Resources for Green Research

Bill St. Arnaud over at CANARIE has had numerous posts on green IT on his blog and recently condensed some of the resources on green research into one place, that I’ve included below as I think it’s of interest.

CyberInfrastructure 2.0 Blog
http://blog.cybera.ca/

BCnet Workshop on Green Cyber-Infrastructure
May 22 Vancouver

CLS workshop on web services for remote instrumentation
http://www.lightsource.ca/medsi-sri2008/workshops.php#remote

The tools being developed by researchers to allow remote access for
scientific instruments such as under the ocean or remote beam lines will
serve as a model for future “green” cyber-infrastructure.  Because of the
huge power demands of new big science instruments and computers combined
with the increasing shortage for power at our existing research centers
means increasingly these facilities will have to be located in remote zero
carbon, renewable energy, science centers.  Instruments and computation will
need to be accessed remotely.

Green House and Green Computing at Norte Dame
http://ianfoster.typepad.com/blog/2008/04/greenhouse-and.html

Clouds over Chicago
http://ianfoster.typepad.com/blog/2008/04/clouds-over-chi.html
Integration of Grids and Clouds

4th International IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Scalable
Computing eScience 2008 Conference
http://escience2008.iu.edu

Organizing committees of the 4th International IEEE Computer Society
Technical Committee on Scalable Computing eScience 2008 Conference are now
accepting papers and proposals for tutorials; posters, exhibits, and demos;
and workshops and special sessions.

Topics of interest cover applications and technologies related to e-Science
and grid and cloud computing.  They include, but are not limited to, the
following:

* Application development environments
* Autonomic, real-time, and self-organizing grids
* Cloud computing and storage
* Collaborative science models and techniques
* Enabling technologies: Internet and Web services
* e-Science for applications including physics, biology, astronomy,
chemistry, finance, engineering, and the humanities
* Grid economy and business models
* Problem-solving environments
* Programming paradigms and models
* Resource management and scheduling
* Security challenges for grids and e-Science
* Sensor networks and environmental observatories
* Service-oriented grid architectures
* Virtual instruments and data access management
* Virtualization for technical computing
* Web 2.0 technology and services for e-Science

NSF Cluster Exploratory Project
http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=111186

In an open letter to the academic computing research community, Jeannette
Wing, the assistant director at NSF for CISE, said that the relationship
will give the academic computer science research community access to
resources that would be unavailable to it otherwise.

“Access to the Google-IBM academic cluster via the CluE program will provide
the academic community with the opportunity to do research in data-intensive
computing and to explore powerful new applications,” Wing said. “It can also
serve as a tool for educating the next generation of scientists and
engineers.”

“Google is proud to partner with the National Science Foundation to provide
computing resources to the academic research community,” said Stuart
Feldman, vice president of engineering at Google Inc. “It is our hope that
research conducted using this cluster will allow researchers across many
fields to take advantage of the opportunities afforded by large-scale,
distributed computing.”

“Extending the Google/IBM academic program with the National Science
Foundation should accelerate research on Internet-scale computing and drive
innovation to fuel the applications of the future,” said Willy Chiu, vice
president of IBM Software Strategy and High Performance On Demand Solutions.
“IBM is pleased to be collaborating with the NSF on this project.”

In October of last year, Google and IBM created a large-scale computer
cluster of approximately 1600 processors to give the academic community
access to otherwise prohibitively expensive resources. Fundamental changes
in computer architecture and increases in network capacity are encouraging
software developers to take new approaches to computer-science problem
solving. In order to bridge the gap between industry and academia, it is
imperative that academic researchers are exposed to the emerging computing
paradigm behind the growth of “Internet-scale” applications.

This new relationship with NSF will expand access to this research
infrastructure to academic institutions across the nation. In an effort to
create greater awareness of research opportunities using data-intensive
computing, the CISE directorate will solicit proposals from academic
researchers. NSF will then select the researchers to have access to the
cluster and provide support to the researchers to conduct their work. Google
and IBM will cover the costs associated with operating the cluster and will
provide other support to the researchers. NSF will not provide any funding
to Google or IBM for these activities.

While the timeline for releasing the formal request for proposals to the
academic community is still being developed, NSF anticipates being able to
support 10 to 15 research projects in the first year of the program, and
will likely expand the number of projects in the future.

Information about the Google-IBM Academic Cluster Computing Initiative can
be found at
http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/pressrel/20071008_ibm_univ.html

We’ve got our own investigation into green IT that Rob Bristow is leading so it will be interesting to see what comes out of that and applies to research.

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