ENTERTAINMENT

BALTIMORE--Visitors to booth R1249 at SC2002 will get a peek at the power of the TeraGrid, learn about the technology behind the IntelliBadge project, observe the capabilities of an early version of the NEESgrid, see visualizations of supernovae explosions and black hole collisions, and much more. The booth is the research exhibit of the National Computational Science Alliance (Alliance) and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). SC2002, the world's largest high-performance computing and networking conference, convenes Nov. 16-22 at the Baltimore Convention Center. The SC2002 exhibit floor opens at 7 p.m. Monday, Nov. 18, with a VIP reception and will be open from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 19, and Wednesday, Nov. 20, and from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 21. "The grid infrastructure and computing resources being developed and deployed by the Alliance, NCSA, and its TeraGrid partners are changing the face of computational science," said Dan Reed, director of NCSA and the Alliance and TeraGrid chief architect. "Many of our demonstrations will showcase new grid infrastructure, which will link terascale computers, online data repositories, and applications. In the long run, the TeraGrid will enable new breakthrough scientific discoveries." Funded by the National Science Foundation, the TeraGrid is a multi-year effort to build the world's most powerful distributed computing infrastructure for open scientific research. Five institutions currently are part of the project: NCSA, the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), the Center for Advanced Computing Research (CACR) at the California Institute of Technology, Argonne National Laboratory, and the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center. A 32-node TeraGrid Linux cluster--IBM servers with Intel's Itanium(TM) 2 processor--will span four of the TeraGrid partners' booths and will connect via 10-gigabit-per-second links into SCinet, the high-speed conference network. Several demonstrations in the Alliance booth will utilize the TeraGrid Itanium 2 architecture: *NAMD and VMD--applications for biomolecular modeling and visualization, presented by Jim Phillips of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. *Microbubble drag reduction--simulations of drag reduction in a turbulent flow through the injection of small bubbles, presented by George Karniadakis and Steve Dong of Brown University. *MEAD--an example of how the TeraGrid can be used to run hundreds of weather forecast simulations and how the data can then be analyzed in depth, presented by Bob Wilhelmson, Jay Alameda, and Brian Jewitt of NCSA. *Turbulence simulations--a visual representation of very fine details in turbulent gas flows, presented by Paul Woodward, David Porter, and Sarah Anderson of the University of Minnesota, and Bob Wilhelmson of NCSA. *Eclipse Reservoir Modeling-- a simulation of oil and gas reservoirs, an essential tool in managing these natural resources, presented by Kevin Shaw of Schlumberger Limited. *Remote, distributed black hole computations--real-time simulations of black hole collisions using a range of grid resources, presented by Ed Seidel and Gabielle Allen of the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics. In addition to these demonstrations, another presentation will highlight the benefits of a developing infrastructure to support remote, collaborative experimentation and data analysis among earthquake engineers. An early version of the Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation grid, or NEESgrid, will be demonstrated Nov. 14 at a meeting at the University of Nevada, Reno. In the Reno demo, researchers will simulate an earthquake's effect on a bridge span using shake tables equipped with sensors. At SC2002, NCSA's Joe Futrelle and Joel Plutchak will show the data from the Reno demonstration and also explain the Curated Data Repository, the data archiving, retrieval, and management component of the NEESgrid. NCSA leads the NSF-funded NEESgrid project. Another NCSA-led project is IntelliBadge, and NCSA's Volodymyr Kindratenko and Donna Cox will demonstrate the interactive database and visualization technologies that were used to create and support the project. IntelliBadge is a demonstration of "smart" technology that uses Savi Technologies' 600 Series RFID badges. Participation is open to all SC2002 technical program registrants, who will then be able to see a playback of the conference's history; view the distribution of attendees by their interests; track conference statistics, such as miles walked; play interactive games; locate and join groups; and find useful information, including the distance to restaurants that cater to their tastes. IntelliBadge technology and display systems will be distributed throughout the convention center. A wide range of other examples of grid technologies and scientific successes using resources developed by NCSA and Alliance partners will be presented in the Alliance/NCSA booth. Stop by the booth for a full demonstration schedule.