ACADEMIA

CHAMPAIGN, IL -- The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will offer a seminar series over the Access Grid beginning in July. The series will offer information on high-performance computing tools and applications developed by NCSA and its National Computational Science Alliance (Alliance) partners. The Access Grid Seminar series will offer at least one two-hour session a month on topics of interest to academic and industry researchers, and faculty and staff at universities, research centers, and government laboratories. Staff with NCSA's Education, Outreach, and Training (EOT) program will coordinate the series. The Access Grid is an integrated, interactive audio and video environment that supports distributed group meetings, remote collaborative research and visualization, and distance education. It is an Alliance project led by Argonne National Laboratory. Ninety-eight sites in the U.S., Canada, Europe, Asia, Australia, and South America operate Access Grid nodes. Those interested in participating in a seminar should contact their Access Grid coordinator to reserve their Grid node and seminar series coordinator Mary Ellen Michael at . The seminar series is expected to continue next spring. Those with ideas for seminars are also encouraged to contact Michael. Below is the seminar series schedule through October. All seminars will run from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. Central time. July, 9 2002 OSCAR (Open Source Cluster Applications Resources) for High-Speed Performance Instructor: Neil Gorsuch, software engineer, NCSA. An overview of OSCAR 1.2.1, software that makes it easy to build, maintain, and use a modest-size Linux cluster for high-performance computing. Aug. 6, 2002 VIAS--An Automated Knowledge Acquisition and Extraction System Instructor: Alan Craig, research programmer, NCSA Introduction to NCSA VIAS, which automatically builds databases by archiving information from electronic mailing lists and USENET newsgroups, and by executing targeted crawls of the Web. Sept. 10, 2002 Introduction to HDF5 Instructors: Mike Folk, technical program manager, NCSA, Barbara Jones, Elena Pourmal, technical support, NCSA HDF5 Tutorial on Hierarchical Data Format, version 5 (HDF5), a data management and organization tool used by many large research projects and organizations. Sept. 12, 2002 Using HDF5 in High-Performance Computing Environments A continuation of the Sept. 10 tutorial. Sept. 24, 2002 Biology Workbench Instructors: Kevin Messner and John Sabo, research programmers, NCSA Tutorial introducing Biology Workbench, an online suite of bioinformatics tools used in research and education. Oct. 8, 2002 D2K (Data to Knowledge), a Tool for Data Mining Instructor: Michael Welge, program manager, NCSA Information on D2K, a JAVA-based application used to predict outcomes and extract information from existing data. Oct. 22, 2002 BioCoRE Instructor: Kirby Vandervort, UI Theoretical Biophysics Group A seminar to demonstrate BioCoRE, an application that allows users to access NAMD, a parallel, object-oriented molecular dynamics code. The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is a leader in developing and deploying cutting-edge high-performance computing, networking, and information technologies. NCSA is a partner in the TeraGrid project, a National Science Foundation initiative to build and deploy the world's largest, fastest, most comprehensive, distributed infrastructure for open scientific research. NCSA also leads the National Computational Science Alliance (Alliance), a partnership to prototype an advanced computational infrastructure for the 21st century that includes more than 50 academic, government, and industry research partners. The NSF Partnerships for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (PACI) program funds the Alliance. In addition to the NSF, NCSA receives support from the state of Illinois, the University of Illinois, private sector partners, and other federal agencies. For more information, see http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu.