From Bare Metal to Virtual: Lessons Learned when a Supercomputing Institute Deploys its First Cloud

As primary provider for research computing services at the University of Minnesota, the Minnesota Supercomputing Institute (MSI) has long been responsible for serving the needs of a user-base numbering in the thousands. In recent years, MSI---like many other HPC centers---has observed a growing need for self-service, on-demand, data-intensive research, as well as the emergence of many new controlled-access datasets for research purposes. In light of this, MSI constructed a new on-premise cloud service, named Stratus, which is architected from the ground up to easily satisfy data-use agreements and fill four gaps left by traditional HPC. The resulting OpenStack cloud, constructed from HPC-specific compute nodes and backed by Ceph storage, is designed to fully comply with controls set forth by the NIH Genomic Data Sharing Policy. Herein, we present twelve lessons learned during the ambitious sprint to take Stratus from inception and into production in less than 18 months. Important, and often overlooked, components of this timeline included the development of new leadership roles, staff and user training, and user support documentation. Along the way, the lessons learned extended well beyond the technical challenges often associated with acquiring, configuring, and maintaining large-scale systems.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures, PEARC '18: Practice and Experience in Advanced Research Computing, July 22--26, 2018, Pittsburgh, PA, US

Managing Intellectual Property to Foster Agricultural Development

Over the past decades, consideration of IPRs has become increasingly important in many areas of agricultural development, including foreign direct investment, technology transfer, trade, investment in innovation, access to genetic resources, and the protection of traditional knowledge. The widening role of IPRs in governing the ownership of—and access to—innovation, information, and knowledge makes them particularly critical in ensuring that developing countries benefit from the introduction of new technologies that could radically alter the welfare of the poor. Failing to improve IPR policies and practices to support the needs of developing countries will eliminate significant development opportunities. The discussion in this note moves away from policy prescriptions to focus on investments to improve how IPRs are used in practice in agricultural development. These investments must be seen as complementary to other investments in agricultural development. IPRs are woven into the context of innovation and R&D. They can enable entrepreneurship and allow the leveraging of private resources for resolving the problems of poverty. Conversely, IPRs issues can delay important scientific advancements, deter investment in products for the poor, and impose crippling transaction costs on organizations if the wrong tools are used or tools are badly applied. The central benefit of pursuing the investments outlined in this note is to build into the system a more robust capacity for strategic and flexible use of IPRs tailored to development goals

An analytic framework to assess organizational resilience

Background: Resilience Engineering is a paradigm for safety management that focuses on coping with complexity to achieve success, even considering several conflicting goals. Modern socio-technical systems have to be resilient to comply with the variability of everyday activities, the tight-coupled and underspecified nature of work and the nonlinear interactions among agents. At organizational level, resilience can be described as a combination of four cornerstones: monitoring, responding, learning and anticipating. Methods: Starting from these four categories, this paper aims at defining a semi-quantitative analytic framework to measure organizational resilience in complex socio-technical systems, combining the Resilience Analysis Grid (RAG) and the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). Results: This paper presents an approach for defining resilience abilities of an organization, creating a structured domain-dependent framework to define a resilience profile at different levels of abstraction, to identify weaknesses and strengths of the system and thus potential actions to increase system’s adaptive capacity. An illustrative example in an anaesthesia department clarifies the outcomes of the approach. Conclusions: The outcome of the RAG, i.e. a weighted set of probing questions, can be used in different domains, as a support tool in a wider Safety-II oriented managerial action to bring safety management into the core business of the organization

Development of Computer Science Disciplines - A Social Network Analysis Approach

In contrast to many other scientific disciplines, computer science considers conference publications. Conferences have the advantage of providing fast publication of papers and of bringing researchers together to present and discuss the paper with peers. Previous work on knowledge mapping focused on the map of all sciences or a particular domain based on ISI published JCR (Journal Citation Report). Although this data covers most of important journals, it lacks computer science conference and workshop proceedings. That results in an imprecise and incomplete analysis of the computer science knowledge. This paper presents an analysis on the computer science knowledge network constructed from all types of publications, aiming at providing a complete view of computer science research. Based on the combination of two important digital libraries (DBLP and CiteSeerX), we study the knowledge network created at journal/conference level using citation linkage, to identify the development of sub-disciplines. We investigate the collaborative and citation behavior of journals/conferences by analyzing the properties of their co-authorship and citation subgraphs. The paper draws several important conclusions. First, conferences constitute social structures that shape the computer science knowledge. Second, computer science is becoming more interdisciplinary. Third, experts are the key success factor for sustainability of journals/conferences

Issues in NASA program and project management

This volume is the third in an ongoing series on aerospace project management at NASA. Articles in this volume cover the attitude of the program manager, program control and performance measurement, risk management, cost plus award fee contracting, lessons learned from the development of the Far Infrared Absolute Spectrometer (FIRAS), small projects management, and age distribution of NASA scientists and engineers. A section on resources for NASA managers rounds out the publication

OGSA first impressions: a case study re-engineering a scientific applicationwith the open grid services architecture

We present a case study of our experience re-engineeringa scientific application using the Open Grid Services Architecture(OGSA), a new specification for developing Gridapplications using web service technologies such as WSDLand SOAP. During the last decade, UCL?s Chemistry departmenthas developed a computational approach for predictingthe crystal structures of small molecules. However,each search involves running large iterations of computationallyexpensive calculations and currently takes a fewmonths to perform. Making use of early implementationsof the OGSA specification we have wrapped the Fortranbinaries into OGSI-compliant service interfaces to exposethe existing scientific application as a set of loosely coupledweb services. We show how the OGSA implementationfacilitates the distribution of such applications across alarge network, radically improving performance of the systemthrough parallel CPU capacity, coordinated resourcemanagement and automation of the computational process.We discuss the difficulties that we encountered turning Fortranexecutables into OGSA services and delivering a robust,scalable system. One unusual aspect of our approachis the way we transfer input and output data for the Fortrancodes. Instead of employing a file transfer service wetransform the XML encoded data in the SOAP message tonative file format, where possible using XSLT stylesheets.We also discuss a computational workflow service that enablesusers to distribute and manage parts of the computationalprocess across different clusters and administrativedomains. We examine how our experience re-engineeringthe polymorph prediction application led to this approachand to what extent our efforts have succeeded

特集 科学教師教育

International comparisons point to a substantial difference in attainment between the highest and the lowest attaining students in science. This gap suggests a need for improved pedagogies which can be addressed through pre- and in-service education. Recent government changes aimed at improving the quality of science education have led to the creation of a number of new routes into teaching and a determined focus on raising the number of physics specialist teachers. The process of allocating teacher training numbers by subject specialism rather than by simply identifying ‘science’ places has had an impact on the balance of biological and physical sciences. A new system of financial bursaries rewards students with good degrees. While some success has been achieved in increasing pre-service numbers, teachers still do not appear to be getting the in-service training that they need and want

Point-of-care testing for disasters: needs assessment, strategic planning, and future design.

Objective evidence-based national surveys serve as a first step in identifying suitable point-of-care device designs, effective test clusters, and environmental operating conditions. Preliminary survey results show the need for point-of-care testing (POCT) devices using test clusters that specifically detect pathogens found in disaster scenarios. Hurricane Katrina, the tsunami in southeast Asia, and the current influenza pandemic (H1N1, "swine flu") vividly illustrate lack of national and global preparedness. Gap analysis of current POCT devices versus survey results reveals how POCT needs can be fulfilled. Future thinking will help avoid the worst consequences of disasters on the horizon, such as extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis and pandemic influenzas. A global effort must be made to improve POC technologies to rapidly diagnose and treat patients to improve triaging, on-site decision making, and, ultimately, economic and medical outcomes