ASTRONOMY

Exhibits at the annual conference, considered the premier U.S. event in the field of supercomputing, will be open to the public from November 13-15 at the Reno Sparks Convention Center. The IU exhibit features speakers from IU, as well as presentations by scientists and researchers from other institutions collaborating with IU on innovative projects involving advanced information technology. IU exhibit highlights include presentations on technology education opportunities and polar science within IU's new Polar Grid cyberinfrastructure project given by Professor Linda Hayden of Elizabeth City State University at 10:00 am and by Professor Prasad Gogineni of the University of Kansas Center for Remote Sensing of Ice Sheets at 2:00 pm, both on November 14. In support of the "Gateways to Insight" theme, IU's Marlon Pierce, assistant director of the Community Grids Lab, will speak on November 13 at 10:00 am about the newly-funded Open Grid Computing Environments, a large-scale collaborative project funded by the National Science Foundation to develop software for building science portal gateways. Craig Stewart, associate dean for research technologies at Indiana University will provide an overview of IU's core IT equipment and services on November 13 at 5:00pm. In addition, two Indiana University teams will participate in competitions held during the conference. The High Performance Bandwidth Challenge is an annual competition designed to test the limits of network capabilities and applications that support supercomputing. An IU team, led by Stephen Simms, will use IU's 535 TB Data Capacitor to demonstrate data collection, analysis, and visualization across distance. Researchers from IU, the Rochester Institute of Technology, and the Technische Universitaet Dresden will assist in the demonstration, running a range of data-intensive applications from a variety of disciplines. IU will also host a team in the Cluster Challenge, a new competition in which teams of undergraduate students assemble and run benchmarks on a small cluster on the exhibit floor. The team of IU undergraduate students has been working on its competition "Red Delicious" Apple Xserve cluster under the leadership of team facilitator Andrew Lumsdaine, along with guidance from researchers and graduate students from the IU School of Informatics and University Information Technology Services. Corporate partners for the Cluster Challenge include Apple, Intel, Myricom and Fujitsu. For more details on the Indiana University exhibit, and to view the complete schedule of speakers, visit its Web site.