ASTRONOMY

NCSA’s mission is to empower the nation’s science and engineering researchers, enabling them to tackle critical problems that once seemed intractable. Providing high-performance cyber-resources is only the first step in fulfilling this mission; NCSA also provides the user-focused, user-friendly cyberenvironments that allow the broad research community to tap the power of cyberinfrastructure more easily and effectively. Cyberenvironments combine concepts and technologies from distributed computing, digital libraries, collaboratories, problem-solving environments, and the semantic Web and go beyond an access-to-resources paradigm to provide more natural, end-to-end, science-oriented capabilities. By reducing the effort required to manage large-scale, complex, and interdisciplinary research projects, cyberenvironments pave the way for enhanced scientific and engineering productivity. NCSA staff will give a presentation describing the creation of cyberenvironments for science and engineering at the center’s booth at 11 a.m. Wednesday, Nov. 16. Other scheduled demos include: -- Innovative Systems for Science and Engineering: NCSA’s Innovative Systems Laboratory provides early access to, and evaluation of, future generations of computing systems, hardware, and software. It focuses on architectures that promise to significantly decrease the cost of computational scientific and engineering applications or to greatly extend the range of these applications. 1 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 15 -- Cyber-resources for Science and Engineering: The need for high-end computing resources is driven by the increasing fidelity and attendant sophistication of computational models used to describe natural and engineered systems. Increasingly, it is also driven by the growing quantity of data that must be managed, analyzed, visualized, and understood. This talk with give an overview of the more than 40 teraflops of compute power NCSA provides to the research community, education, and industry. It will also describe how NCSA is engaging research communities to better understand their requirements and usage modes. 1 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 16 -- Grid-Based Simulation of Gas Transport in Proteins: Researchers at the Theoretical and Computational Biophysics Group at the University of Illinois are now able to image gas transport pathways inside proteins, which has many implications for biotechnology and science. For this research, a large number of simulations need to be run and monitored, traditionally very time-consuming tasks. To solve this problem, a grid submission engine (NAMD-G) targeted toward biomolecular simulations running the NAMD software has been developed by NCSA in collaboration with the research team. From the researchers' host machines, NAMD-G can farm out a large number of jobs, in parallel, to the Linux clusters at NCSA and to other supercomputers on the TeraGrid. In addition, NAMD-G monitors and manages multiple sequences of linked simulation jobs and performs the necessary transfers and backups on all of their associated files on an as-needed basis. During this presentation, the scientific background of the gas transport process, the NAMD and VMD software, and the NAMD-G submission engine will all be showcased. 7 p.m. Monday, Nov. 14 -- Linked Environments for Atmospheric Discovery: Linked Environments for Atmospheric Discovery (LEAD) is a National Science Foundation large Information Technology Research project aimed at connecting people and technologies with the weather. To this end, LEAD has laid out a project plan whereby it incrementally approaches the ultimate goal of seamless interoperability between data sources, forecasting tools, and analysis tools that feed back into data collection schemes through the construction of a number of prototypes with an increasingly large set of features relevant to LEAD. This demonstration will show the materialization of data onto any of the project’s grid and Web testbed nodes, with key capabilities in LEAD expressed as services, to be orchestrated through the LEAD portal. This demonstration will show use of the underlying grid to move data as needed between testbed nodes, as well as decoding of the data into the required format for display in the integrated data viewer (IDV). 8 p.m. Monday, Nov. 14 SC2005 will be Nov. 12-18 at the Washington State Convention and Trade Center in Seattle. The SC05 exhibit floor opens at 7 p.m. Monday, Nov. 14, with a gala reception and will be open from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 15, and Wednesday, Nov. 16, and from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 17. Demonstrations in the NCSA booth will run from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Tuesday, Nov. 15; 11 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. on Wednesday, Nov. 16; and 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Thursday, Nov. 17. For a complete schedule of activities, stop by the NCSA booth.