak times that cannot be contained within the combined in-house HPC resources. Last week at Google I/O, Brookhaven National Lab’s Sergey Panitkin discussed the role of the Google Compute Engine in providing computational support to ATLAS, a detector of high-energy particles at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
Read more...
May 23, 2013 |
The study of climate change is one of those scientific problems where it is almost essential to model the entire Earth to attain accurate results and make worthwhile predictions. In an attempt to make climate science more accessible to smaller research facilities, NASA introduced what they call ‘Climate in a Box,’ a system they note acts as a desktop supercomputer.
Read more...
May 22, 2013 |
At some point in the not-too-distant future, building powerful, miniature computing systems will be considered a hobby for high schoolers, just as robotics or even Lego-building are today. That could be made possible through recent advancements made with the Raspberry Pi computers.
Read more...
May 16, 2013 |
When it comes to cloud, long distances mean unacceptably high latencies. Researchers from the University of Bonn in Germany examined those latency issues of doing CFD modeling in the cloud by utilizing a common CFD and its utilization in HPC instance types including both CPU and GPU cores of Amazon EC2.
Read more...
May 15, 2013 |
Supercomputers at the Department of Energy’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) have worked on important computational problems such as collapse of the atomic state, the optimization of chemical catalysts, and now modeling popping bubbles.
Read more...
05/10/2013 | Cleversafe, Cray, DDN, NetApp, & Panasas | From Wall Street to Hollywood, drug discovery to homeland security, companies and organizations of all sizes and stripes are coming face to face with the challenges – and opportunities – afforded by Big Data. Before anyone can utilize these extraordinary data repositories, however, they must first harness and manage their data stores, and do so utilizing technologies that underscore affordability, security, and scalability.
04/15/2013 | Bull | “50% of HPC users say their largest jobs scale to 120 cores or less.” How about yours? Are your codes ready to take advantage of today’s and tomorrow’s ultra-parallel HPC systems? Download this White Paper by Analysts Intersect360 Research to see what Bull and Intel’s Center for Excellence in Parallel Programming can do for your codes.
In this demonstration of SGI DMF ZeroWatt disk solution, Dr. Eng Lim Goh, SGI CTO, discusses a function of SGI DMF software to reduce costs and power consumption in an exascale (Big Data) storage datacenter.
The Cray CS300-AC cluster supercomputer offers energy efficient, air-cooled design based on modular, industry-standard platforms featuring the latest processor and network technologies and a wide range of datacenter cooling requirements.