Cyberinfrastructure services for the long tail of science BOF

A BOF to discuss infrastructure for Small to Medium Sized Labs (SMLs), the equivalent of the SME in the business world. Ian Foster cites [???] stating that 80% of NSF funding is given through grants of < $350K. SMLs struggle to meet their IT needs. The big question, how can cyberinfrastructure meet the needs of this research community.

Jim Myers - RPI talks about the SEAD CI infrastructure project in the support of sustainability research. Looks quite interesting in terms of managing data in a Flickr/social network style interface... Surprise, surprise, people like it when the tools are easy to use and not draconian...

Carl Kesselman - USC talks about the data life cycle and mechanisms for sharing data. Suggests that long tail research data is often VERY messy and ad hoc with meta-data encoded in odd ways (file path). Manage data through tagging data files, allowing searches to find data of interest... User's publish data files and subscribe to data files of interest. Back end is a DropBox style capability.

Ian Foster - ANL talks about Globus Online as a resource for managing data.

Great discussion after the speakers finished presenting... A huge need and lots of interesting opportunities!!! Institute for Enabling Long Tail Research web site at https://sites.google.com/site/ieltrconcept/home

Scalable Adaptive Graphics Environment (SAGE) BOF - Catching Up!!!

Attended the SAGE BOF and caught up with EVL/GLVF colleagues... As usual, SAGE users/reserarchers are doing interesting and exciting things... A couple of interesting observations:

• SAGE usage continues to grow (~25% per year over the last four years).
• Interesting CAVE-2 system - Large surround screen LCD tiled display. Combining features of tiled display wall world of SAGE with the immersive 3D world of a VR system.
• Heard about CAL-VR a couple times at the conference (Kaust immersive display, also in the EVL CAVE-2 system). Might be worth looking at for the IQStation.
• SAGE-NEXT is a SAGE system for a single computer that drives a large tiled display wall (8K x 2K). Sometimes has trouble pushing the pixels but is much simpler than the typical cluster based system.
• GenoSAGE - a visualization system for genome visualization. Sound interesting, need to follow up with Luc to see what kind of tools they are using.

Ultrascale Vis Workshop - Towards Exascale

Ken Moreland from Sandia National Lab presents an interesting talk about the challenges of visualization in the exascale world. Really, a talk about the challenges of exascale in general, using visualization as a case study in how we might tackle exascale. Too much concurrency (too many processors/cores/threads), and therefore too much overhead, on all levels... Libraries from National Labs (DAX, PISTON) are moving towards tackling these problems...

On the road again... SC 2012 in Salt Lake City

Annual adventure to SC, in Salt Lake City this year, is underway. Salt Lake City is a winter wonderland on arrival. No impact for my flight, but others had issues...