Specialised design problems can require massive computing efforts. Middleware tools to harness the power of Grid computing have been proven to work in real industrial applications, through the work of IST project DAMIEN.
Helping to design aircraft
EADS, a major aerospace company and DAMIEN consortium member, used the system in real applications across its sites in Europe. “Before you can get official certification for a new design of aircraft, extensive tests have to be car
A team from CERN and Caltech has set a new Internet2 Land Speed Record by transferring data across nearly 11,000 kilometres at an average rate of 6.25 gigabits per second (Gbps), nearly 10,000 times faster than a typical home broadband connection, from Los Angeles, USA, to Geneva, Switzerland. The Internet2 Land Speed Record (I2-LSR) is an open and ongoing competition for the highest-bandwidth, end-to-end networks.
The mark of 68,431 terabit-metres per second, which used the same IPv4 protoc
Ever wished that you could know what a place was like before you booked a holiday or you could revisit where you went on holiday? A new virtual reality tool created by the IST project BENOGO allows you to do just this.
The project was initiated to build on research into a new image-based rendering (IBR) technique that had been carried out by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, one of the project partners. BENOGO aimed to further develop the technologies to produce an innovative system to pe
Embed the open source Linux operating system within a microprocessor and what do you get? For IST project ACEOS it led to demonstration applications for standard Linux networking and voice telecommunications.
Porting Linux to a new processor platform
Project coordinator Gregory Doumenis of the Athens-based system house Global Digital Technologies (GDT) explains why the ACEOS project was considered successful. “We were very happy with the project results because, one, we ma
Although technologically and economically superior to their proprietary counterparts, GNU/Linux operating systems are very rarely used in audio and multimedia production. AGNULA is out to change this with its easy-to-use “free software” infrastructure.
Free, or “libre software”, gives the users freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change, and improve the software, even sell copies. To qualify as free software it must also be available for commercial use, development, and distribution.
In ancient maps of the world, expanses of unknown territory might hold a warning to would-be explorers: Here there be monsters. For today’s explorers seeking to navigate and understand the world of science, the monsters are the untamed collections of data that inhabit a largely uncharted landscape.
The April 6, 2004, issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) features nearly 20 articles by some of tomorrow’s mapmakers. Representing the computer, information and cog
Researchers at the Johns Hopkins Children’s Center have designed an online, Web-based system for ordering total parenteral nutrition (TPN) that identifies and pre-emptively eliminates potentially serious calculation errors.
The Children’s Center team describes its “TPN Calculator” in the April issue of Pediatrics.
“TPN Calculator” not only reduced TPN order errors in the Hopkins Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) by nearly 90 percent, but also proved to be faster and ea
Program speeds drug discovery
Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute today announced the release of a software program capable of quickly identifying molecules that show promise for future medicines. The software program enables drug makers to comb through enormous databases of potential molecules and identify the ones that have sound medicinal properties.
Rensselaer researchers with skills in computer science, chemistry, and math allied to create the software pro
An innovative set of tools that enable the use of component-based software engineering (CBSE) in the full lifecycle of applications will soon be at the disposal of small and big business.
Completed in October 2003, the ’software toolbox’ that resulted from the IST project, ECO-ADM, is now in its ’pre-commercial phase’ with the finished product expected to go on sale before the end of this year, according to project coordinator Joan Canal at Centro de Calculo de Sabadell
UK plans for Grid computing changed gear this week. The pioneering European DataGrid (EDG) project came to a successful conclusion at the end of March, and on 1 April a new project, known as Enabling Grids for E-Science in Europe (EGEE), begins. The UK is a major player in both projects, providing key staff and developing crucial areas of the technology. While EDG tested the concept of large-scale Grid computing, EGEE aims to create a permanent, reliable Grid infrastructure across Europe.
Gr
Engineers at Purdue University are developing a system that will enable people to search huge industry databases by sketching a part from memory, penciling in modifications to an existing part or selecting a part that has a similar shape.
“It’s like a special kind of Google that lets you search for parts based on their three-dimensional shapes,” said Karthik Ramani, a professor of mechanical engineering and director of the Purdue Research and Education Center for Information Systems in
One of the key challenges to managing distributed projects is to keep track of the overall project execution ensuring that all parties are kept informed when, say, one partner makes a breakthrough. This communications and coordination challenge led to GENESIS’ open source solution.
“The idea was to develop a flexible and low intrusive environment for managing the distributed teams of people working on the same project,” says Pierluigi Ritrovato, Manager of the Centre for Research in Pure a
Institute of Physics Condensed Matter and Materials Physics Conference
University of Warwick, 4-7 April, 2004
Developments in snap-shot MRI (magnetic resonance imaging), organic semiconductor technology, high temperature superconductivity, and progress towards quantum computers are some of the topics being presented at a major conference organised by the Institute of Physics next month. The four-day conference, CMMP 2004, will take place from Sunday 4th to Wednesday 7th April 200
Competitiveness in the chip design and fabrication sector depends on fast turn-arounds and ever shorter concept-to-product cycles. New hardware design tools based on object-oriented methods should help shorten the design cycle.
The design gap
The complexity of recently available products, such as new 3G mobile phones, camera and PDA combos, is staggering and requires a huge design effort. “There is no doubt that electronic systems of the future are going to be very complex,”
Researchers at Wright State University have developed a prototype device to help blind individuals “see.”
Nikolaos Bourbakis, Ph.D., Ohio Board of Regents Distinguished Professor of Information Technology at Wright State’s College of Engineering and Computer Science is the principal investigator. The project is a cooperative venture with Arizona State University (ASU).
“Our object is to develop intelligent assistants that can help blind and visually impaired individuals eff
The first computing resources of the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) TeraGrid became fully available for scientific use in January, and some of the first applications will be tracking the formation of galaxies in the early universe and finding the most efficient and least expensive ways to clean up groundwater pollution.
Other early TeraGrid (www.teragrid.org) users will study seismic events and analyze biomolecular dynamics on the Linux clusters at the National Center for Supercomp
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