NEWS ABOUT NPACI & SDSC

Strategic Advisors Selected

Fran Berman, director of SDSC and NPACI, has selected six scientists to provide her counsel on a regular basis. "I look forward to working with this distinguished group and to expanding our set of strategic advisors in the future," said Berman. The strategic advisors are:

Richard Moore Appointed NPACI Executive Director

NPACI has selected aerospace research executive Richard L. Moore as its new executive director, succeeding Peter Arzberger, who has assumed new responsibilities in the office of the Vice Chancellor for Research at UC San Diego. Moore, who moved into his office at SDSC in mid-February, will provide strategic direction and management as well as day-to-day supervision of NPACI operations.

"This is an important year for NPACI and Richard’s combination of strategic, management, leadership, and scientific skills will greatly benefit the partnership and help take us into the future," said NPACI and SDSC Director Fran Berman. "We would also like to thank Peter for his service, leadership and outstanding contributions to NPACI." (v 6.2)

Ellisman’s Group Wins Award at SC2001

A team of researchers representing
NPACI, the National Center for Microscopy and Imaging Research (NCMIR), and UCSD received a top award at the Supercomputing 2001 conference for having the "Best Network-Enabled Application." The group, led by Mark Ellisman, leader of NPACI’s Neuroscience thrust area and director of NCMIR at UCSD, transferred a live video stream from a high-energy transmission electron microscope in San Diego to the conference in Denver, CO.

SC2001’s Bandwidth Challenge encouraged researchers to push SciNet’s 14.5-gigabit wide-area network connection over multiple OC-48 links with demonstrations of leading-edge computer applications. Judges of the competition added a category for the "Best Network-Enabled Application" to recognize Ellisman’s "Telescience for Advanced Tomography Applications" project.

The telescience application included a remote-controlled electron microscope that imaged spiny dendrites, the branch-like structures that transmit nerve impulses between cells in the brain. The judges recognized the demonstration for transmitting data in new ways, as opposed to simply moving as much data as possible. "This application was head and shoulders above the others in terms of using a network to integrate and deliver an effective application," said one judge. (v 5.24)

12 Companies Adopt Globus Toolkit as Standard Grid Technology Platform

The open source Globus Toolkit has become the de facto international standard in grid computing as 12 leading computer vendors and software providers in the United States and Japan announced that they will port and/or support the product.

The University of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute and Argonne National Laboratory developed Globus, which is a focus of research in the NPACI Grid Computing Thrust Area.

Compaq, Cray, SGI, Sun Microsystems, and Veridian in the United States, and Fujitsu, Hitachi, and NEC in Japan, will adopt Globus and develop an optimized form of it for their platforms as their preferred path toward secure, distributed, multi-vendor, grid computing. Three other American companies, Microsoft, IBM, and Entropia also announced stronger commitments to Globus. Platform Computing Inc. also announced that it will collaborate with Globus to provide a commercially supported version of the toolkit.

"Grid computing makes possible new and previously unimagined collaboration and applications," said Bill Blake, vice president of High Performance Technical Computing at Compaq. "Open source standards are crucial to making this vision a reality, and the Globus team is doing essential work in this area." (v 5.24)

PDBScientists Release Alpha Version of OpenMMS Toolkit

A consortium of scientists managing the
Protein Data Bank (PDB)–the world’s central online archive containing detailed structural data on proteins, nucleic acids, and protein-nucleic acid complexes–has released a software toolkit that provides more seamless access to this information. The OpenMMS (Open Macromolecular Structure) Toolkit, released by the nonprofit Research Collaboratory for Structural Bioinformatics (RCSB) consortium, allows researchers to use the PDB more efficiently with the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) standard.

Researchers rely on the PDB to pursue a wide range of biological investigations, such as drug discovery and design, molecular comparison analysis, and studies of evolution at the molecular level. "The RCSB consortium is committed to providing PDB data in the most effective way possible, and the OpenMMS toolkit does that," said Philip Bourne, co-director of RCSB and director of Integrated Biosciences at SDSC, and professor of Pharmacology at UCSD. (v 5.25)

Girls Gather for SDSC-Sponsored Science Night

Hundreds of San Diego girls and their families recently spent an evening at the San Ysidro (CA)Community Center working with computers, microscopes, bridge building kits, and soda bottle rockets as part of the SDSC-sponsored Science Enrichment Program. The November 16, 2001, event was intended to give parents of minority girls in grades 4—8 an opportunity to become more aware of their daughters’ talents and interest in science.

"Parental support is very important to further girls’ interest in science and technology," said Rozeanne Steckler, senior staff scientist at SDSC and a founding director of the Science Enrichment Program. "Some may say that higher education can distance minorities from their culture, and we’re showing that that is not always the case."

Family Science Night at San Ysidro, which lies north of the border with Mexico, also gave parents an opportunity to meet their daughters’ teachers and participate in hands-on science projects. NSF Director Rita Colwell called the program "an exemplary education initiative." (v 5.25)

Taylor Moving to University of Warwick

Peter Taylor, SDSC’s Program Director for Computational Science, has announced plans to take on new roles with Great Britain’s University of Warwick. Taylor, who joined SDSC in 1992, has accepted an appointment as Royal Society Wolfson Professor of Chemistry and chief scientist of the Centre for Scientific Computing at the University of Warwick. The Centre was established in late 2001 to provide an environment in which computational scientists, computer scientists, and mathematicians can interact and collaborate.

"This is a great opportunity for Peter," said NPACI and SDSC Director Fran Berman. "Peter has shown outstanding scholarship and great leadership in his work at the center, and we will greatly miss him. We wish Peter much success in his new role and look forward to continued collaboration with him in the future." (v 6.3)

SDSC Chooses SAN Solution from Sun

SDSC has selected Sun Microsystems, Inc., to build the center’s data-intensive portion of the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Distributed Terascale Facility, called the TeraGrid. SDSC will use Sun’s iForce(SM) High Performance Computing Storage Area Network (HPC SAN) solution to allow multiple computers–using a range of operating systems–to seamlessly share data. SDSC chose the Sun platform and its iForce HPC SAN solution for its proven performance and scalability, and will leverage Sun Professional Services for architecture guidance.

The $53 million TeraGrid project includes four partners: SDSC; the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; Argonne National Laboratory in Argonne, IL; and the Center for Advanced Computing Research at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

SDSC works on some of the world’s most challenging biological, environmental, and computing issues. Sun technologies offer the performance needed to support data-intensive requirements. (v 5.25)

NPACI Portal Adds Data Technology

GAMESS, a favorite software tool of computational chemists, is incorporating the advanced file handling and storage management of the SDSC Storage Resource Broker (SRB). The GAMESS Web portal provides seamless access to computational resources across the country, allowing scientists to investigate ab initio quantum chemistry without worrying about which machines are working on the problems.

"Integrating the SRB into the GAMESS Web portal will give researchers access to one of the best data management systems available," said Jerry Greenberg, a programmer analyst with the National Biomedical Computation Resource at SDSC. "Computational chemistry has reached the point where problems generate enormous amounts of data on many different types of machines and the SRB provides an excellent and easy-to-use way to control that information." (v 6.4)