Focusing on Research News Across XSEDE and the Country
President Obama Boosts Federal R&D By $2 Billion
The White House has proposed a $2 billion increase in the budget for U.S. research and development (R&D) for fiscal year 2013, with a focus on research being done at the Department of Homeland Security, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and the Department of Energy (DOE). The proposed R&D budget also allocates $3 billion for science, technology, engineering, and math education as part of an ongoing effort to prepare a more technology-savvy workforce. Overall, the White House proposed a $140.8 billion R&D budget, an increase of 1.4 percent over last year, according to the Office of Science and Technology Policy. The budget proposal includes stipends for research efforts in clean air and energy at DOE, specifically providing $350 million for transformational energy R&D in DOE's Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, and $2.3 billion for DOE's Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy office to focus on clean-vehicle technologies research. In addition, the budget request provides a combined $13.1 billion, a 4.4 percent increase, for the R&D labs at the National Science Foundation and NIST as well as DOE's science office. To read more, please visit http://www.informationweek.com/news/government/leadership/232600745.
National Science Foundation Steps Up Its Push for Interdisciplinary Research
The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) is dispatching top official and University of Michigan professor Myron P. Gutmann to college campuses to promote the need for greater interdisciplinary research if they wish to win NSF grants. Gutmann notes that such research has yielded rapid advances in various fields, such as healthcare applications of atomic-scale science and the study of extreme weather events through analysis of both natural and social variables. NSF director Subra Suresh has prioritized the push for more interdisciplinary research since his arrival in October 2010. Emphasizing more interdisciplinary research is both financially and scientifically sensible, says Columbia University professor Mark C. Taylor. He notes that graduates are becoming too specialized to find employment due to the unsustainable nature of department-based hierarchies. Economic anxiousness could aid the NSF in its interdisciplinary efforts by making universities and their researchers particularly keen to comply with its mandate. To read further, please visit http://chronicle.com/article/National-Science-Foundation/130757/.
UCSD's Center for Design and Geopolitics: The Art & Theory of Planetary-Scale Computation
Take a look at a map depicting global computer networks and two things become immediately apparent: the vast number of connections between servers across the planet, and the way those connections overlap geopolitical boundaries. Take a look at a map depicting global computer networks and two things become immediately apparent: the vast number of connections between servers across the planet, and the way those connections overlap geopolitical boundaries. To read further, please visit http://www.calit2.net/newsroom/article.php?id=1948.
Colleges Looking Beyond the Lecture
Science, technology, engineering, and math departments at many universities are redesigning the lecture as a style of teaching out of concern that it is driving students away. Initiatives at American, Catholic, and George Washington universities and across the University System of Maryland are dividing 200-student lectures into 50-student studios and 20-student seminars. Faculty also are learning to make courses more active by asking more questions, starting ask-your-neighbor discussions, and conducting instant surveys. "We need to think about what happens when students have a bad experience with the course work," says University of Maryland of Baltimore County president Freeman Hrabowski. The lecture backlash signals an evolving vision of college as a participatory exercise as research studies have shown that students in traditional lecture courses learn comparatively little. The anti-lecture movement is fueled by the proliferation of online lectures, which threaten the monopoly on learning by self-sufficient campuses. Other scholars are looking to improve, rather than replace, the lecture model. For example, Johns Hopkins chemistry professor Jane Greco records her lectures and posts them online as homework, and uses her time in the lecture hall as an interactive discussion of the lab experiment students completed the previous session. To read further, please visit http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/colleges-looking-beyond-the-lecture/2012/02/03/gIQA7iUaGR_story.html.
Oak Ridge National Laboratory Computer Scientists Collect Computing Tools for Next-Generation Machines
Oak Ridge National Laboratory's new Titan supercomputer, which is based on a hybrid architecture of central and graphics processing units and is expected to be operational next year, will replace the lab's Jaguar system, which uses an entirely central processing unit-based platform. "Anything that tool developers can do to reduce the burden of porting codes to new architectures, while ensuring performance and correctness, allows us to spend more time obtaining scientific results from simulations," says Oak Ridge researcher Bronson Messer. The Oak Ridge team is working to ensure that researchers will not have to spend huge amounts of time learning how to use their codes during the shift to hybrid computing architectures. Many of the tools that are used on Jaguar will be used on Titan, but they will have to be scaled up for the larger machine. For example, the researchers have expanded the capabilities of debugging software to meet the needs of large leadership-class systems. To read further, please visit http://www.ornl.gov/info/features/get_feature.cfm?FeatureNumber=f20120214-00.
UCSD Study of Origin of Lava Formations in Western U.S. Yields New Model, Aided By XSEDE Resources
Scientists at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego used XSEDE resources, including Ranger and Lonestar supercomputers at the Texas Advanced Computing Center and Abe at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, to create simulations that helped them discover a source of massive lava formations in the Western United States. To read further, please visit http://scrippsnews.ucsd.edu/Releases/?releaseID=1241.
TACC's Ranger Helps Predict Storms Intensity With Greater Accuracy
When Hurricane Irene swept through New England in August 2011, the National Hurricane Center (NHC) did an astounding job of predicting its path. However, Irene arrived significantly weaker than originally forecast, leading to a larger evacuation than would have occurred had NHC's intensity forecasts been closer to the mark.
“The National Hurricane Center has been doing an excellent job over the past few decades of persistently increasing the hurricane forecast track accuracy,” said Fuqing Zhang, professor of meteorology at the Pennsylvania State University. “But there have been virtually no improvements in the intensity forecast.” Predicting how hurricanes form, intensify, or dissipate is different and more challenging than predicting its path. To read further, please visit http://www.tacc.utexas.edu/news/feature-stories/2012/upgrading-the-hurricane-forecast.
Purdue University Researchers Develop New Imaging Reveals Early Changes Leading to Breast Tumors
University researchers have created a new imaging technology that reveals subtle changes in breast tissue, representing a potential tool to determine a woman's risk of developing breast cancer and to study ways of preventing the disease. The researchers, using a special "3-D culture" that mimics living mammary gland tissue, also showed that a fatty acid found in some foods influences this early precancerous stage. Unlike conventional cell cultures, which are flat, the 3-D cultures have the round shape of milk-producing glands and behave like real tissue, said Sophie Lelièvre (pronounced Le-LEE-YEA-vre), an associate professor of basic medical science. To read further, please visit http://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/research/2012/120306LelievreBreastcancer.html.
Blue Waters “Earth Science System” Delivered to NCSA
The first cabinets of the new Blue Waters sustained-petascale supercomputer have arrived at the University of Illinois' National Center for Supercomputing Applications and were powered up over the last few days. A total of 48 Cray XE6 cabinets were installed.
These cabinets represent about 15 percent of the final Blue Waters system. They will be operated as a limited access "Early Science System" while the rest of the Blue Waters supercomputer is built over the next several months. In March, select scientific teams from around the country will begin using the Early Science System on research in a range of fields. In parallel, the Cray and NCSA team will use the Early Science System to prepare for the operation of the full Blue Waters supercomputer. The Early Science System will ultimately be integrated into that sustained-petaflop supercomputer, which NCSA expects to operate for five years. To read further, please visit http://www.ncsa.illinois.edu/News/Stories/BW_ESS/.
