News from the San Diego Supercomputer Center
June 2007
Colleagues and Friends,
This spring has been busy for the data team from SDSC and the UCSD Libraries. Earlier this month, team leaders visited the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. to discuss the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP); later, SDSC hosted a delegation from the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) who traveled west to hear about the latest advances in data preservation.
SDSC and the UCSD Libraries form a highly collaborative group, working together on a variety of digital data projects, including the Chronopolis pilot project on digital preservation. In May, campus announced that UCSD Librarian Brian Schottlaender would be the first holder of the Audrey Geisel University Librarianship, a prestigious honor that brings with it a $1 million gift. We congratulate our colleague Brian and the UCSD Libraries on this outstanding tribute.
Computer science and engineering provides a foundation for innovative Cyberinfrastructure and today’s information technology. Thus, it was gratifying to see an informal study by researchers at the University of Utah that ranked UCSD’s Computer Science and Engineering Department 7th nationally, using a new index of scholarly citations. The CSE department is the home of an outstanding group of computer scientists and engineers and includes as faculty SDSC Director Fran Berman, as well as Jacobs School of Engineering Associate Dean, Jeanne Ferrante, and Calit2 Director, Larry Smarr. Congratulations to our colleagues in CSE!
With summer coming on, SDSC is preparing for many visitors through our Summer Institutes and other activities. We hope all our Nuggets readers have a great month and we’ll report back in July.
Fran Berman and Vijay Samalam
| Saving Our Digital Heritage: Berman and Barksdale on Library of Congress NDIIPP Program | |
 |  In May, SDSC Director Fran Berman and former Netscape Chief Executive Jim Barksdale coauthored an opinion piece about an emerging crisis in the digital world – the preservation of our most valuable digital data for the foreseeable future. Critical digital data of all types (official records, research and education data, video, etc.) is in danger of being damaged or lost without adequate plans for transition of collections to next-generation storage media, and for their stewardship, replication, etc. The article, which focused on federal funds in jeopardy for the Library of Congress’ National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP), appeared in the May 15 issue of the Washington Post, the San Diego Union-Tribune, and elsewhere. The full op-ed can be found online. |
| Supercomputers Power New Theory for Supersonic Turbulence | |
 | The chaotic mixing of turbulent fluids when they’re moving rapidly is one of the most challenging unsolved problems in physics. Even more complex is supersonic turbulence, where fluids that move faster than the speed of sound give rise to shock waves. Understanding supersonic turbulence will help researchers understand events as diverse as the formation of stars and in designing better high-speed aircraft. UC San Diego researchers Alexei Kritsuk, Michael Norman, and colleagues have used supercomputers at SDSC and other TeraGrid centers to probe in unprecedented detail the intricacies of these complex flows. By taking advantage of today’s massive systems, they were able for the first time to break the fluid domain into as many as 2,048 cells on a side to model realistically how energy flows from larger to smaller scales and other key aspects of the flow. The computations ran on up to 512 processors using some 500,000 cpu-hours. In results reported in Astrophysical Journal, the UCSD scientists found that the well-established characteristics of incompressible or lower speed turbulent flows do not hold for supersonic turbulent flows, and they proposed a more general theory that encompasses both flow regimes. More information on this important research can be found online at Astrophysical Journal and arXiv.org. |
| SDSC Co-Sponsors Geoinformatics 2007 Conference: Data to Knowledge | |
 | More than 125 geoscience researchers from the U.S. and countries as far away as Britain, France, Australia, and Japan gathered at UCSD for the May 17-18 Geoinformatics 2007 Conference. The meeting, organized by the Geological Society of America and hosted at Calit2 and UCSD, was cosponsored by SDSC, the US Geological Service, the National Science Foundation, the British Geological Survey, and AGU. SDSC’s Dogan Seber served on the organizing committee. Focusing on “Data to Knowledge,” the gathering provided an international forum for collaborating researchers and educators from earth and planetary sciences as well as information technology and computer science. Topics spanned Cyberinfrastructure-enabled discovery, integration, management, and visualization of geoscience data to improve understanding of the processes that have shaped the earth over time. This is the second meeting of this national conference, which has in part grown out of the annual meetings of the pioneering NSF GEON “Cyberinfrastructure for the Geosciences” project, in which SDSC’s Chaitan Baru leads the information technology component. Visit the conference website for more information. |
| SDSC to Help Build ORION Cyberinfrastructure for Ocean Observatories | |
 | The world’s oceans have traditionally been only sparsely observed from a handful of expensive, moving ships. To expand knowledge of the oceans on a planetary scale for fields from climate change to marine genomics and fisheries management, oceanographers will deploy a global network of moored buoys or observatories, whose multiple instruments will provide continuous data to fill in vital knowledge gaps. Researchers at Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO) and Calit2 at UCSD, leveraging the cyberinfrastructure expertise of SDSC, will design and build the Cyberinfrastructure portion of the project. The initial $29 million award is for six years, with total funding up to $42 million over the 11-year project. The cyberinfrastructure will transport real-time data streams from a variety of ocean-dwelling sensors and instruments. The data will be made available in real time to every researcher, teacher and citizen. The “virtual” infrastructure will also underpin the physical infrastructure of two related projects, a regional, cabled network in the Northeast Pacific Ocean, and expanded coastal observing facilities. More information about this can be found at Scripps Oceanography News. |
| Award-Winning Digital Preservation Prototype Keeps Growing | |
 | The Transcontinental Persistent Archives Prototype (TPAP) project is addressing key challenges to safeguard, preserve, and provide access to authentic electronic records. The testbed is preserving nearly 4 terabytes of electronic records collections in 5 million files from the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) that must be maintained for “the life of the Republic.” The TPAP project, based on the SDSC Storage Resource Broker (SRB), received an Internet2 Driving Exemplary Applications (IDEA) Award in 2006 for enabling transformational progress in digital preservation research. In May, the collaboration added a sixth partner site at the U.S. Navy’s Allegany Ballistics Laboratory in West Virginia, extending the prototype into a new environment with the DoD’s high performance DREN network. The other sites include SDSC, two NARA sites in or near the nation’s capital, the University of Maryland, and Georgia Tech. |
| SDSC's TeacherTECH Program Receives Partner of the Year Award | |
 | The SDSC TeacherTECH program, under the direction of Education Program Coordinator Ange Mason, reaches educators all over San Diego and its surroundingss and helps bring new technology tools and technology-enabled science concepts into the K-12 curriculum. In May, TeacherTECH received a Partner of the Year Award from the San Diego Science Alliance. The TeacherTECH outreach program attracted more than 1,200 teachers from more than 150 area schools to workshops in 2006, and anticipates some 1,400 participants in 2007, representing educators who reach as many as 200,000 students annually from San Diego County and Baja, Mexico. TeacherTECH helps reduce teachers’ barriers to using technology for learning and teaching science, and has proven highly effective. The program’s technology tools, science, and math workshops are held regularly in both academic year and summer training sessions, and are supported by an information-rich website and follow-up sessions to reinforce new technology skills and knowledge. The model program is now being adopted by other sites in the TeraGrid. Congratulations to the TeacherTECH group for this prestigious award. |
