ASTRONOMY

NCSA's exhibit in Booth 548 will feature three presentation zones anchored by a large-screen display where scientists and technology developers will present their work. Science conducted using the center's more than 30 teraflops of computing power-including the Mercury cluster that is a key part of the TeraGrid cyberinfrastructure-will be the highlight of booth activities. Scheduled demos include: Exploring Biomolecular Machines with Supercomputers: Computational and experimental biologists jointly investigate the physical mechanisms underlying the function of the molecular machines in cells. Members of the Theoretical and Computational Biophysics Group at the University of Illinois regularly use NAMD to simulate systems of 300,000 atoms and beyond on NCSA's Linux clusters, visualizing and analyzing the results with VMD software. This presentation will highlight the team's simulations of the MscS mechanosensitive membrane channel and will demonstrate how BioCoRE software enables communication among collaborators and simplifies access to supercomputing resources. Researcher: Klaus Schulten, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Linked Environments for Atmospheric Discovery (LEAD) is an NSF Information Technology Research project aimed at connecting people and technologies with the weather. The ultimate goal is seamless interoperability between data sources, forecasting tools, and analysis tools through the construction of a number of prototypes with an increasingly large set of features. LEAD involves scientists at nine U.S. universities. 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). Researchers: Kelvin Droegemeier, University of Oklahoma; Jay Alameda, NCSA; Bob Wilhelmson, NCSA and University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign. Internal Cooling of Turbine Blades for Power and Propulsion: Gas turbines operate at temperatures that are well above the melting point of turbine blades, so active cooling of these components is crucial to preserve their structural integrity and avoid catastrophic failure. Results from a series of high-resolution calculations of one active-cooling method will be presented. Insight into the highly turbulent flow encountered internally in rotating blades will be highlighted by a series of animations that show the effect of different parameters on the turbulence generated and its effect on cooling efficiency. The work is being done by a team from Virginia Tech, and recent calculations were performed on NCSA's TeraGrid cluster. Researcher: Danesh Tafti,Virginia Tech. Coupled Space Weather Simulations Using the InterComm Library: The InterComm Library has been developed to facilitate communication between independent parallel programs. This demonstration will show InterComm operating as the communication medium between a number of codes used to simulate "space weather" (space weather is used to denote the effects upon the Earth and the near-Earth space environment from activity on the Sun that produces disturbances in the solar wind that impact upon the Earth's magnetosphere, ionosphere, and thermosphere). The researchers are based at Boston University, the University of Maryland, and Dartmouth College. Researchers: Charles C. Goodrich, Center for Integrated Space Weather Modeling, Boston University; Alan L. Sussman, UMIACS University of Maryland John G. Lyon Dartmouth College. Where is my oil, dude? Supporting Dynamic, Data-driven Oil Reservoir Simulation Studies in the Grid. The main objective of oil reservoir modeling is to predict oil production in order to optimize return on investment while minimizing environmental effects. An important challenge is to develop accurate models and mechanisms to search a large space of oil production and reservoir parameters. This process is very time consuming and data intensive, since simulation studies evaluate thousands of scenarios using complex models, resulting in multi-terabyte datasets. This demonstration will show the use of the TeraGrid infrastrcuture to develop a dynamic, data-driven approach to solving optimization problems in oil reservoir management. Researchers: Joel Saltz, Tahsin Kurc, Umit Catalyurek, and Benjamin Rutt, Biomedical Informatics Department, Ohio State University; Mary Wheeler, Hector Klie, and Wolfgang Bangerth, The Center for Subsurface Modeling, ICES, University of Texas at Austin; Paul Stoffa and Mrinal Sen, Institute for Geophysics, University of Texas at Austin; Manish Parashar, Rutgers. Large Scale Computer Simulations of Proton Transport Dynamics: A research group at the University of Utah's Center for Biophysical Modeling and Simulation has been studying the dynamic interactions of protons with the membrane channel environment. A novel methodology for the simulation of multiple proton systems with a computational cost scaling linearly with number of protons has recently been developed in the group and used to study proton solvation and transport phenomena. Solvation structures of protons and ions in aqueous solution have been examined within a hybrid parallel hopping and tempering algorithm. All these studies made extensive use of the NCSA parallel supercomputing environments. Researchers: Feng Wang, Boaz Ilan, Matt Peterson, and Christian Burnham, Greg Voth Center for Biophysical Modeling and Simulation. NCSA's booth will also feature presentations on the center's data mining applications, computer and network security research, and extensible sensor platform project. A high-definition stereo display system will showcase the center's expertise in scientific visualization. SC2004 will be Nov. 6-12 at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center in Pittsburgh. The SC04 exhibit floor opens at 7 p.m. Monday, Nov. 8, with a gala reception and will be open from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 9, and Wednesday, Nov. 10, and from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 11. Demonstrations in the NCSA booth will run from 10:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. on Tuesday, Nov. 9 and Wednesday, Nov. 10, and from 10:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 11. For a demonstration schedule, stop by the NCSA booth. NCSA (National Center for Supercomputing Applications) is a national high- performance computing center that develops and deploys cutting-edge computing, networking and information technologies. Located at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, NCSA is funded by the National Science Foundation. Additional support comes 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/.