In a breakthrough demonstration yesterday, as part of CENIC's CalREN-XD/HPR workshop [www.cenic.org/workshop/] held at Calit2 at UCSD, two research groups at UCI and UCSD momentarily created the world's largest virtual OptIPortal. Using two dedicated one gigabit per second optical links, provided by CENIC as part of the persistent Calit2 OptIPuter, the two HiPerSpace tiled walls at Calit2@UCSD and Calit2@UCI were united into a 124 tile HiPerVerse exceeding 1/2 billion pixels.This extension of the CGLX software system(http://vis.ucsd.edu/~cglx/), developed by Kai-Uwe Doerr and Falko Kuester at UCSD, sets the stage for linking together a number of the 33 sites around the world that are currently ...

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During my weeklong trip to Seattle, I was able to visit Professor Ginger Armbrust's research group at the University of Washington. Ginger is an expert on marine microbes, particularly diatoms. She was a member of the Vision '05 expedition headed by UW's John Delaney and has participated in uncompressed (1. 5 Gbps) HD video links with me as Supercomputing '07 and at Calit2 in February '08 (see image below). Ginger is a distinguished member of our Moore Foundation-funded CAMERA microbial metagenomics Scientific Advisory Board. She and her group have been pioneers in using OptIPortals to create new visual representations for microbial genomics and metagenomics. Here is a picture I took of her ...

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Today ...

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It was a real pleasure to have Jim Bottum, CIO of Clemson University, and three of his staff, Tracey Hare, Jill Gemmill, Carla Rathbone, visiting Calit2@UCSD for a few days. Jim was my Deputy Director at NCSA for fifteen years, then became CIO of Purdue University, before moving to Clemson a few years ago.At each of these universities, Jim and his crackerjack staff have pioneered new campus cyberinfrastructure. In January 2008 Jim was on the cover story of Storage Magazine, describing his petabyte rotating storage campus cache, an architectural innovation that UCSD is currently considering installing. Besides the Great Wall o' Pixels, we visited many labs in Calit2 yesterday.

Today we will visit ...

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Tom DeFanti and I just did a hard hat tour of the UCSD Scripps Institution of Oceanography's Robert Paine Scripps Forum for Science, Society, and the Environment (Scripps Seaside Forum). This fascinating new complex is under construction, but you can already begin to see the shape taking form.

SIO Director Tony Haymet had asked us to come down the hill from Calit2 and consult with long-time collaborator Graham Kent and the Forum project manager on whether Calit2 could help SIO design a tiled display wall OptIPortal in the complex. We think we have found a wall against which the OptIPortal can be mounted and, more challenging, a set of conduits in which to run fiber extended ...

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I just finished a day and a half meeting with the Community Cyberinfrastructure for Advanced Marine Microbial Ecology Research and Analysis (CAMERA) microbial metagenomics Scientific Advisory Board, held at the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation headquarters in San Francisco. The SAB reviewed Calit2's ambitious plans to build a second-generation CAMERA cyberinfrastructure (CI), as well as to bring many more metagenomic data sets into the CAMERA servers. Mark Ellisman, who has recently been named the CAMERA Chief Technology Officer, was in attendance as the leader of the CI development team. Mark is the director of the NIH-fundedNational Center for Microscopy and Imaging Research at UCSD.

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 building groundbreaking on May 31, 2002. Note the then Chancellor's Dynes (UCSD) and Cicerone (UCI), along with long time private sector supporter Marco Thompson, standing behind us...

The directors of the four Gray Davis Institutes for Science and Innovation got an opportunity to have a conference call this morning with former Governor Davis. He has been interested in how research in the Cal-ISIs into Green Technologies can be harnessed for helping California transform its economy and lower its energy intensity and carbon footprint. The directors of the Institutes have been pulling together one-pagers on key projects which we hope will bring more attention to the innovations our faculty and campuses are pursuing in these critical areas. Quite an exciting phone call!

Below is a picture of Governor Davis and me at the Calit2@UCSD

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I visited the Machine Perception Lab (MPL) today on the 2nd floor of Calit2@UCSD. They are the group that has the cool RUBI robot that talks to children. They demoed their frame by frame face recognition software that can tell if you are smiling or not, as well as other facial expressions. All this is read out on a series of graphs in realtime. It was amazing that I could just sit down in front of their computer and it instantly started analyzing my face with no training period required!

We also got to talk to a UCSD CSE grad student Jacob Whitehill, who was featured June 26 on the Calit2 Web site. His YouTube video has been getting a lot of hits.

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I am off to attend the three day Australian-American Leadership Dialogue (AALD) annual meeting in Washington DC. The first day of the meeting is devoted to the Young Leadership Dialogue [YLD]. The photo above is of me with Amanda Johnson, Co-Chair of the YLD, and Phil Scanlan, founder of the AALD. Calit2ers will recognize both as virtually appearing the UCSD auditorium as participants in our AALD-driven telepresence sessions, critical first steps in creating our persistent global OptiPlanet Collaboratory.

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