INDUSTRY

The San Diego Supercomputer Center’s annual Summer Computing Institute, held the week of August 23 - 27, can now be relived on the Web in streaming video. With the theme of “Data Computing,” this year’s workshop gave the 20 attendees an introduction to cyberinfrastructure concepts and tools for the creation, manipulation, dissemination, and analysis of large datasets. The series covered techniques in general use and new technologies that provide advanced features and services -- many of them developed at SDSC. Streaming videos of the workshop presentations are now available on the SDSC website. Each presentation session video is a separate RealPlayer .ram file. Each session’s written notes also are available on the same site, in the form of PowerPoint files. “This was the first Summer Computing Institute in which we treated data-intensive computing as an integral part of cyberinfrastructure,” said program training coordinator Donald Frederick of SDSC's Scientific Computing Services group. “The attendees seemed to appreciate seeing it all come together.” Led by experts from the SDSC's staff, the Summer Computing Institute activities encompassed classroom lectures, case studies, and hands-on laboratory sessions. “The sessions covered visualization, data mining, databases, and middleware,” Frederick said. “Case studies enabled attendees to see the application of cyberinfrastructure technologies in production situations.” Case studies in data research projects included the Protein Data Bank (PBD), Cyberinfrastructure for Phylogenetic Research (CIPRes), the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL), the National Virtual Observatory (NVO), the APST middleware tool, and the SDSC Biology Workbench. “We received many comments from participants that this was a useful and satisfying set of presentations,” Frederick said. “The people who attended the lectures and laboratory sessions were generally quite positive in their evaluations at the end of the week, and the majority of the attendees’ responses rated the value of the workshop as ‘excellent’.” For more information on the SDSC Summer Computing Institute and other training programs, see http://www.sdsc.edu/Training/.