Past Projects
AT RS and Collaborators grant funded
A proposal developed by RS staff and collaborators in Engineering and Physics to prototype and develop an intracampus research grid has been funded. The proposal to the Vice President for Research office's Math and Physical Sciences Internal Fundining Initiative program, was developed by principal investigator Shaowen Wang (Assistant Research Scientist, AT RS) and his collaborators: Terry Braun (Biomedical Engineering), Greg Carmichael (Chemical and Biochemical Engineering), Boyd Knosp (AT RS), Jun Ni (AT RS) and Yasar Onel (Physics and Astronomy). The project provides $45,000 to establish a campus-wide grid, Hawk Grid, and to develop and deploy two pilot applications onto this grid.
Hawk Grid monitor is on line.
Click here to see the current status of a number of compute clusters around campus. Another HawkGrid project is to monitor network performance. This can be seen here.
National Physics Grid Workshop Held in July.
Over 40 researchers and educators from around the Midwest and others through VRVS (Virtual Rooms VideoConferencing System) attended the "CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) UIowa Tier 2 Workshop" held July 22 here on campus. This workshop was co-sponsored by AT Research Services and the Department of Physics and Astronomy. The workshop featured presentations and discussions about the CMS Physics Grid project, an international, multi-year effort to support the (CMS) instrument that is being built in CERN Switzerland.
Speakers included Dr. Ian Fisk, from Fermi Lab, who described the Physics Grid project and its need for developing several U.S. national Tier-2 computational centers to support the analysis of petabytes (10^6 Gigabytes) of data that will be generated each year by the CMS instrument; Dr. Ruth Pordes, of the International Virtual Data Grid Laboratory (www.ivdgl.org), who described the new multi-institutional open science grid project; Dr. Yasar Onel (Physics, Iowa) who described the high energy physics work his lab does and their part in building the CMS instrument, and Dr. Shaowen Wang (ITS AT Research Services) who described the physics Grid efforts of his Grid Research and Education Group at Iowa (GROW).
Dr. Onel and Wang organized and chaired the workshop. They said the main thrust of the workshop was to discuss the development of a proposal to establish The University of Iowa as one of ~5-8 U.S. national Tier-2 computational centers for the CMS Physics Grid. If successful, The University of Iowa would serve as a Grid-based shared computational center for high energy physics and other data-intensive sciences that involve researchers and educators from The University of Iowa as well as other U.S. universities and national laboratories. Visit http://www.physics.uiowa.edu/tier2/ for more information.
Moving Sybyl License from SGI to Linux a Success.
Sybyl, a suite of molecular mechanics and graphics tools supported by AT Research Services, has been ported from its original platform, SGI workstations, to Red Hat Linux. This change makes the management of using these tools easier and less expensive for research labs that would like to use them.
Jason Smart, a graduate student in Mike Duffel's laboratory in Medicinal Chemistry, had recently moved the lab's Sybyl license from an old SGI 02 workstation to a Dell Precision 360n Linux workstation. In doing this, Jason reduced the costs for his lab, lowering expensive annual hardware and software maintenance charges, and replacing the SGI Irix operating system with a more standard Red Hat Linux operating system. (Note: Red Hat licenses are supported by ITS's Campus Software Program http://www.its.uiowa.edu/cs/software/aboutprogram.html.)
This move also improved the performance of many of Jason's computational operations. For instance, a genetic docking algorithm that took overnight to complete on the SGI workstation(albeit last generation) now takes about 2 minutes on the Dell Linux workstation. Jason also found the management of the Linux workstation to be easier than the SGI. Local list serves; colleagues, books and web sites assisted Jason in learning Linux management.
Academic Technologies supports a Linux workstation with Sybyl installed in Studio 107. For more information on how to access this system and to learn more on getting Sybyl installed on a Linux workstation in your lab through our shared Sybyl licensing, contact Daniel Langstraat; daniel-langstraat@uiowa.edu or call 335-6141.
VoluMeasure Software
Working with Professor Ge Wang, we have developed a java-based CT-image analysis application that measures stereological volume of tumor size. This project was presented at RSNA 2003.
Lattice Boltzman Method on Grid.
Working with Professor Chin Long Lin, AT Research Services research scientist Jun Ni developed a system that performed Lattice Boltzmann Simultions of fluid flow in a Grid Environment. We have been awarded time on the Terra Grid to continue working on this project. This was funded by a VPR internal funding initiative in CY 2003.
