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...

SC2011 - Seattle

Annual pilgrimage to SC currently underway. This year a large presence for WestGrid in the Compute Canada booth, with an IQStation running 3D demos for the week. Spend the first three days setting up the hardware and software with WestGrid colleagues... A bit of a job, but demo was ready to go for the Gala Opening last night. Had lots of interest at the Gala opening with many people interested in the demos...

GPU Ray Tracing - nVidia tech talk

GPU ray tracing is available as a main stream tool. Five years ago considered "the future" but impossible on GPU (challenge/claim made to GPU community). NVidia solution is Optix, a library API for abstracting the RT core from the hardware. There are a bunch of commercial apps for RT on GPU but Optix as an API for developers looks interesting. Beta of new version available soon.

Lunch with the Aussies

Heard from Kevin Smith and Matt Adcock from my ANU/Australia days. They are also in town for SIGGRAPH and we went to lunch. Talked about old times, caught up with what the Canberra (ANU/CSIRO) gang is up to. Also talked a lot about my PhD research, turns out Matt and one of his colleagues (Viveka Welley) are interested in similar areas. Not too surprising since I worked so closely with them in the "ol' days".