hpc

This year was my fourth time attending the IEEE Supercomputing conference.  My experiences at Super are almost opposite from my experiences at most other conferences I attend. At SC, I tend to hear information that I can't immediately apply back on campus (deeply scientific presentations based on highly advanced projects conducted on heavily specialized equipment). I'm surrounded by people whose occupations tend to be substantially different from mine (professors and scientists, grid/cluster administrators and scientific programmers). It sure isn't Educause.

So, what am I doing here? Other than sometimes bumping into my colleagues from the CIC Research Computing Group, I'm here as a trend-spotter and as an observer of the field and of faculty. I speak entirely in that capacity, and I'd like to share with you my highly un-scientific observations for your consideration.

 

Data

In this 18 minute recording, Bill Hogue sits down with MIT's Patrick Dreher for a discussion about research computing, cyberinfrastructure, and open content.

See also:

• A Baseline Study on IT Engagement in Research
• The Net@EDU Campus Cyberinfrastructure Working Group

This 25 minute recording provides coverage of an interview with Google's Vint Cerf. In a couple of weeks, Dr. Cerf will be speaking at our Annual Conference, and we hope to see you then. For now, let's listen in as we cover a range of topics including Google Video, digital preservation, intellectual property, net neutrality and high performance computing.

In this 29 minute recording, we'll hear from José-Marie Griffiths, Dean and Professor of the UNC School of Information and Library Sciences.  She's also the principal investigator of The Future of Librarians in the Workforce study and we'll hear about her activities on that front.   We'll also learn about her session at CNI's Fall Task Force meeting about a recent report from the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee.

See also:

• The Louis Round Wilson Academy
  - a very interesting group represented there
• ibiblio

In this 21 minute recording, I sit down with Tony Hey, Microsoft's VP for Technical Computing.

Let's listen in as he compares e-science research in the US and UK, talks about the prospects of multicore computing, shares his thoughts on the NSF's cyberinfrastructure report, and sheds some light on the challenges of working with very large, high throughput datasets ... the raw materials of research. 

He also briefly touches on the UK's Open Middleware Infrastructure Institute (OMII) and as well as their Digital Curation Centre  ... an attempt to bring scientists, computer scientists and librarians together to to tackle issues involvingcuration and preservation of massive amounts of data. 

More on Tony Hey
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/exec/tonyhey/default.mspx
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2005/may05/05-17HeyPR.mspx
http://www.cni.org/tfms/2005b.fall/plenary.html

Sorry, I couldn't help but think of REM when Tony began to talk about multicore chips
It's the end of Moore's Law as we know it -- and I feel fine ...  ;)

This interview is provided courtesy of CNI and was recorded at their 2005 Fall Task Force Meeting.  The Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) is an organization dedicated to supporting the transformative promise of networked information technology for the advancement of scholarly communication and the enrichment of intellectual productivity.  You can learn more about CNI at their web site, http://www.cni.org