Search results for 'app:weblogs' matching tag 'eScience'

WWT at TechFest on NYTimes.com

Anonymous — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 06:00:00 GMT

The NYTimes.com article by Ashlee Vance, included a great picture by Stuart Isett for The New York Times showing the dome that was put together for TechFest to demonstrate the planetarium projection mode of WWT as well as the gesture interaction from Andy Wilson and Hrvoje Benko.

Microsoft Maps Course to a Jetsons-Style Future

Stuart Isett for The New York Times

Hrvoje Benko demonstrating a Microsoft projection system that lets people manipulate large video images with their hands.

Microsoft Maps Course to a Jetsons-Style Future - NYTimes.com

New Tools Mobilize Local Data to Study Global Environmental Issues from Berkeley Lab

Anonymous — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 06:00:00 GMT

Here’s a really good article from the folks at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory on the collaboration MSR has ongoing between LBL and the Berkeley Water Center. It highlights the use of databases for scientific information as Catharine mentions…

“One of the greatest challenges of the next century will be developing cyber-architectures that allow scientists to easily navigate their digital assets. Today, the internet has given environmental researchers instant access to a wealth of field data. Now, they need a scientific ‘safety deposit box’ system that will not only store this information, but also organize it so it is searchable and ready for analysis,” says van Ingen.

New Tools Mobilize Local Data to Study Global Environmental Issues

Guarding water supplies, protecting endangered species and curbing greenhouse gases is going high-tech. Environmental scientists are turning to innovative cyber-infrastructures and data-mining tools.

As they strive to develop effective strategies for guarding water supplies, protecting endangered species and curbing greenhouse gases, environmental scientists are turning to innovative cyber-infrastructures and data-mining tools developed by an ongoing collaboration between researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Microsoft Research, and the University of California, Berkeley.

The Microsoft eScience program is the primary funder of this project, which is one of numerous ventures cultivated by the Berkeley Water Center (BWC). Launched approximately three years ago by researchers from the Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley’s Colleges of Engineering and Natural Resources, the BWC marshals expertise from public institutions and the private sector in support of projects that enable science and public policy researchers to more easily access and work with water and environmental datasets.

“The most cost-efficient way to impact issues like global climate change and water management is to develop cyber-architectures that organize data and foster scientific collaboration,” says Susan Hubbard, staff scientist in the Berkeley Lab’s Earth Sciences Division and associate director of the BWC.

Environmental scientists typically collect data on a project-by-project basis, in campaigns targeted at very specific topics. One study may use NASA satellites to track annual rainfall of deserts around the globe, while another project sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF) might measure the annual water tables of the Sahara desert with commercial sensors. The data are then typically stored in local archive systems and accessed by researchers associated with that particular project. These sites are scattered across the country, tend to be aligned with specific campaigns, and are funded by a variety of organizations.

Rest of the article at: New Tools Mobilize Local Data to Study Global Environmental Issues « Berkeley Lab News Center

WorldWide Telescope Academic Development Kit Release -Microsoft Research

Anonymous — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 06:00:00 GMT

With this ADK, users can convert their own astronomical images/data to the format that can be read by WWT and share with other WWT users. Can’t wait to see more images/datasets made available.

WorldWide Telescope Academic Development Kit, January 2009 Release

The WorldWide Telescope (WWT) Academic Development Kit, January 2009 release contains two utilities that enable people to convert their astronomical images, panoramas, sky surveys, and planetary textures to a format that can be read by WWT and shared with other WWT users. It produces image pyramids of the photographs, thumbnails, and WTML files. WTML files are XML files in the WWT format that point to the images on the Internet and store details of how they are to be displayed in WWT and metadata such as image title and credits. The WWT SphereToaster Tool enables users to provide images in an equirectangular format that covers all or part of the inside or outside of a sphere. This includes, for example, cylindrical projections of panoramas and all-sky surveys. SphereToaster converts these to a different projection system—the TOAST system, currently unique to WWT—and then stores an image pyramid of the resulting TOAST-projected image. The tool also produces thumbnails and WTML files. The WWT StudyChopper Tool enables users to provide photographs of small parts of the sky, such as a high-resolution image of the Crab Nebula, and enter appropriate coordinate information and metadata. It creates image pyramids of the photographs, thumbnails, and WTML files. Once the output image pyramids and thumbnails are hosted by the user's servers and the WTML files are made available to others, anyone with access to the WTML files will be able to browse the images in WWT.

WorldWide Telescope Academic Development Kit, January 2009 Release - Microsoft Research

Science Images in Photosynth

Anonymous — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 06:00:00 GMT

Here are a few really good synths of scientific images in Photosynth. You can find others using Microscopes or Biology. And there is even a Dissected Cat if you have a strong stomach.

Obelia, polyps, golangia by ppberk

Micrographs of powder coating material by SynthSets

Frog Kidney by ppberk

GrayWulf (on SQL Server) wins SC’08 Storage Challenge

Anonymous — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 06:00:00 GMT

Congratulations to Alex Szalay and his amazing team at JHU for winning the SC’08 Storage Challenge – with the entry GrayWulf:Scalable Clustered Architecture for Data Intensive Computing. GrayWulf – is implemented with SQL Server 2008

Abstract:

Data intensive computing presents a significant challenge for traditional supercomputing architectures that maximize FLOPS since CPU speed has surpassed IO capabilities of HPC systems and BeoWulf clusters. We present the architecture for a three tier commodity component cluster designed for a range of data intensive computations operating on petascale data sets. The design goal is a balanced system in terms of IO performance and memory size, according to Amdahl’s Laws. GrayWulf pays tribute to Jim Gray who stimulated the system and its design. The hardware currently installed at JHU exceeds one petabyte of storage and has 0.5 bytes/sec of I/O and 1 byte of memory for each CPU cycle. The GrayWulf provides almost an order of magnitude better balance than existing systems. Our benchmarks are based on date from the petascale Pan-STARRS project, building the largest sky survey to date. The benchmarks involve sequential searches over hundreds of terabytes.

University of Washington eScience Institute Rollout Event

Anonymous — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 06:00:00 GMT

Yesterday afternoon I had the pleasure to participate and present at the UW eScience Institute kickoff event. I really enjoyed the event and and the vision laid out by Ed Lazowska. The talks by David Baker, Martin Savage and Andy Connolly really highlighted the need for resources to help in the eScience space. While the effort is still spinning up, it will be a great resource for scientists at UW to utilize in their efficient adoption of computing technologies. I look forward in continuing to work with UW as we’ve been doing with the Dynameomics project and with the Trident Workbench.

University of Washington eScience Institute" href="http://escience.washington.edu/rollout/index.html" mce_href="http://escience.washington.edu/rollout/index.html">University of Washington eScience Institute Rollout Event

Presentations by:

Phyllis Wise, Provost

Ed Lazowska, Computer Science & Engineering
(Interim Director, eScience Institute)

Dan Fay, Microsoft Research

David Baker, Biochemistry

Martin Savage, Physics

Andy Connolly, Astronomy
Rollout Event for the University of Washington eScience Institute