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CACR is pleased to announce an award of $479,100 from the National Science Foundation Office of Cyberinfrastructure for the Skyalert project. Skyalert is an event-driven system to understand and disseminate events that are created from real-time sensors, such as astronomical telescopes that repeatedly scan the sky for change. The number of these astronomical transient detections will grow enormously over the next few years, and rapid follow-up observation will be the key to discovery. This will come from big observatories, small college observatories, and amateur astronomers. Skyalert delivers events from the Catalina Real Time Survey and the NASA SWIFT and Fermi observatories, as well as a dozen other projects that detect astronomical transients. Examples of such transients include supernovae, cataclysmic variables, gamma-ray bursts, blazar eruption, planetary microlensing, and other exciting astrophysics.
Skyalert delivers events in real time via email, Twitter, instant message, and other protocols to observatories that can do rapid follow-up — some completely automatically with no human in the loop. Other event-driven actions can include fetching data to build a data portfolio, and running machine-learning algorithms and classification rules to make better automatic decisions. The intention is for automated systems to make real-time intelligent decisions. Skyalert uses an international standard, VOEvent, enabling participation in the global event infrastructure, exchanging events with other event brokers, such as NASA’s GCN.
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The first beam in the Large Hadron Collider at CERN was successfully steered around the full 27 kilometers of the world’s most powerful particle accelerator at 10h28 September 10. This historic event marks a key moment in the transition from over two decades of preparation to a new era of scientific discovery. (Read the full story on the Caltech website)
The LHC experiments are using a globally distributed “Tiered” grid of computational resources to process the proton collision data. This multi-Tier design was proposed and prototyped by Caltech in the late 90s, and is now universally adopted. The prototype cluster in the CACR machine room has been continually expanded and enhanced since then, and it is now one of the major Tier2 centres in the world, with over 1M SPECInt2k of compute power, several hundred Terabytes of storage space, and multiple 10 Gigabit network connections to other LHC sites in the US, and to CERN. First data from the initial LHC tests has already arrived for processing and analysis on the Caltech Tier2.
Local Press, featuring commentary and an interview with CACR Principal Computational Scientist Julian Bunn:
For further information on the Large Hadron Collider, see the CERN website.
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Panoramic images of the sky obtained at Palomar Observatory and by the Two Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS), plus pointed observations from the Spitzer Space Telescope, form a significant part of Microsoft’s World Wide Telescope (WWT).
The WWT combines cosmic imagery and educational content from many sources, including major ground-based sky surveys. Images of the northern sky used in the WWT are based on the second major photographic Palomar Sky Survey (POSS-II), conducted in the late 1980s and early 1990s. A digital version of this survey was produced in collaboration with the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, and processed and calibrated at Caltech. Additional images for the WWT were provided by the currently ongoing Palomar-Quest digital sky survey. All of the images were processed at Caltech’s Center for Advanced Computing Research (CACR).
> Read more in the Caltech Press Release.
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With a $17 million grant from the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), the California Institute of Technology becomes one of five new centers of excellence that will focus on the emerging field of predictive science. Predictive science is the application of verified and validated computational simulations to predict the behavior of complex systems where routine experiments are not feasible. The research effort, which involves Caltech and four other selected PSAAP centers, will focus on unclassified applications of interest to NNSA and its three national laboratories: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and Sandia National Laboratories.
Michael Ortiz, the Dotty and Dick Hayman Professor of Aeronautics, professor of mechanical engineering, and director of Caltech’s new Predictive Science Academic Alliance Program (PSAAP) Center, says Caltech will focus its efforts on the high-energy density dynamic response of materials, with demonstrations of hypervelocity impact response.
Hypervelocity impact is central to a number of scientific and application areas, including the design of protective shields for space structures and the understanding of meteorite impact cratering. Accurate computer simulation is critical to the understanding of experiments that involve velocities reaching 10 kilometers per second, pressures in the megabar range, and extraordinarily high temperatures and deformation rates.
The executive director of Caltech’s PSAAP Center is Mark Stalzer, executive director of Caltech’s Center for Advanced Computing Research (CACR). The PSAAP Center will coordinate activities in areas including computational fluid dynamics, led by Dan Meiron, the Jones Professor of Applied and Computational Mathematics and Computer Science; computational science and engineering, led by CACR’s principal computational scientist, Michael Aivazis; experimental science, led by Rosakis; solid dynamics and materials, led by Ortiz; and uncertainty quantification, led by Houman Owhadi, assistant professor of applied and computational mathematics and control and dynamical systems.
> Read more at the Caltech Press Release or the original NNSA release
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An award of $994,408 from the National Science Foundation was made to the project entitled “Development of a Research Infrastructure for the Multithreaded Computing Community Using the Cray XMT Platform.” The subcontract for Caltech/CACR (PI Ed Upchurch) will fund the porting of significant science applications to an XMT system. CACR will assess the XMT’s performance and compare it with the performance on other parallel architectures at CACR.
With the advent of MPI and Linux clusters, message-passing architectures are today the dominant approach for parallel computing systems, and the high-end computing community has developed a strong infrastructure to support this. With the trend towards multicore processors, however, the situation is changing. The major processor developers all envision placing tens to hundreds of cores on a single die, each running multiple threads. To take advantage of this, the CS community will need focus on how to develop efficient multithreaded programs in shared memory. The goal of the project is to bring a diverse group of researchers with extensive experience with shared-memory multithreading together as a community, and to jointly develop a shared infrastructure needed to broaden its impact for developing software to run on the next generation of computer hardware.
The first objective of the program is to acquire computer hardware as a shared community resource capable of efficiently running, in experimental and production modes, complex programs with thousands of threads in shared memory. The Cray XMT system, scheduled for delivery in the first half of 2008, is an ideal platform for this.
The second objective of the program is assembling a software infrastructure for developing and measuring the performance of programs running on this hardware. This will include algorithms, data sets, libraries, languages, tools, and simulators to evaluate architectural enhancements for future hardware.
The third objective of the project building stronger ties between the people themselves, creating ways for researchers at the partner institutions to collaborate and communicate their findings to the broader community.
The academic partners on the team are the University of Notre Dame, Georgia Institute of Technology, University of California, Berkeley, University of California, Santa Barbara, University of Delaware, and the California Institute of Technology. The team will also collaborate with Sandia National Laboratories, who has agreed to host the Cray XMT system and will provide supplementary funding.
For further information on the Caltech subcontract, contact Ed Upchurch
