Minster replaced Freeman Gilbert of SIO, who stepped down in April. Altman takes over from Peter Taylor, a computational chemist at SDSC and NPACI's Chief Applications Scientist who had been the acting thrust area leader. Taylor remains Chief Applications Scientist.

NLANR Group at SDSC Awarded $2.08 Million to Analyze Network Traffic

"We would like to understand the workload--the traffic signature--of the network," said Hans-Werner Braun, principal investigator of the NLANR/MOAT effort. "Understanding the intricacies of Internet traffic patterns and characterizing workload is fundamental to our ability to design and implement next-generation networks."

"All agencies need to address the challenge of life-cycle management of records in an automated environment," said Archivist of the United States John Carlin. "This is a great opportunity to apply information technology to improve both internal processes and services to customers. We are interested in whether the technical approaches explored in the DOCT project could be applied throughout the federal government in managing records as well as specifically within NARA to address some of the challenges of archival preservation and access to electronic records."

NARA's involvement with DOCT is intended to solve its critical need to develop better ways to preserve historically valuable electronic records of the federal government. The DOCT testbed provides an infrastructure on which to test advanced technologies for preserving electronic records.

"The Starfire has proven itself to be a formidable data-handling engine," said Mike Vildibill, SDSC's associate director for computing resources. "We are eager to integrate the Starfire into SDSC's data-intensive infrastructure."

NPACI's Starfire system has 16 UltraSPARC II processors running at 333 MHz (scalable to 64 processors), 8 GB of memory, and 100 GB of disk. The Starfire also offers "domain partitioning," which allows the system to be split into several independent systems, as well as hot-swappable parts for correcting hardware problems without interrupting users of the system.

"We have achieved some encouraging results on the one-processor MTA system since December," said Wayne Pfeiffer, deputy director at SDSC and principal investigator for the MTA evaluation projects. "We look forward to working with larger MTA systems and verifying the performance on real-world applications." SDSC expects to make the MTA available to a limited number of additional scientists at UC San Diego and elsewhere later this year.

"I think that international programs like the NPACI International Affiliates Program are going to be an increasingly important part of PACI," said Steve Elbert, NSF PACI Program Director. "The rest of the world is looking to the United States in this area."

Four international universities are members of the International Affiliates Program: the Advanced Computational Systems Cooperative Research Center (ACSys) at the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra, Australia; the Center for Research on Parallel Computation and Supercomputers (CPS) in Naples, Italy; the Computer Engineering Department of the University of Lecce, Italy; and the Parallel Computing Center at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm, Sweden.

"The goal of these collaborations is to accelerate the researchers' efforts by using resources most effectively and enable new science on relatively short time scales," said Jay Boisseau, the NPACI Strategic Applications Coordinator. "We hope to discover general solutions that will benefit not only the selected researchers but also their entire academic communities and all HPC users."

Candidates for the program are chosen to ensure that SAC teams achieve significant results and that the methods and results are recognized in the academic and HPC user communities.

Organized by Henry Sowizral, a senior staff engineer at Sun and the chief architect of the Java 3D API, the full-day course will be taught July 21 by Sowizral; SDSC principal scientist David Nadeau; Michael Deering, a distinguished engineer at Sun and co-architect of Java 3D; and SDSC principal scientist Michael Bailey. Nadeau has also been one of the librarians of the SDSC-maintained Java 3D Repository.

"We don't want operational details that can be easily automated to get in the way of anyone's scientific work," Boisseau said. "And we do want to draw together all of the operational services so that the users see NPACI as a unified entity."

The HotPage features links to all NPACI user documentation, application-appropriate technical documents, news items of interest, training and consulting, data on platforms and applications, and information about allocations and accounts. Users can also find the real-time operational status of computational resources, access the platforms' messages-of-the-day, and display current queue information.