As noted in a news release from Calit2 this morning, Calit2's Larry Smarr, Tom DeFanti and Jerry Sheehan (with CANARIE's Bill St. Arnaud) have co-authored the lead article in the November-December issue of EDUCAUSE Review. It's an overview of the challenge facing universities in the age of 'global climatic disruption,' and provides a roadmap for campuses to help pave the way for a greener future. The article is accompanied by a backgrounder that EDUCAUSE is offering as a Web Exclusive, focused on the scientific basis for concern about continued carbon emissions into the atmosphere -- and how carbon regulation will impact universities financially.

The article was published in time for the ...

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When Facebook's VP of Technology, Jeff Rothschild, delivered a lecture at Calit2 Oct. 8 at the invitation of the Center for Networked Systems (CNS), he divulged some key statistics that made news in high-tech publications that follow the data center industry. Rothschild's talk was webcast live by Calit2 and the archived version of "High Performance at Massive Scale" is now available for on-demand viewing [Windows Media player and broadband connection required]. As the blog High Scalability reports, Rothschild divulged that "Facebook handles 30K+ machines, 300 million active users, 20 billion photos, and 25TB per day of logging data."

Then in the Oct. 13 issue of Data Center Knowledge, Rich ...

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On Tuesday evening, Calit2 Director Larry Smarr was the keynote speaker at the 2009 Convocation, which welcomed thousands of transfer students and freshmen to the UC San Diego campus. In his talk, Smarr went out of his way to challenge the students to work on solving the big challenges facing humanity, including global climate change. Here's the full text of his speech:

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The San Diego Union-Tribune's technology writer Mike Lee picked up on the joint Calit2-Scripps Institution of Oceanography release about overcoming the final obstacle to start receiving roughly $32 million in stimulus funding for the Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI) Cyberinfrastructure project. The funding comes from NSF, via the semi-governmental Consortium for Ocean Leadership, and had been initially announced in 2007, before an overhaul of Ocean Leadership's predecessor organization -- and budget problems -- put the award on hold. The funding will allow the OOI Cyberinfrastructure project to staff up, primarily at Calit2 where the project is based, under the leadership ...

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On Thursday, July 30 Calit2 and the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts (CRCA) were part of the first super-high-bandwidth 4K feature film premiere streaming on three continents. The film by Brazilian director Beto Souza, "Enquanto a Noite nao Chega" (While the Night Doesn't Come), made its debut to a packed theater at the Electronic Language International Festival (FILE 10) world festival in Brazil. Simultaneously, the film (actually, 4K is a video format) was streamed in real time over high-speed optical networks to the Calit2 Auditorium in Atkinson Hall at UC San Diego, and to Keio University's Design Media lab in Yokohama, Japan.

With only ...

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The recent joint annual meetings in Boston of the Radio Frequency Integrated Circuits conference (RFIC 2009) and the International Microwave Symposium (IMS 2009) had researchers and students from Calit2 and UC San Diego out in force -- 17 UCSDers were on hand (five of them at left). UC San Diego was also the only university showing off hardware at their exhibit booth, staffed by a team led by Calit2's Javier Rodriguez Molina. They demonstrated technologies including Calit2's Gizmo, CalMesh, CalRadio and much more.

Meanwhile, on the conference side, UCSD graduate students came home with bronze and silver medals for research papers presented at the two meetings. As we reported in our roundup ...

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On Monday, June 8, our own Maurizio Seracini, director of Calit2's Center of Interdisciplinary Science for Art, Architecture and Archaeology (CISA3), was in Canada to be honored at commencement ceremonies of McMaster University. They gave him an honorary Doctor of Letters degree, to add to his previous degrees in bioengineering (from UC San Diego, Class of '73) and electrical engineering (University of Padua). According to the Hamilton Spectator newspaper reporter covering the Calit2 scientist's address to the McMaster Convocation, Seracini "is a modern-day Renaissance man approaching problems in the same way Leonardo did five centuries ago."

Reporter Mark McNeil added that Seracini "urged ...

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On April 25, one of the undergraduate students working on Calit2's StarCAVE took top honors in the 2009 IEEE Regional Student Paper Contest. UC San Diego electrical engineering junior Jordan Rhee won the competition for his paper on "Hot Spot Mitigation in the StarCAVE". Rhee -- who is President of the IEEE chapter at UCSD -- was competing against papers from the University of Nevada, University of New Mexico, University of Arizona, and the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology. The contest was held as part of the IEEE Southwest Area Meeting. For his work, Rhee also took home a $500 prize. Rhee first had to beat out four other UC San Diego papers before he could represent ...

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The first full week of May will be particularly busy, with a wide variety of seminars and conferences for Calit2 participants, and the rest of May looks equally busy. Note that this week the public will get an opportunity to sit in on the final forum and conference declaration, at the end of an invitation-only conference on water issues and climate change facing California and the Himalayas. It's organized by UC San Diego and the University of Cambridge. Trinity College Cambridge Fellow, Lord Julian Hunt (pictured) and Calit2 Director Larry Smarr will be on the closing panel discussion on Wednesday, and Calit2 will be videotaping the two-hour session for later ...

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The closest that artist Roger Ferragallo has come to displaying the full dimensions of his "Cosmic Tree of Life" digital painting was when he got the chance to display the latest version (2.0) of the art work on Calit2's HIPerSpace tiled display wall at UC San Diego recently. The digital painting measures 556 million pixels, and it was displayed on HIPerSpace's native 287 million pixelsl. If ever "Cosmic Tree of Life" is printed out in its current incarnation, the painting would measure 25 x 15 feet, so HIPerSpace permitted Ferragallo to see the full scope of his work on the tiled display system which measures 31.8 x 7.9 feet.

In a video posted on YouTube, Ferragallo talks about ...

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Calit2's chief scientist Ron Graham will take part in a bit of history-making next week. That's because on April 8, Graham will give one of five plenary lectures at the 61st annual British Mathematical Colloquium. The history? It's the first time that the Colloquium has been held outside the United Kingdom. This year, the British are teaming with the Irish Mathematical Society to hold a joint meeting at the National University of Ireland's Galway campus.

As for Graham's talk, it's on "the combinatorics of solving linear equations." A major branch of modern combinatorics, usually called Ramsey theory, studies properties of structures which are preserved under partitions. Its guiding philosophy ...

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Calit2's composer in residence at UC San Diego, Pulitzer Prize winner Roger Reynolds, is getting a rare concert honor: On March 29, "Roger Reynolds and his Proteges" will echo through a concert hall in Toronto, Canada, as part of the New Music Concerts 2008-2009 season. The aforementioned proteges include composers David Felder of SUNY Buffalo, Israel's Chaya Czernowin, Juan Campoverde from Ecuador, and Brazilian Antonio Borges-Cunha. All of the proteges are well-known composers who earned their Ph.D.'s under Reynolds in the UC San Diego Music graduate program in Composition.

The concert by the New Music Concerts Ensemble (with David Swan on piano and Robert Aitken on flute ...

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Our colleague Mohan Trivedi, a professor of electrical and computer engineering in the Jacobs School and longtime participant in Calit2, has been singled out to deliver the annual Mel Webber Lecture. A lecturer is selected each year by the University of California's System-Wide Transportation Research Center (UCTC). It's the main event for all UC-wide Ph.D. students working on research in various transportation-related topics. Trivedi will give his talk on the evening of this Friday, Feb. 13, in Riverside, Calif., and the conference begins Feb. 12. The topic of Trivedi's keynote lecture: "Human-Centered, Holistic Systems for Safer and Smoother Traffic"; click here for the abstract. 

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The Month Ahead: What's Happening at Calit2... in San Diego and Irvine

Technology and the arts are the focus of two major events this week at Calit2. A new exhibit opens in the gallery@calit2 at UC San Diego... and performers in the Calit2 Building at UC Irvine will participate in a networked performance with an artist and a musician at UC San Diego, in what they're calling an "inter-arts telematics performance". Here's what's coming up at Calit2 on the two campuses...

Monday-Tuesday, October 20-21 UCSD
Biomedical Informatics Research Network All-Hands Meeting
Speaker: Mark Ellisman, UC San Diego and Director, BIRN-CC et. al.
The all-hands meeting is open ...

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On his three-month sabbatical, Calit2 director Larry Smarr is Down Under, barnstorming Australia's major research universities to talk up why today's scientists need more optical networking and visualization facilities. Writing in The Australian newspaper, Andrew Trounson notes that "Smarr is visiting Australia on behalf of the Australian American Leadership Dialogue to exhort vice-chancellors and government to invest in, and adapt to using, the expanding bandwidth capacity to ensure Australian researchers continue to compete." The feature article is extensive, and highlights Smarr's belief that a social and cultural transformation is needed among researchers and universities, in order to take ...

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Our colleague John Orcutt alerted us to a major story we missed last week: Atkinson Hall-based Dorian Raymer (at left), who works for Orcutt on the Ocean Observatories Initiative, made international headlines when he and UCSD physics professor Douglas Smith won an Ig Nobel Prize for Physics. The ceremony took place last Thursday at Harvard, with Raymer in attendance. They were cited for "proving mathematically that heaps of string or hair or almost anything else will inevitably tangle themselves up in knots." This isn't the first big publicity for the study, which Raymer conducted as an undergraduate in Smith's lab. The work was featured by the BBC, and was also selected as one of ...

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Here are some of the events on the calendar at Calit2, or co-sponsored by Calit2, on the two campuses:

The Month Ahead: What's Happening at Calit2... in San Diego and Irvine

With summer over and students back on campus, we resume our weekly digest of what's coming up in the UC Irvine and UC San Diego divisions of Calit2. These are events taking place in our buildings on the two campuses, or activities co-sponsored or organized by Calit2 entities. This week at UCSD, we kick off the second year of Calit2's well-attended, interdisciplinary Behavioral, Social and Computer Sciences Seminar Series, and the UCSD division will co-present the West Coast premiere of "Sanctuary" ...

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A European team, writing in the New England Journal of Medicine, indicates that stroke sufferers can still benefit from clot-busting medicine even if they receive it an hour or so beyond the current three-hour window after symptoms start. But writing in the same journal, UCSD Stroke Center director and Calit2 participant Pat Lyden (pictured at far left) cautions that patients should still seek treatment as soon as they first suspect a possible stroke. Meanwhile, an article about a Calit2-affiliated telemedicine study co-authored by Lyden, co-diretor Brett Meyer, Calit2's Ramesh and others, is now published in the September issue of the British medical journal, The Lancet. 

Titled ...

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After Falko Kuester came up with the ingenious name for his tiled-display-on-steroids, dubbing it the HIPerSpace system, it was probably only a matter of time before it would become a window on U.S. space exploration. And that's what happened this week when two NASA engineers, in San Diego for a conference, opted to participate in a Mars Rover sortie while watching incoming images from the Rover and a NASA control room -- all displayed on Calit2's 286-million-pixel HIPerSpace display at UCSD. The NASA officials -- Michael Sims and Laurence Edwards -- joined Mars Rover Exploration Rover Mission Ops, via live video feeds from Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The feeds were displayed on the ...

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Today we "opened" the StarCAVE, and six local TV stations sent reporters and camera crews. We got a call from the Univision reporter Sandra Bermudez asking whether we could provide a Spanish-speaking expert to talk about the virtual-reality system, so that's her interviewing A/V "guru" Hector Bracho, for a report to air this evening on Channel 17. Hal Clement from the ABC affiliate Channel 10 was here, along with Kristina Lee from the new Fox5 affiliate, plus camera crews from KUSI (Channel 9), KNSD (Channel 7), the CW (Channel 6). The only no-show was KFMB Channel 8. Also on hand: San Diego Union-Tribune reporter Jonathan Sidener and a photographer, so look for an article in the paper tomorrow ...

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Roger Reynolds (pictured at left, with percussionist Steven Schick) composed most of "Sanctuary" before becoming Calit2's composer in residence at UC San Diego in July 2007. But as he was preparing for the work's world premiere in the I.M. Pei-designed East Wing of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., last November, he told me that his hope was to re-formulate "Sanctuary" as part of a series we informally dubbed "great music for great spaces". After the smashing success in Washington (when the Washington Post critic Stephen Brookes called it a "once-in-a-lifetime aural experience"), we discussed what might be a suitably 'great' venue for the work in San Diego. It didn't take ...

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If you're traveling to the Big Apple sometime soon, be sure to stop in Times Square and look up at the giant MTV high-definition video screen on the east side of Broadway between 44th and 45th streets. Several times a day at the top of the hour, they are showing a 5-minute video clip taken from a re-enactment of a famous 1971 Cesar Chavez speech in Los Angeles, with Calit2 researcher and Visual Arts assistant professor Ricardo Dominguez in the "title" role. The re-enactment was part of a series produced by artist Mark Tribe for the Port Huron Project 4: We Are Also Responsible. And if you aren't headed for New York City, you can still watch the video on Blip.TV. Dominguez is also ...

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Peter Day, whose program "In Business" on BBC Radio has a wide following, spent time at Calit2 in San Diego recently. Now, his documentary "Bring in the Bandwidth" hit the airwaves last night in the UK, and will eventually play on BBC World Service as well... but you can already listen to his interview with Calit2 Director Larry Smarr (and eavesdrop on his tour of the StarCAVE at UCSD with Trish Stone) by downloading an .mp3 podcast of the program at http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/radio/worldbiz/worldbiz_20080904-2030a.mp3. Peter also mentions Larry and Trish in a preview on the BBC website, explaining how the story arose from his first interview with futurist George Gilder more than 20 ...

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As we reported back in June, an Illinois startup company named its privately-built supercomputer "R Smarr" after Calit2 director Larry Smarr. [The "R" refers to the company, R Systems, which is the brainchild of co-founder Brian Kucic, who worked with Smarr when the latter was founding director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.] So on Friday, Larry visited his eponymously named supercomputer at R Systems in Champaign and attended a reception in his honor at the iCyt atrium in the University of Illinois Research Park.

Local media turned out to laud the startup and its muse. In the News-Gazette, reporter Don Dodson ...

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New curators at the San Diego Museum of Art visited Calit2 on Thursday to look at some of the cool capture and visualization technologies being developed for our Center of Interdisciplinary Science for Art, Architecture and Archaeology (CISA3). SDMA and CISA3 are partnering on a long-term project to develop digital clinical charts as a conservation tool for major works in SDMA's permanent collection, and the work will be part of a permanent exhibit scheduled to open next January in time for a meeting of the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD) in San Diego. The visitors included John Marciari, Curator of Italian and Spanish Paintings and head of provenance research at SDMA, as well as ...

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All this week geoscientists are gathering in the SDSC/Calit2 Synthesis Center for a crash course in how to use IT and other cyber tools. Funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and organized by the NSF-funded Geosciences Network (GEON), the Cyberinfrastructure Summer Institute for Geoscientists (CSIG) kicked off on Monday with an introduction by SDSC's Chaitan Baru, GEON principal investigator and frequent Calit2 collaborator. Click here to download his talk on "Enabling Discoveries in the Earth Sciences Through the Geosciences Network".

Another Calit2 participant, Deborah Kilb from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, focused on "Earthquake Data: Manipulation & ...

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We're a bit late on this story... but Visual Arts professor Ricardo Dominguez (in blue at left) had a unique experience in July, when he portrayed Cesar Chavez in a re-enactment of a landmark speech by the Chicano leader. It was the fourth event of the Port Huron Project, a series of re-enactments organized by artist Mark Tribe, part of Creative Time's 2008 public art initiative, "Democracy in America: The National Campaign". It was held in Exposition Park in South L.A., site of the original speech.

According to LosAngeles Times art critic Christopher Knight, "At the end of Dominguez's second performance of the Chavez speech, the crowd spontaneously erupted into a loud chant of "Si! Se puede! ...

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There's a great feature in the online version of Environmental Protection magazine, about the project under which UC San Diego undergraduates "have desigend, built and deployed a network of five weather-monitoring stations as a key step toward helping the university use ocean breezes to cool buildings, identify the sunniest rooftops to expand its solar-electric system, and use water more efficiently in irrigation and in other ways." As the article notes, the students are mentored by Calit2's Bill Hodgkiss and Doug Palmer as well as Jacobs School mechanical and engineering professors Jan Kleissl and Paul Linden. Linden also directs UCSD's Environment and Sustainability Initiative (ESI), ...

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Our colleague Sheldon Brown, director of the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts (CRCA), is at the FILE new-media art festival in Sao Paulo, Brazil, along with others from Calit2 and CRCA: Peter Otto, Todd Margolis and Mike Toillion. He says his Scalable City installation and festival of 14 4K films have been well-received. "For the first time, the interactive installation of Scalable City is seen side-by-side with its 4K film version, creating a more complete experience of its multiple media forms," writes Brown from the festival. "CRCA and Calit2 have worked with FIOLE to create the first 4K film screening in Brazil. Along with the Scalable City film, 4K fare such as Mike Toillion's ...

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Calit2 participant and Computer Science and Engineering professor Mihir Bellare got some great news today. A dozen years ago Bellare was one of the inventors of the Keyed-Hash Message Authentication Code (HMAC), a crypotology algorithm for use when message authentication is required. After a long process and a series of new proofs published by Bellare in 2006, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) proposed last year to make HMAC a standard for data communications security, and today it became effective -- with the publication of a notice in the Federal Register.

The story was picked up today by William Jackson, writing in Government Computer News ("New version ...

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One of Calit2's first joint projects with the UCSD School of Medicine, in 2003, involved creation of a broadband video telemedicine system, STRokE DOC. It allowed a stroke specialist from UCSD, using a laptop and broadband connection, to evaluate possible stroke victims brought into one of several community ERs in remote areas of San Diego County. Evaluation is critical, because if stroke victims can be administered a clot-buster drug within the first few hours of an attack, it can minimize the damage. The project has resulted in several major studies, but the most far-reaching was published over the weekend by the British medical journal Lancet Neurology.

The net result: In a study of 222 ...

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Every year CONNECT hosts the well-attended Most Innovative Product Awards, now in their 21st year. CONNECT calls it San Diego's "Oscars for local technology innovation." When the 2008 awards are handed out next Dec. 12, the crowd will be treated to an introductory video sampling the wisdom of local tech luminaries, which explains how a TV crew and producers from CONNECT ended up in front of the HIPerSpace wall last Thursday, interviewing Calit2 director Larry Smarr for his thoughts on "Generation Innovation" -- the catchphrase for this year's MIP Awards. And of course Larry obliged, delivering some of his lines while walking in front of the display wall for a "tracking shot" (click on right ...

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Fact #1: The IT industry consumes as much energy and has roughly the same carbon footprint as the airline industry.
Fact #2: Energy usage per compute server rack was 2 kilowatts in 2000, but will be fifteen times as much (30KW) in 2010.
Fact #3: To help improve the energy efficiency of computing, NSF has awarded $2 million over three years to Calit2's GreenLight project.
Tom DeFanti, director of visualization in the UCSD division of Calit2, is PI on the project. Together with the campus's Administrative Computing and Telecommunications (ACT) group, Calit2 will provide $600,000 in matching funds. One of the two Sun Modular Datacenters (see interior pictured above) deployed recently ...

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Robert Friedman, a co-principal investigator on the Community Cyberinfrastructure for Advanced Marine Microbial Ecology Research and Analysis (CAMERA) project, was named recently to be Deputy Director of the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) La Jolla R&D facility. JCVI is Calit2's partner in the CAMERA marine metagenomics project. According to a JCVI news release: "In his new role, Dr. Friedman will oversee day to day operations of JCVI La Jolla, which currently has approximately 40 staff and scientists in 20,000 square feet of lab and office space who are engaged in synthetic, environmental and human genomic research. Plans are underway to build a new, carbon-neutral laboratory facility ...

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CISA3 director Maurizio Seracini discovered 'Cerca Trova' on a painting in the Palazzo Vecchio: 'Seek and Ye Shall Find' is the closest translation in English, and 'Wer suchet, der findet?' turns out to be the German translation. I only know that because it's the sub-title of a profile of Seracini's research on Germany's Monsters & Critics entertainment site. Actually, it's a review of the 2006 British documentary on Seracini's work on two Leonardo da Vinci masterpieces, including the search for his long-lost "Battle of Anghiari" -- a major project now of CISA3. The documentary aired last weekend in continental Europe on the ARTE cable network. If you speak German, read all about ...

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If you missed seeing the interactive installation of ATLAS in Silico at SIGGRAPH 2007 here at Calit2 in San Diego, you'll have to travel to Cleveland if you want to see its latest instantiation. The piece will be shown tomorrow, Saturday and Sunday at Cleveland's Ingenuity Fest, which calls it "a beautiful, interactive 3D experience that uses a participant's movement to trigger mesmerizing, life-size audiovisual effects inspired by the Global Ocean Survey". The GOS marine metagenomic data is housed in the CAMERA project servers on the first floor of Atkinson Hall. A team from the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts (CRCA), including Todd Margolis, Iman Mostafavi and Joachim Gossman, ...

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High-school students participating in the COSMOS math-and-science residential program this month at UCSD were visibly interested in this week's 53-minute lecture by Paul Linden on sustainability and climate change, now available for on-demand viewing [Windows Media player and broadband connection required]. The speaker (at left) wears many hats, most notably Director of the Calit2-based UCSD Environment and Sustainability Initiative (ESI), and Chair of the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering department of the Jacobs School. Calit2 is webcasting the weekly lecture series, which is one of the few chances when all ~150 students in the COSMOS program's seven 'clusters' get to participate ...

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Two of Calit2's visual arts faculty at UCSD are mounting a joint exhibition that opens Aug. 4 and will run through Oct. 3. It will take place in the gallery@ calit2 on the first floor of Atkinson Hall. Prof. Adriene Jenik will present version 2.6 of SPECFLIC (at left), her ongoing experiment in "distributed social cinema" that premiered its version 1.0 at the dedication of Calit2's building on the UCSD campus. Prof. Ricardo Dominguez is the ringleader of an art collective that calls itself *particle group*, which will be showing its interactive "Particles of Interest," highlighting the pervasive threat of nanoparticles to human health. News release. Website. Earlier ...

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Click on arrow for video of Google HQs
Since Google Chief Internet Evangelist Vint Cerf is on the Calit2 Advisory Board, and for lots of other reasons (future jobs?), we care what happens to Google. After the closing bell on Wall Street today, Google broke the bad news: net profits fell short of analyst expectations, by 11 cents per share. In after-hours trading, Google stock plunged 11%, so it will probably take a pounding when the markets open on Friday. That's even though profits jumped $100 million from a year ago, to $1.25 billion. More impressive: Google booked $5.37 billion in revenues in just three months, up 39% from a year ago. ...

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On Monday, July 14, the CAMERA marine metagenomics project released a major upgrade to its Web site. The new CAMERA Web site is built upon the open-source Drupal content management system, and in addition to a new layout, this release has added:

• New Education content
• Events calendar (feel free to send event notices to camera-info@calit2.net) 
• New Forum system
  • Anonymous posting/replies. By default, all posts are anonmyous, but you can leave your name, which will be visible to the public. If you leave your email address, it will only be shown to the CAMERA admins.
  • Integrated forum searches. Searching the site now also returns forum content.
• Advanced BLAST - a more streamlined ...

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Calit2's Advanced Network Sciences (ANS) group at UC San Diego, in collaboration with the Jacobs School's Electrical and Computer Engineering department, will bring five top scholars in network theory to UCSD. They'll be "in residence" the week of Aug. 18-22, some for the entire week, some just for two or three days. The speakers include Princeton's Bill Massey, USC's Amy Ward, Sean Meyn of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Nick Bambos of Stanford, and Caltech's Adam Wierman. Each will give two, 90-minute talks over two days, in addition to meeting with faculty and graduate students "to foster discussion and collaborations." The specific topic of each short course will be announced ...

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Calit2's partner in the OptIPuter project -- University of Illinois at Chicago's Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) -- is getting ready to build the OmegaTable. It's a modular, multi-sensory touch tabletop for interactive, visual data exploration in 2D and autostereoscopic 3D (3D without special glasses). EVL recently landed a $450,000 Major Research Instrumentation grant from the National Science Foundation to develop the OmegaTable. It's the next generation of EVL tabletops, after the LambdaTable (pictured) that wowed visitors to the joint SDSC/Calit2/EVL booth at Supercomputing 07. Says EVL director and OptIPuter co-PI Jason Leigh: "These displays are the new microscopes and telescopes, ...

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UC San Diego prides itself on having an aggressive "green" campus strategy. UC Irvine is home to the National Fuel Cell Research Center (NFCRC), which is looking at fuel cells to power everything from laptops to electric utilities, and operates the first 700-bar hydrogen fueling station in California (at left). The two campuses have a history of collaboration -- not least on Calit2 -- and Calit2 director Larry Smarr thinks the institute can play a pivotal role in developing and deploying two-campus activities that could help make Southern California a powerhouse in combatting climate change, reducing our carbon footprint, and building new industry on sustainable technologies. ...

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As UC San Diego stem cell research director Larry Goldstein told a packed audience at Calit2 this morning,"talking to a bunch of high-school students who are interested in science is a lot easier than talking to a bunch of Congressmen. I know you're interested... and you're at least a few IQ points above most people in Washington!". Noting that "stem cells are cool," the School of Medicine professor was addressing more than 150 middle and high-school students participating in this summer's COSMOS 4-week residential science-and-math program at UCSD, as well as many of the Calit2 Summer Undergraduate Scholars. Goldstein's hour-long talk on "Developing the Medical Treatments ...

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Calit2's Maurizio Seracini, director of the Center of Interdisciplinary Science for Art, Architecture and Archaeology (CISA3), was invited to give a lecture earlier this summer to participants in the UCSD Osher Lifelong Learning Institute program. Calit2 hosted the meeting, and UCSD-TV filmed the event, which is now airing at various times on the broadcast network (it premiered on June 16). The talk, "Rediscovering Leonardo", is also available on UC-TV's YouTube channel. Osher is part of UCSD Extension, and provides a wealth of opportunities for retirees and others age 50 or older. In his talk, Seracini noted the important role that donors are playing through "Friends of ...

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It was first produced and aired by Britain's Channel 4 in 2006, but the documentary about CISA3 director Maurizio Seracini's work on two Leonardo da Vinci masterpieces aired again this evening in Europe on the ARTE TV channel. The 80-minute film tracks Seracini's multispectral scans of the "Adoration of the Magi" painting in the Uffizi Gallery, and the 30-year search for the "Battle of Anghiari", a mural by da Vinci that disappeared from the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence 450 years ago. Originally aired in English as "The Da Vinci Detective", the documentary is airing in France as "Léonard de Vinci: Chefs-d'oeuvre masqués" or "Leonardo da Vinci: Masked Masterpieces"....

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When it comes to tomography, even the most powerful electron microscopes have limitations when taking snapshots of biological micro-structures. So to fine-tune the images, top scientists are refining the algorithms they use to process the raw data, in order to get a more accurate (and hence more useful) picture. That was the focus of "Tomography Day 2008" July 10 at Calit2" on the UCSD campus (attendees pictured at left). It was staged by two groups with facilties in Atkinson Hall -- Peter Arzberger's National Biomedical Computation Resource (NBCR) and Mark Ellisman's National Center for Microscopy and Imaging Research (NCMIR). Rick Lawrence of NCMIR and ...

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The second weekly COSMOS Discovery Lecture will bring UCSD stem cell research leader Larry Goldstein (left) to the Calit2 Auditorium. His talk: "Developing the Medical Treatments of Tomorrow Using Stem Cells". But unless you're one of the 150 middle and high-school students spending July at UCSD as part of the math and science residential camp, or the Calit2 Summer Undergraduate Scholars, you won't be guaranteed a seat for Goldstein's talk. So interested parties in San Diego or anywhere in the world are advised to watch his lecture on the Web, thanks to a live Calit2 webcast. Bookmark this URL -- http://calit2.net/webcast -- and tune in at 9am Pacific time on Tuesday, July 15. And if you ...

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A number of international reporters have been inquiring about Calit2's HIPerSpace, unveiled this week in all its 286 million pixels of glory. Marc Chacksfield of Britain's TechRadar online service calls HIPerSpace the "highest-resolution display systems for scientific visualisation in the world." (If you look closely at the words below the photo on TechRadar, the caption reads: "Now that's a big TV.") The writer ends his article with some dry humor: "And what are they displaying on the, er, display. Well, it's certainly not re-runs of Hollyoaks, more footage from the National Geographic and the like." Ironically, and apparently unknown to Chacksfield, the very first group treated to ...

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Seven of the students participating in this summer's Pacific Rim Experiences for Undergraduates (PRIME) program, funded by NSF with Calit2 support, are spending their ten weeks at Monash University in Australia. And based on a news release from Monash about the UCSD interns, they're off to a great start (and don't seem to mind that it's winter in Melbourne, and they're missing summer in San Diego!). The students are doing e-science and grid engineering research in the university's Faculty of Information Technology, with professor David Abramson. All are working on projects that use Nimrod, a software tool developed at Monash that enables users to harness multiple, distributed computers ...

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Calit2 today announced that its HIPerSpace display system on the 2nd floor of Atkinson Hall takes top honors among high-resolution displays for scientific visualization. The lab of prof. Falko Kuester (pictured below in middle of front row) expanded the first HIPerSpace, making it 30 percent bigger in terms of total pixels. At nearly 287 million pixels, the HIPerSpace tiled wall boasts more than one active pixel for every U.S. citizen, based on the 2000 census.
The second-highest-res display, hyperwall-2, was installed recently at NASA Ames, with nearly 256 million pixels of screen resolution. Other runners-up in order are: Calit2's HIPerWall at UC Irvine (204.8 million pixels); Calit2's ...

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Talk about getting students actively involved in what could otherwise be a dry academic lecture: At one point there were nearly 30 students on the Calit2 auditorium stage at UCSD this morning, as Jeanne Ferrante had them scrambling to categorize themselves on some basic principles used in parallel computing. The associate dean of the Jacobs School of Engineering was speaking to more than 150 middle and high-school students participating in this summer's COSMOS 4-week residential science-and-math program at UCSD, as well as many of the Calit2 Summer Undergraduate Scholars.
Helping as master of ceremonies was Ferrante's husband and CSE emeritus professor Larry Carter (pictured with Ferrante ...

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Calit2's Tom Levy (left) admits that "every real 'dirt' archaeologist fancies him or herself as an Indiana Jones-type character". A profile of Levy, "Raiders of the Lost Artifacts", is the spotlight article in the Summer 2008 issue of UCSD Social Sciences e-Connection. Levy holds the Norma Kershaw Endowed Chair in Archaeology of Ancient Israel and the Neighboring Lands, and is the current chair of UCSD's Judaic Studies Program. And as the article points out, Levy's interest in technology "extends to modern applications of digital technologies and media for archaeological research," which he is pioneering as associate director of Calit2's Center of Interdisiplinary Science for Art, Architecture ...

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An old acquaintance from my early days in broadcasting paid us a visit today. Peter Day (pictured), one of the top "presenters" at the BBC Radio 4 in London, who reports on business and technology, is doing a documentary on the future of bandwidth, asking the question: "Do we really need more pixels?" After a long interview with Larry Smarr, Peter got a good feel for super-high-definition conferencing on the 4K auditorium projection system, and was taken with the animation showing research network bandwidth across the world (courtesy of our OptIPuter partners at the University of Illinois). We also treated Peter to a "ride" in the StarCAVE, and he interviewed Kai Doerr in ...

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Earlier this week CASB director Pavel Pevzner's undergraduate bioinformatics program made headlines for an important publication on an emerging field in bioinformatics called comparative proteogenomics. The program is funded by Pevzner with his fellowship grant from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and in a feature story on the HHMI website, Pevzner says the undergraduate program will take their experiment on experiments to the whole world. Called UBER-GRID--the Undergraduate Bioinformatics E-Research Grid--it will be a platform for worldwide, distributed bioinformatics research projects, Pevzner says. "We will put all our projects on the web and invite every student in the world to ...

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The RedOrbit online news service picked up a report on a deal whereby Darkstrand, Inc. has purchased and will commercialize one-half of all capacity on the National LambdaRail (NLR), which covers multi-gigabit networks linking advanced research institutions across the U.S., including Calit2. The report quotes Calit2's visualization director at UCSD, Tom DeFanti (pictured), saying, "We've been very aware of the disconnection between what is possible in our NLR-networked visualization labs and what is available commercially. The inability to use applied technologies as they evolve and are proven is a critical obstacle for companies, especially those in the media space that need ...

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The July issue of Genome Research features a cool new paper that stakes a claim to the development of a new area of bioinformatics, called 'comparative proteogenomics', combining mass spectrometry and comparative genomics to analyze multiple genomes. Co-author Pavel Pevzner is a Jacobs School computer science professor and Director of Calit2's Center for Algorithmic and Systems Biology (CASB), and his Ph.D. student Nitin Gupta is the lead author. But the big news is that much of the research was handled by undergraduate students who are part of the Bioinformatics [Under]graduate Research Consortium in Comparative Proteogenomics, created by Pevzner, with funding from his 2006 Howard ...

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Lily Cheng went to Beijing in 2006 as part of the NSF- and Calit2-funded Pacific Rim Experiences for Undergraduates (PRIME) summer research program in cyberinfrastructure. Since then, she has continued that research on avian influenza with Wilfred Li, Peter Arzberger and others, identifying more than two dozen promising and novel compounds to combat bird flu. In the Flash video above, Lily talks about her research, just published (with Cheng as first author) in the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry. For more, read the news release "UC San Diego Researchers Identify Potential New Drug Candidates to Combat Bird Flu".

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Calit2's CAMERA marine metagenomics project organized a two-day workshop June 26-27 to focus on "new communication channels in biology". Calit2 webcast the event, and more than 20 individual presentations are now available for on-demand viewing [Windows Media Player required]. Calit2'ers were well represented: Jerry Sheehan (left) did a "Calit2 Technology Overview", focusing on Web 2.0 tools; CAMERA executive director Paul Gilna (right) outlined the project's experience as "A Community-driven Cyberinfrastructure for Metagenomics"; a team of Phil Bourne's colleagues from SciVee laid out how the online video service is "Taking Scientific Communication into the 21st Century"; and John Wooley, ...

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Most conferences at Calit2 tend to draw speakers primarily from the academic community at UC San Diego and beyond. But Calit2's Center for Algorithmic and Systems Biology (CASB) at UCSD is trying to reach out to the growing number of private companies that see the long-term potential in bioinformatics, systems biology and proteomics. Hence today's La Jolla Proteomics Conference, which drew a cross-section of industry participants and speakers. They focused on developments in mass spectrometry from the biological side as well as from the computational side, notably covering current techniques and open problems in proteomics.. The organizing committee included ...

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One of the top TV anchors from Italy's largest broadcast network, RAI, spent half a day at Calit2 yesterday with his crew from Italy. Roberto Giacobbo interviewed CISA3 director Maurizio Seracini and associate director Falko Kuester, and shot HD video of some of the cool visualization tools -- the StarCAVE, HIPerSpace wall, 4K -- being used in the search for Leonardo da Vinci's long-lost mural, "The Battle of Anghiari". Giacobbo's video will be shown at the end of the project, in conjunction with the National Geographic Channel's documentary (for which RAI purchased Italian broadcast rights). Hover over image and click on the right arrow to watch a short clip of the interview with Seracini ...

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Not long ago Larry Smarr was interviewed on one of the popular podcast programs of This Week in Tech (with the rather unfortunately named acronym, TWiT.TV). Now, one of the shows hosted by Leo Laporte and Randal Schwartz, FLOSS Weekly, is featuring two of the brains behind the Rocks cluster middleware. OptIPuter co-PI Philip Papadopoulos and colleague Greg Bruno, developers of Rocks, are interviewed on the show about Rocks, clusters and the Ada language. Click here to download an .mp3 file of the hour-long show. Length: 1:00:44

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It was a strange site on the UCSD campus today, when an interdisciplinary collection of researchers got together to eat some beans -- cooked on a new type of solar cooker, designed primarily for use in developing countries. It's the brainchild of Ida Lunde Jorgensen who is collaborating with Lasse Lorentzen, a Danish researcher who is working at Calit2 in the lab of Ricardo Dominguez. Lasse and Ida have formed the collective project Innovative Reflections where they are working on re-inventing the solar cooker as their first project inventing a more sustainable product, process and business. Members of Calit2's India Initiative, including manager Srinivas Sukumar, participated in the demo. Pictured ...

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This week NASA unveiled its second-generation "hyperwall-2", claiming that it's "the world's highest resolution scientific visualization and data exploration environment." Well sorry, that honor goes to the upgraded HIPerSpace wall built at Calit2 on the UCSD campus by prof. Falko Kuester and his team. NASA arrived at its claim because its Hyperwall is bigger than the earlier version of HIPerSpace (220 million pixels of screen resolution). NASA's 128-screen tiled display boasts 250 million pixels. But the new HIPerSpace wall -- which is already operating but won't be formally announced until next week -- can display just over 290 million pixel graphics. The Calit2 system uses fewer ...

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The CAMERA project is hosting a two-day meeting where scientists are talking about how to communicate biology and other disciplines in a world of open source, YouTube, wikis and such. Today's topics: scientific discovery and dissemination; data sharing and re-use; the impact of Web 2.0 tools on biology; and "the future of science", the keynote this evening by Canada's Michael Nielsen. Attendees gathered around the "Bear" sculpture in front of Atkinson Hall for a 'class photo'. [Click on image to download high-res version.] The workshop continues on Friday, with talks by CAMERA executive director Paul Gilna, SciVee creator and UCSD professor Phil Bourne; and more.

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BBC's Radio 4 Science at Nine program "Leading Edge" just ran a feature story by Molly Bentley on the RUBI robot developed by Javier Movellan and his Machine Perception Lab on the 2nd floor of Atkinson Hall. RUBI has been around for a while, but the new project -- part of the Calit2-based Temporal Dynamics of Learning Center -- is testing to see if RUBI can teach a foreign language to pre-schoolers. The test language: Finnish, because it is unlikely that the children would have heard it. Click here to listen [the RUBI segment begins roughly 15 minutes into the 30-minute program]. No conclusions from the research yet, but it was clear that at least one tyke was picking up Finnish words in ...

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Our fearless leader Larry Smarr is getting a new supercomputer named after him! The "R Smarr" supercomputer is the first offering of a startup company -- R Systems -- that is betting that there is plenty of business in the private sector for a supercomputer that will compete with large supercomputer centers such as the San Diego Supercomputer Center and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois. (Larry was the founding director of NCSA prior to becoming the founding director of Calit2.) R Systems calls R Smarr "the most powerful supercomputer owned and operated by a private company in the U.S.", and it was ranked #44 on the latest TOP500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers. News release.

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Several young faculty members affiliated with Calit2 on the UCSD campus are among the 20 recipients of the 2008 Hellman Faculty Fellows Awards, announced June 23. They include (pictured left to right): Morana Alac from Communication; Ricardo Dominguez (Visual Arts); and Curt Schurgers from Electrical and Computer Engineering. The 20 assistant professors will share in $360,000 in the 2008-'09 academic year. The awards are funded by Chris and Warren Hellman to "support the research and creative activities of promising assistant professors who show capacity for great distinction in their work" -- and to enhance their progress toward tenure.

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Jeff's the VP of Marketing and Business Development at the Canadian company Mechdyne. Fun fact: Mechdyne has a motto printed on its business cards that could work just as well for Calit2: "Enabling Discovery". Pictured: Jeff (far right) with colleagues in the Calit2 Auditorium, watching an interactive demo by Maurizio Seracini (far left) on the 4K display.

One of the newest members of the Calit2-incubated CineGrid digital cinema consortium, Jeff Brum, took a tour of the institute's cool virtual-reality facilities at UCSD today.

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National Geographic Society, with its magazine and TV network, are partnering with Calit2's CISA3 project in Florence to find the long-lost "Battle of Anghiari" mural by Leonardo da Vinci. Leading that project: Maurizio Seracini, recently named a National Geographic Fellow. And this June 16-18, a delegation from the Society led by Mission Programs EVP Terry Garcia (pictured) are in San Diego to explore other potential collaboration with Calit2 researchers. On Tuesday, June 17 at 2:30pm, the UCSD community is invited to attend a lecture by Garcia and participate in a discussion afterwards about the use of cutting-edge technology in modern exploration. [Photo by Omar Mohsen, Business Today - Egypt] ...

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Larry Smarr keynoted at TeraGrid '08 this week in Las Vegas, urging scientists to deploy OptIPortal systems in their labs to visualize in real time as their data are run through remote supercomputers connected via the TeraGrid. Lots of excitement... read the news release... or download Larry's presentation.

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