HPCwire

Leading HPC
Solution Providers




















HPCwire >> Off the Wire

Indiana University Receives $1.9M for Polar Grid Project


Page:  1  of  3
1 | 2 | 3   All  »  

BLOOMINGTON, Ind., Aug. 20 -- Despite the August heat, researchers from Indiana University are about to get a whole lot cooler. The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded an IU-led team $1.96 million to create a cyberinfrastructure that will help scientists better understand the current and future state of polar ice sheets.

Under the leadership of Geoffrey C. Fox, director of Pervasive Technology Labs' Community Grids Lab and IU professor of informatics, the project team includes partners from Elizabeth City State University and the University of Kansas' Center for the Remote Sensing of Ice Sheets.

NSF funding and additional IU support will be used to create a computer grid spanning from the North to the South Pole. This "Polar Grid" will be comprised of ruggedized laptops and clusters deployed in the field in the polar regions, and also two large scale clusters for detailed data analysis in the U.S. -- a 17 Teraflops cluster to be installed at IU, and a 5 TFLOPS cluster at Elizabeth City State University. The clusters will be made highly accessible through a science gateway, using Web 2.0 and portal approaches designed to make high performance computers easier to use.

"The Polar Grid project will transform U.S. capabilities in ice sheet research," said Fox. "With this technology, it will be possible to collect, examine and analyze data -- and then use the results of such analysis to optimize data collection strategies -- all during the course of a single expedition. This will help scientists more quickly gain understanding about the potential impact of rising sea levels and how they relate to global climate change, a problem of urgent importance."

The Polar Grid represents a dramatic change from the current method of study, in which expeditions occur during the summer months, data is brought back to the U.S. for analysis, and a new expedition takes place the following year.

In addition to impacting polar science, the project builds upon Fox's existing efforts to help minority serving institutions enhance their research by gaining greater access to cyberinfrastructure. The Polar Grid project will provide Elizabeth City State University, a historically black university in North Carolina, with a high performance computing cluster and will give its researchers access to IU's cluster, using a high speed network connection.

"Polar Grid will give Elizabeth City some very powerful and highly advanced, high performance computing equipment," said Matt Link, director of Research Technologies-Systems for University Information Technology Services at Indiana University, who serves as equipment coordinator for the project. "ECSU researchers will have access to cyberinfrastructure that's on par with some of the nation's top colleges and universities."

Linda Hayden, co-principal investigator from Elizabeth City State University, says the Polar Grid project will support student learning by expanding ECSU's existing polar science efforts, as well as providing greater access to and understanding of high performance computers.

"This will give ECSU a top-ranked 5 Teraflop high performance computing system, building on existing distance education and undergraduate laboratory infrastructure, that will enable crucial ice-sheet science and educate a diverse workforce in both polar science and cyberinfrastructure," said Hayden.

Page:  1  of  3
1 | 2 | 3   All  »  


Article Tools

  • Print This Page
  • Bookmark This Article

Share Options

(Digg, Technorati, more)


Subscribe

Discussion

There are 0 discussion items posted.  



Feature Articles

TeraGrid '09: Student Participation Soars

There was a new energy at this year's TeraGrid '09 conference thanks to an outstanding turnout for the student program. Thanks to support from the National Science Foundation, more than 100 high school, undergraduate and graduate students were able to participate in the conference.
Read More...

TeraGrid '09: OSG and TeraGrid Collaboration

Paul Avery, a recognized leader in advanced grid and networking for science, delivered the first keynote address at the recent TeraGrid '09 conference in Arlington, Virginia. A professor of physics at the University of Florida, Avery is co-principal investigator and founding member of the Open Science Grid (OSG). Avery talked about the history of OSG, some of the projects that leverage its resources, and OSG's relationship with TeraGrid.
Read More...

TeraGrid '09: Thriving in an Exponentially Changing World

Before he even took the podium, Ed Seidel was one of the buzz makers at the TeraGrid '09 conference. The day before his keynote, it was announced that he was stepping in as acting assistant director of the National Science Foundation's math and physical sciences directorate. For his talk at the conference, however, Seidel focused on the issues and efforts within his home at NSF, the Office of Cyberinfrastructure.
Read More...

Top Headlines

3D Seismic Data: Taking a Smarter Approach to Interpretation

Jul 09 | Engineer Live | The demand for computational tools to underpin the 3D seismic interpretation process has never been more apparent. Read more...

Engineering Unemployment Soared in 2Q to 8.6%

Jul 08 | EE Times | Unemployment for U.S. engineers has reached record levels, according to government figures. Read more...

Gartner Adjusts 2009 IT Spend Downward Again

Jul 08 | Network World | Global spending for 2009 projected to drop 6 percent, for a total of $3.2 trillion. Read more...

Concurrent and Parallel Are Not The Same

Jul 08 | Linux Magazine | Portability or efficiency? Neither is guaranteed when writing explicit parallel code. Read more...

800 TFLOP Real-Time Ray Tracing GPU Unveiled, Not for Gamers

Jul 07 | Ars Technica | Japanese company builds custom ASIC to accelerate real-time ray traced rendering for the auto industry. Read more...

Featured Whitepapers

Building High Performance Computing in a Green and Modular Solution Building Block

Apr 14 | | Many HPC IT departments are feeling the rising pressure to deliver more capacity computing and performance while trying to reduce the total cost of ownership. This white paper discusses how an environmentally-friendly and open-standards HPC building block based computing system using flexible interconnect options helps address capacity computing needs.

Multimedia

Webcast: Dell Expands HPC Access and Adoption with Intel Cluster Ready Program


Source: Addison Snell, GM/VP, Tabor Research; sponsored by Dell

Many organizations that could benefit from the use of HPC clusters find that it is complicated to get the systems up and running because of limited IT resources or the complexities of the clusters themselves. Learn how the Intel Cluster Ready program, for which Dell was an original partner, seeks to address this challenge for entry level and mid-range HPC users.

Video White Paper: Architecting a Better Network Storage Solution

BlueArc's Titan architecture represents an evolutionary step in file servers by creating a hardware-based file system that can scale bandwidth, IOPS, and overall data capacity well beyond conventional software-based devices. With its ability to virtualize a massive storage pool of up to four usable petabytes of tiered storage, Titan can scale with growing data requirements, offering a competitive advantage for businesses, researchers, or other enterprises seeking to better manage data growth while still ensuring optimal performance.

Webcast: HPC Development Solutions: Sun Studio & Sun HPC ClusterTools


Sun Studio Compilers and Tools and Sun HPC ClusterTools allow you to create high performance parallel applications for OpenSolaris, Solaris and Linux. Sun Studio Express 11/08 includes MPI performance analysis capabilities and full OpenMP 3.0 compiler support. Learn about all this and the latest in Sun HPC ClusterTools 8.1.

Special Feature: ISC'09

Newsletters

Stay informed! Subscribe to HPCwire email Newsletters.






HPC Job Bank


Featured Events

WORLDCOMP 2009
Data Mining Courses