XSEDEScience

Computer scientist Doug Jennewein's working environment is, in more ways than one, a great frontier. Situated at the University of South Dakota (USD) on America's wind-swept plain, he is in a job that is allowing him to pursue his passion for science and technology, and be a pioneer in growing the use of computationally assisted research.

In this podcast, he discusses how the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) has enhanced his work as USD's research computing manager.

Link to XSEDE website: https://www.xsede.org
Link to the University of South Dakota website: http://www.usd.edu

Spurring Scientific Exploration on the Great Plains with XSEDE and HPC

This podcast episode focuses on a recent XSEDE Campus Bridging Success involving a site visit.

The National Science Foundation-funded eXtreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) is a single virtual system that scientists can use to interactively share computing resources, data and expertise. People around the world use these resources and services—things like supercomputers, collections of data and new tools—to improve our planet.

XSEDE’s Campus Bridging aims to make cyberinfrastructure—whether local, regional, national, or international—feel close at hand to students, researchers, and staff. Computational systems, data and information management, advanced instruments, visualization environments, and people are all linked together by software for a sense of virtual proximity akin to accessing a peripheral device plugged into the back of a laptop.

Campus Bridging helps institutions with their computer clusters, or sets of computers that work together, by providing an open-source toolkit called Rocks for deploying, managing, upgrading, and scaling applications in parallel across the cluster. Each release of Rocks has core and optional “Rolls” that provide the operating system and other applications integral to cluster computing. So, Rocks Rolls helps institutions build an XSEDE-compatible basic cluster, or XCBC. 

Campus Bridging also offers on-site visits for software installations.  

The first of such visits took place in April at Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia. The project involved increasing the cluster’s capabilities and enhancing system management. 


An XSEDE Campus Bridging Success Story: Installation at Marshall University

The story in this podcast revolves around a collaboration of social scientists, humanities scholars, and digital researchers directed at using advanced computing to find and understand the historical experiences of Black women by searching two massive databases (HathiTrust and JSTOR) for written works from the 18th through the 20th centuries. The team also is developing a common toolbox that can help other digital humanities projects.

The research is supported by the National Science Foundation's eXtreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE), the preeminent collection of integrated digital resources and services in the world. (xsede.org)

Participating in the podcast's discussion are the following: Ruby Mendenhall, an associate professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and the project's principal investigator; Nicole M. Brown, a postdoctoral researcher at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA); Michael Black, an assistant professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell; and Mark Vanmoer, a senior visualization programmer at NCSA.

Links to stories that have been written about this project:

http://www.nsf.gov/discoveries/disc_summ.jsp?cntn_id=137797&org=NSF

http://www.ncsa.illinois.edu/news/story/word_search

Recovering Lost History

Most of the podcasts presented here convey activities of the National Institute for Computational Sciences (NICS), a project of the Joint Institute for Computational Sciences (JICS). JICS was established by the University of Tennessee and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) to advance scientific discovery and leading-edge engineering, and to further knowledge of computational modeling and simulation. JICS realizes its vision by taking full advantage of petascale-and-beyond computers housed at ORNL and by educating a new generation of scientists and engineers well versed in the application of computational modeling and simulation for solving the most challenging scientific and engineering problems. JICS runs NICS, which had the distinction of deploying and managing the Kraken supercomputer. NICS is a leading academic supercomputing center and a major partner in the National Science Foundation's eXtreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE). In November 2012, JICS sited the Beacon system, which set a record for power efficiency and captured the number one position on the Green500 list of the most energy-efficient computers.

Spurring Scientific Exploration on the Great Plains with XSEDE and HPC

Tennessee Supercomputing