Visit us at Booth 2135!

At the 2009 Supercomputing (SC) Conference being held in Portland, Oregon November 14-20, CACR will be highlighting our research in computational biology, computing and networking for high-energy physics, data analysis for neutron scattering experiments, hypervelocity impact simulations, and time-domain astronomy. The SC Conference is the premier international conference for high performance computing (HPC), networking, storage and analysis.

Among the demonstrations at the CACR exhibit will be the Caltech entry in SC’s Bandwidth Challenge. The Bandwidth Challenge is an annual competition for leading-edge network applications developed by teams of researchers from around the globe. The Caltech entry for this year’s challenge is entitled Moving towards Terabit/sec Scientific Dataset Transfers: the LHC Challenge. This entry will demonstrate Storage to Storage physics dataset transfers of up to 100 Gbps sustained in one direction, and well above 100 Gbps in total bidirectionally, using a total of fifteen 10Gbps drops at the Caltech Booth.

Caltech’s PSAAP center will be represented in the NNSA exhibit as one of five centers of excellence focusing on predictive science. A talk entitled, “UQ Pipeline Ballistic Impact Simulations – Methods and Experiences”, will be given by Sharon Brunett in the NNSA exhibit (Booth 735) on Tuesday, November 17 at 5:15PM.

1pm Friday March 13, 2009
Powell-Booth Room 100

The second Practical Semantic Astronomy Workshop took place last week at the University of Glasgow. The workshop brought together experts from a broad range of disciplines using semantic technologies, alongside practitioners experimenting with these technologies to address current problems in astroinformatics. The workshop’s aims were to:

* inform how semantic technologies are being used successfully in other sciences
* reveal what semantic activities are emerging in astronomy
* foster greater communication between groups working in this exciting area

For further information about the workshop and semantic astronomy, see the website at http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/workshops/semast09/

Semantic astronomy promises to expand the scientific discovery potential of exponentially growing data collections by enabling natural language querying, content-based searching, rich metadata markup and retrieval, rapid integration of diverse data collections, and machine-assisted scientific discovery.

Practical Semantic Astronomy 2009 is the second in a series of workshops first held at Caltech in February 2008.  The workshop brings together experts from a broad range of disciplines using semantic technologies, alongside practitioners experimenting with these techniques to address current problems in astroinformatics.

The Virtual Observatory is a loose planet-wide collaboration of astronomy computing projects, aiming to make available the high-volume and rich data of astronomy.  Although astronomical data is generally
well-described, it is very dispersed, so that there is a substantial data-discovery and integration problem, making it fertile ground for the sorts of semantic approaches applied with such success in other
disciplines.

In SemAst 2009, we will pair keynote speakers and astronomical use-cases, focusing broad expertise on challenging and exciting problems in astroinformatics. The keynotes will comprise of:

• Danny Ayers, Talis, UK
• Peter Fox, National Center for Atmospheric Research, USA
• Antoine Isaac, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands
• Amedeo Napoli, LORIA, France
• Joel Sachs, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, USA
• +1 to be confirmed

Topics of Interest

• Astronomy and solar ontologies
• Knowledgebases
• Metadata for astronomical databases
• Semantic integration
• Semantic queries and data mining
• Semantic technologies

Submission

Submissions should be in the form of an extended abstract of no more than 1 page. Abstracts should be submitted electronically with the EasyChair system.

Important Dates

• Abstract Submissions: 4 January 2009
• Paper Notification: 16 January 2009
• Early-bird Registration: 31 January 2009
• Workshop: 2-5 March 2009

Organizers

• Alasdair J G Gray, University of Glasgow, UK
• Norman Gray, University of Leicester/University of Glasgow, UK
• Iadh Ounis, University of Glasgow, UK
• Jon Ritchie, University of Glasgow, UK

Scientific Organizing Committee

• Norman Gray (Chair), University of Leicester/University of Glasgow, UK
• Kirk Borne, George Mason University, USA
• Doug Burke, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, USA
• Sebastien Derriere, Observatoire Astronomique de Strasbourg, France
• Matthew Graham, California Institute of Technology, USA
• Bob Mann, Royal Observatory, Edinburgh, UK

Further Information

More information is available from the web site
http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/workshops/semast09/
or by email to semast09 at dcs.gla.ac.uk

The SC Conference is the premier international conference for high performance computing (HPC), networking, storage and analysis. SC08 marks the 20th anniversary of the first SC Conference, then called Supercomputing, held in Orlando, Florida in 1988. It is also the 20th anniversary of the participation of the group that evolved into CACR. Visit us at Booth 751!

This conference provides a unique opportunity to learn and affect what is happening in the realm of scientific computing with Python. Attendees will have the opportunity to review the available tools and how they apply to specific problems. By providing a forum for developers to share their Python expertise with the wider commercial, academic, and research communities, this conference fosters collaboration and facilitates the sharing of software components, techniques and a vision for high level language use in scientific computing.

Just Announced!

• How to get there
• Conference schedule posted
• Alex Martelli will be giving the Keynote address this Year
• Tutorial schedule posted

2008 NVO Summer School
3-11 September 2008
The Lodge at Santa Fe
Santa Fe, NM

In this nine-day, hands-on program, participants will work with experienced NVO users and software specialists to become familiar with how to discover, access, visualize, and analyze data with the Virtual Observatory. Those attending will be introduced to VO tools and utilities by using them to accomplish a variety of research goals. Some of the research tasks that will be addressed include data mining, multiwavelength analysis, and temporal astronomy. In the latter part of the summer school, small teams will pursue their own VO-enabled projects.

Please see the NVO Website for further Information.