Tuesday, September 15, 2009

UC San Diego Cyberlink


Below is the latest "UC San Diego Cyberlink"


UC San Diego CyberLink is a monthly digest of news and events related to cyberinfrastructure from San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2), Jacobs School of Engineering, UC San Diego Libraries, Administrative Computing & Telecommunications (ACT) and Center for Research in Biological Structures (CRBS). If you have news to share about cyberinfrastructure-related research, applications or activities on the UC San Diego campus, please send them to cyberlink@ucsd.edu.
Blink 2.0 Launched September 10
On September 10, 2009, Administrative Computing & Telecommunications (ACT) launched Blink 2.0. The new UC San Diego site page uses the Hannon Hill Cascade Server content management system and has direct links to research, instruction, business, and personal tools, a new calendar feature, a live shuttle map, and more.
Calit2 is leading an effort to develop and construct the science-driven, networked cyberinfrastructure to underpin the U.S. Ocean Observatories Initiative, with UC San Diego slated to receive approximately $32 million of newly-announced funding for the effort.
Leveraging lightning-fast technology already familiar to many from the micro storage world of digital cameras, thumb drives and laptop computers, SDSC has unveiled a “super-sized” version – the first “flash” memory-based resource of its kind among major HPC systems designed to accelerate investigation of a wide range of data-intensive science problems.
UC San Diego students working on cyberinfrastructure projects this summer in India, Malaysia, Australia, Japan and Taiwan talk about how they are balancing research at foreign institutions and the excitement – and challenges – of living and working abroad.
A UC San Diego-led team of computer scientists and optical interconnection systems technologists in the Center for Integrated Access Networks (CIAN) is developing Scalable Energy Efficient Data Centers (SEED, for short). It consists of novel optical interconnection technologies for a multi-stage network topology that could offer tomorrow's data centers greater scalability, bisectional bandwidth, fault tolerance and energy efficiency.
Computer scientists have developed an inexpensive solution for diagnosing router delays in data center networks as short as tens of millionths of seconds. These delays can slow parallel processing in high performance cluster computing applications. They can also lead to multimillion-dollar losses for investment banks running automatic stock trading systems.
Software created by UC San Diego computer scientists may lead to data centers that logically function as single, plug-and-play networks that will scale to today's massive data center networks.
The new self-registration wireless network, UCSD-GUEST, is now available to campus visitors and guests, who no longer need to obtain guest usernames and passwords in advance to use the wireless network. Administrative Computing & Telecommunications implemented this new feature in August.
Visualization researchers at Calit2 have unveiled a 3D display system made of nine modified, overlapping LCD flat screens. The NexCAVE device is a relatively economical solution for viewing 3D imagery at distributed end-points in larger cyberinfrastructures.
The High Performance Wireless Research and Education Network (HPWREN) and UC San Diego are supporting Dr. Toby Whitley from the University of Bath, England, in setting up a data logger and magnetic field sensors at Piñon Flat Observatory in southern California. The long term measurement campaign at Piñon Flat will enable the study of sprites, a type of transient luminous event seen above large thunderstorms.
A powerful new programming approach that generates malicious behavior by combining short snippets of good code can be used to take over voting machines, computer scientists demonstrate.
SDSC has officially launched the Triton Resource, an integrated, data-intensive computing system primarily designed to support UC San Diego and UC researchers. It has some of the most extensive data analysis power available commercially or at any research institution in the country because of its unique large-memory nodes.
HPWREN assisted the National Park Service at Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area in planning and installing a wireless connection and web camera to monitor fires which typically begin inland and race towards the ocean in Malibu. Images and video will provide data for input to a fire behavior model currently under development.
Four new videos featuring some of HPWREN's most recent network applications – collaborations with Native Americans, high-end astronomy research, hydrology sensors, and research on energy efficient wireless sensor networks – are now available on the HPWREN website. They are encoded in MPEG-4, which may require a video player such as MPlayer, VLC or QuickTime.
Calit2 and the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts as well as international partners staged the first movie premiere to be streamed in real time on three continents over high-speed optical networks in a super-high-bandwidth format that offers four times the resolution of high-def TV.


MARK YOUR CALENDAR…… for these upcoming cyberinfrastructure-connected events and training sessions. All events will be held at UC San Diego (except where noted otherwise).
Sept. 22, 2009 – 1:30-3pm – First Floor Lobby, Atkinson Hall, UC San Diego
Visualization and cyberinfrastructure are just two of the topics on display when two dozen undergraduates from a dozen UCSD departments convey the findings of their summer research, at the conclusion of the ninth annual Calit2 summer program to encourage more research opportunities. Computer engineering freshman Robert Turner, working with computer science advisor Beth Simon, worked on interconnecting the Web, iPhone and iClicker with the Ubiquitous Presenter classroom technology system .

Sept. 27 - 30, 2009 – Falls Church , Virginia
Featured workshop topics include knowledge reuse, software verification, software ecosystems, and software reuse and safety.

Oct. 12 - 16, 2009 – SDSC Auditorium, UC San Diego
The Jacobs School's Gordon Engineering Leadership Center is hosting the first SAASE event and summer school, co-chaired by Gordon Center director Ingolf Krueger (also of Calit2 and the Jacobs School), Manfred Broy (Universität München), and Ford Motor's K. Venkatesh. Papers will address research advances in aerospace and automotive software and systems engineering, architecture, components, systems and systems-of-systems – from and across all associated engineering disciplines.

Jan. 25 - 28, 2010 – Calit2 Auditorium, Atkinson Hall, UC San Diego
The C5 conference focuses on ways to transform computer-based human activities for creating and collaborating as a knowledge society emerges from now-pervasive computers, networks and other technologies. Talks will focus on visualization; collaboration and communication; technology-human interaction; virtual worlds; social networks; learning and much more. Paper submission deadline: Oct. 23.

Astrophysical and Magnetic Fusion Theorists!


Under a new $5.8 million five-year grant from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), UC San Diego will host and lead the new Center for Momentum Transport and Flow Organization in Plasmas and Magnetofluids, which will bring together astrophysical and magnetic fusion theorists, experimentalists and computationalists from multiple institutions.


The big-picture goal is to turn fusion into a reliable green energy source.


“We are interested in identifying and understanding the common elements between fusion experiments, rotating stars and accretion disks. How do these systems develop organized flows and how do they dissipate or get rid of the energy associated with the flows?” said George Tynan, a UCSD Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering professor and researcher for the UCSD Center for Energy Research. “Answering these questions can allow us to gain a better understanding of the overall behavior of these systems. For example, in order for stars and planets to for the disk has to get rid of some of the rotational energy.”




Sunny Southern Califonia Increases Focus on the Sun


Southern Californians are all about the sun...and so are a group of Jacobs School of Engineering researchers who are working to bring the sun's fusion processes back to earth. The goal is to provide a much-needed renewable energy to southern California and beyond.


At the heart of the sun, fusion takes place at a temperature of 15 million degrees. Since it's impossible to reproduce these conditions on Earth, terrestrial fusion reactors must operate at lower pressures and higher temperatures -- at about 100 million degrees. The best way to control the plasma is to “bottle” it, enclosing the electrically charged gas in powerful magnetic fields. So far, the most successful magnetic “bottle” is a doughnut-shaped device called a tokamak, where a helical magnetic field is used to confine the plasma.


A team of researchers from UC San Diego, MIT and UC Berkeley recently received a $7 million research grant from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) for fundamental multiscale studies of plasma-material interactions.


Russ Doerner is a research scientist in the UCSD’s Jacobs School of Engineering’s Center for Energy Research and co-PI on the DOE contract. “There’s no deep understanding of this interaction between the plasma and its ‘wall’ and the other materials in a confined environment. If you can build these ‘walls’, or layers, to be more effective it will save time, money and energy in the long run.”