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Newsletter
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published on Monday, July 9, 2007
Newsletter
New Dutch national supercomputer Huygens
On March 29, SARA and IBM signed the contract for the building of the
new Dutch National Supercomputer Huygens. IBM has been selected following
a European Procurement issued by the Netherlands National Computing Facilities
foundation (NCF). The funding has been granted by the Netherlands Organisation
for Scientific Research (NWO). The new IBM System p supercomputer is capable
of more than 60 trillion calculations per second (60 Teraflop/s) theoretical
peak performance and provides 15 terabytes of main memory (15.000 times
more memory than modern PC).
To bridge the time till half 2008, an IBM Supercomputer based on POWER5+
technology was placed at the SARA premises on May 29. IBM has installed
and extensively tested the new supercomputer. On June 27, SARA formally
accepted the system. This temporary system has a theoretical peak performance
of 14 Teraflop/s. In the second half of August 2007, the computing power
of this new POWER5+ system will become available for the scientific community
in the Netherlands.
The festive opening of Huygens took place on June 13. The new national
supercomputer was officially inaugurated by the Mayor of Amsterdam, and
prof. dr. Ben de Kruijff, board member of NWO.
SARA sponsors Computer
Olympiad
From June 11-18, the World Championship Computer Chess and the Computer
Olympiad were held at Science Park Amsterdam. This international event
was organized by the International Computer Games Association (ICGA) en
took place in the week in which the new national supercomputer Huygens
was officially inaugurated. IBM, SARA, NCF en NWO Exacte Wetenschappen
have jointly sponsored the Computer Olympiad.
Life Science Grid
Today's Life Scientists need to have advanced HPC facilities at their
disposal. For that reason, and commissioned by the NCF and NBIC, SARA
places powerful computer clusters at the local sites of interested universities.
These clusters can then be used for experiments. SARA and the user community
take care of support. The first operational clusters were installed in
Amsterdam, Nijmegen and Wageningen, and are connected by the fast SURFnet
network. Locally, every cluster can be utilized as a traditional computer
cluster, thus leveraging significant computational power and data storage.
The true force of the Life Science Grid, though, is that the clusters
together form a Computing and Storage Grid, a virtual supercluster. Applications
running locally on the cluster can also be executed in a distributed fashion
on the entire Grid.
GÉANT2 helps
drive high-speed computer projects
The speed of collaborative research using Europe's network of supercomputers
will be advanced by a major upgrade. The Distributed European Infrastructure
for Supercomputing Applications (DEISA), has increased connectivity speeds
ten-fold to 10 Gbps, through dedicated links designed and deployed by
the GÉANT2 pan-European research and education network. This will
allow researchers to harness the combined processing power of DEISA's
200 teraflops of supercomputing infrastructure. Requests for supercomputing
resources amongst scientific research domains are on the increase.
GÉANT2 is the largest research and education network ever built
in Europe. Extending over 50,000 km, it connects 34 countries on the continent
and has extensive links to North America and Asia. Managed by international
research and education network provider DANTE, it is co-funded by Europe's
National Research and Education Networks (NRENs) and the European Commission.
By mid-2007 the DEISA sites, including SARA, will be connected via dedicated
10 Gbps wavelengths, all managed by a central switch.
HPC-Europa
The project Transnational Access of HPC-Europa offers interested European
scientists the opportunity to make use of the most advanced supercomputers
in Europe. They can spend some time at a scientific institution in one
of the following countries: the Netherlands, Italy, France, the United
Kingdom, Germany or Spain. Not only is the use of computing capacity at
the High Performance Computing (HPC) center in the country involved is
free of any cost, also the travel and accommodation expenses are compensated
by HPC-Europa.
SARA is one of the six supercomputer centers that participates in HPC-Europa.
Since the start of HPC-Europa in 2004, more than 600 researchers made
use of this possibility. Both visitors and hosts are enthusiastic about
this initiative of the European Commission en hope that the project will
be continued in 2008, and years to come.
SARA's CAVE used at
PhD research Vrije Universiteit (VU)
On February 2, Valentijn Visch has defended his PhD thesis “Looking
for Genres - The effect of film figure movement on genre recognition”.
The dissertation reports a series of empirical studies on genre recognition
and the nature of genre knowledge. The study investigated whether film
viewers recognize basic film genres such as comic, drama, action and non-fiction
based on movement. The experiments were done by showing short animation
scenes of moving blocks to a number of respondents. A number of the experiments
for this study were performed in the CAVE at SARA.
SARA wins two main prizes
in lightpath competition
On June 21, five research projects were awarded the main prize in the
lightpath competition “Enlighten your Research”, which was organized
by SURFnet in collaboration with NWO. In the proposals the added value
of the use of a dedicated lightpath had to be explicitly expressed.
SARA participates in two awarded proposals. The first proposal aims at
Electron microscopy through lightpaths and has been submitted together
with the Leiden University Medical Center and the Eindhoven University
of Technology. The second proposal focuses on the high-resolution visualization
of remote climate data with pixel streaming. This proposal SARA has submitted
together with prof. H. Dijkstra of the Institute for Marine and Atmospheric
research Utrecht (IMAU) of the Utrecht University. The winners of the
lightpath competition receive a lightpath and 20,000 euro for integrating
the use of the lightpath in their research.
Contribution to CineGrid
@ Holland Festival 2007
From 17 to 21 June, a film crew of the Research Institute for Digital
Media and Content of the Keio University (Tokyo, Japan) has been recording
ultra-high resolution video in the streets of Amsterdam, and of “Era
la Notte”, a performance of the Holland Festival. For the very first
time in Europe video images were captured in 4-K resolution (4096x2160
pixels per image). The consortium of CineGrid Amsterdam searched for collaboration
with the Keio University of Tokyo and with CineGrid in the USA.
SARA is co-responsible for the storage of 9 TeraByte (9,000 GigaByte)
of data in the Amsterdam Lighthouse, and for the connectivity between
the LightHouse and NetherLight. The Amsterdam LightHouse, a joint project
of UvA and SARA, focuses on research in advanced network technologies.
NetherLight is the optic Internet exchange for academic research networks
under the responsibility of SURFnet. As network operator of NetherLight,
SARA provides the international connectivity via NetherLight on behalf
of SURFnet.
The images were transmitted live over the Internet to institutions in
the USA, Japan, Sweden, Spain and the Czech Republic, and are also stored
at SARA for research purposes. Besides the Holland Festival, the following
Dutch organizations are involved in this experiment: Waag Society, the
Universiteit van Amsterdam (UvA), SURFnet and SARA.
Events
NextStage Network Meeting
On February 1, SARA hosted a NextStage meeting. Theme of this meeting
was "The Netherlands as game hub for Europe?" NextStage is a
network organization that brings together innovative entrepreneurs, investors,
partners, service and knowledge providers. As active player in the field
of co-location, hosting, processing, storage and connectivity SARA is
an interesting partner for the national and international gaming industry.
City Government of Amsterdam visits SARA
On 13 March, Mayor Job Cohen and the Aldermen of Amsterdam City Council
have visited SARA Amsterdam. During this visit SARA Managing Director
Anwar Osseyran gave a presentation on SARA's activities and the importance
of High Performance Computing. Also was explored whether Amsterdam will
remain, in the near future, a supercomputer center that is playing an
important role on European scale.
NBIC conference April 16-19
SARA was one of the head sponsors of the NBIC conference and has organized
demonstrations on the Tiled Panel Display (TPD), a visualization facility
which can be used on almost any location. Researchers of the Integrative
Bioinformatics unit/Micro-Array Department of the Universiteit van Amsterdam
(UvA) have demonstrated the use of a TPD in their investigations. In the
e-BioLab of the UvA, which has been installed in collaboration with SARA,
images of micro arrays are analyzed.
Koen visits SARA
On Monday, May 14, Doe Een Wens Stichting Nederland organized a visit
to SARA for 10-year old Koen. Doe Een Wens Stichting Nederland is organization
of volunteers that tries to fulfill the wishes of children of 3 to 18
years of age that suffer from a life-threatening disease.
DEISA Symposium in Munich
On May 21 and 22, SARA participated in the DEISA Symposium "Towards
Petascale Computing in Europe" at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences
and Humanities, Munich (Duitsland). This symposium is part of a series
that takes place every spring at different locations in Europe.
SARA at innovation congress ICTDelta
On May 22 and 23, the congress ICTDelta took place at the Beatrix Theater
of the Jaarbeurs Utrecht. As national e-Science Support Center, SARA has
a prominent position in a large number of national and international collaborations.
On SARA's Tiled Panel Display, a powerfull visualization facility, demonstrations
were given of several applications that are used at scientific research.
AMS-IX meetings at Science Park Amsterdam
On May 30, NIKHEF and SARA hosted the Video Working Group, the Technical
Meeting and the General Meeting of AMS-IX. After these meetings, Ir. Erik-Jan
Bos, Managing Director of SURFnet, gave a presentation “Linking the
world with light, SURFnet's perspective on next generation networking”.
Opening national supercomputer Huygens
On June 13, the new national supercomputer Huygens was officially opened
by by the Mayor of Amsterdam, and prof. dr. Ben de Kruijff (AB NWO) (see
also the first paragraph of this newsletter).
Computer Olympiad at Science Park Amsterdam
From June 11-18, the World Championship Computer Chess and the Computer
Olympiad were held at Science Park Amsterdam. IBM, SARA, NCF en NWO Exacte
Wetenschappen have jointly sponsored this event..
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Lecture by SARA director dr. ir. Anwar Osseyran during the opening event
of the new national supercomputer Huygens.
Official opening of the new national supercomputer Huygens by Mayor
Job Cohen and prof. dr. Ben de Kruijff (NWO board member).
Dr. Patrick Aerts, director NCF, during the festive opening.
SARA director Anwar Osseyran receives a present from drs. Harry van
Dorenmalen. general manager IBM Benelux.
Tour on the computer floor at the new national supercomputer.
European scientists of the Transnational Access program of HPC-Europa
attend a demonstration in the CAVE.
Social event of a group of visitors of HPC-Europa.
PhD research of the Vrije Universiteit in SARA's CAVE.
Group picture of the CineGrid @ Holland Festival.
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