November 15, 2012
BLOOMINGTON, Ind., Nov. 15 — Indiana University IT experts will manage critical climate data from two NASA polar missions, again demonstrating IU's advanced data management and storage solutions for climate scientists.
IU recently received $1.25 million in awards from the NASA Airborne Science Program to provide specialized IT services to two NASA missions, Operation Ice Bridge and Global Hawk. These services will play a crucial role in the collection of data about earth's changing polar ice sheets and glaciers. In particular, IU's support will help scientists improve models of the physical interactions of glaciers, sea ice and ice sheets at both poles.
"NASA and its partners are working to research and solve problems of global significance. By providing high-quality data management, our team lets them focus on the science - the buildup and breakdown of polar ice and snow," said Rich Knepper, manager of the campus bridging and research infrastructure team within Research Technologies Systems, part of IU's Pervasive Technology Institute. "It's an amazing feeling to know our IU technology and expertise is facilitating such a critical area of research."
The Operation IceBridge award is a renewal. For four years, IU has provided IT support to the Center for Remote Sensing of Ice Sheets (CReSIS) at the University of Kansas. CReSIS plays a major role in the IceBridge mission, providing radar technology that measures physical interactions of polar ice sheets. In October, IU also unveiled an in-flight data copy system for instantly processing and archiving data collected by CReSIS radar systems in NASA's DC-8 aircraft. (The system will be the southernmost cluster when flights reach the South Pole - read more about IU's role in Operation IceBridge.)
The Global Hawk project is a new award for IU's Research Technologies Systems. NASA's Unmanned Global Hawk aircraft are capable of 32 hours of flight. Beginning in 2014, the planes will be equipped with CReSIS snow radar in order to measure glacial snow accumulation. IU's role in the project will be to collect snow radar data after flights, process it on site, and return it to CReSIS researchers for further analysis.
"One of the nice things about Global Hawk is that it gives you a really long flight time, which allows for big gains in how much scientific data you get," said Knepper. "And our team will be standing by to take care of that important data as soon as the plane lands."
About Indiana University Pervasive Technology Institute
Pervasive Technology Institute (PTI) at Indiana University is a world-class organization dedicated to the development and delivery of innovative information technology to advance research, education, industry, and society. Supported in part by a $15-million grant from the Lilly Endowment, Inc., PTI is built upon a spirit of collaboration and brings together researchers and technologists from a range of disciplines and organizations, including the IU School of Informatics and Computing at IU Bloomington, the IU Maurer School of Law, and University Information Technology Services at Indiana University.
-----
Source: Indiana University
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.