TechNews digests: Jan - Nov 2009

TechNews is a technology, news and analysis service aimed at anyone in the education sector keen to stay informed about technology developments, trends and issues. TechNews focuses on emerging technologies and other technology news. TechNews service : digests september 2004 till May 2010 Analysis pieces and News combined publish every 2 to 3 month

CERN openlab Whitepaper on Future IT Challenges in Scientific Research

This whitepaper describes the major IT challenges in scientific research at CERN and several other European and international research laboratories and projects. Each challenge is exemplified through a set of concrete use cases drawn from the requirements of large-scale scientific programs. The paper is based on contributions from many researchers and IT experts of the participating laboratories and also input from the existing CERN openlab industrial sponsors. The views expressed in this document are those of the individual contributors and do not necessarily reflect the view of their organisations and/or affiliates

Containers for Portable, Productive, and Performant Scientific Computing

Containers are an emerging technology that holds promise for improving productivity and code portability in scientific computing. The authors examine Linux container technology for the distribution of a nontrivial scientific computing software stack and its execution on a spectrum of platforms from laptop computers through high-performance computing systems. For Python code run on large parallel computers, the runtime is reduced inside a container due to faster library imports. The software distribution approach and data that the authors present will help developers and users decide on whether container technology is appropriate for them. The article also provides guidance for vendors of HPC systems that rely on proprietary libraries for performance on what they can do to make containers work seamlessly and without performance penalty

Using Java for distributed computing in the Gaia satellite data processing

In recent years Java has matured to a stable easy-to-use language with the flexibility of an interpreter (for reflection etc.) but the performance and type checking of a compiled language. When we started using Java for astronomical applications around 1999 they were the first of their kind in astronomy. Now a great deal of astronomy software is written in Java as are many business applications. We discuss the current environment and trends concerning the language and present an actual example of scientific use of Java for high-performance distributed computing: ESA's mission Gaia. The Gaia scanning satellite will perform a galactic census of about 1000 million objects in our galaxy. The Gaia community has chosen to write its processing software in Java. We explore the manifold reasons for choosing Java for this large science collaboration. Gaia processing is numerically complex but highly distributable, some parts being embarrassingly parallel. We describe the Gaia processing architecture and its realisation in Java. We delve into the astrometric solution which is the most advanced and most complex part of the processing. The Gaia simulator is also written in Java and is the most mature code in the system. This has been successfully running since about 2005 on the supercomputer "Marenostrum" in Barcelona. We relate experiences of using Java on a large shared machine. Finally we discuss Java, including some of its problems, for scientific computing.Comment: Experimental Astronomy, August 201

Graph-Links

The present paper is a review of the current state of Graph-Link Theory (graph-links are also closely related to homotopy classes of looped interlacement graphs), dealing with a generalisation of knots obtained by translating the Reidemeister moves for links into the language of intersection graphs of chord diagrams. In this paper we show how some methods of classical and virtual knot theory can be translated into the language of abstract graphs, and some theorems can be reproved and generalised to this graphical setting. We construct various invariants, prove certain minimality theorems and construct functorial mappings for graph-knots and graph-links. In this paper, we first show non-equivalence of some graph-links to virtual links.Comment: 32 pages, 21 figure

Status Report of the DPHEP Study Group: Towards a Global Effort for Sustainable Data Preservation in High Energy Physics

Data from high-energy physics (HEP) experiments are collected with significant financial and human effort and are mostly unique. An inter-experimental study group on HEP data preservation and long-term analysis was convened as a panel of the International Committee for Future Accelerators (ICFA). The group was formed by large collider-based experiments and investigated the technical and organisational aspects of HEP data preservation. An intermediate report was released in November 2009 addressing the general issues of data preservation in HEP. This paper includes and extends the intermediate report. It provides an analysis of the research case for data preservation and a detailed description of the various projects at experiment, laboratory and international levels. In addition, the paper provides a concrete proposal for an international organisation in charge of the data management and policies in high-energy physics

The Virtualisation of Digital Photography

How do humans relate to their technology? This is not a new question, many have struggled with it. What we want to do here is to make it visible through another vocabulary, the virtual. We are going to unpack this vocabulary by reconfiguring the traditional moves that start with distinct categories of human things and technical things and seek to explain one category in terms of the activities of the other. Through the Actor Network Theory (ANT) we will opt for Allegoresis as another register or vocabulary that makes technology and people visible. Through Latours's recent work we find our way to Walter Benjamin and his take on Leibniz's Monadology as a way of understanding the Kantian symbolic mode in historical terms. Benjamin asks for an account of stability from historical change and reinterpretation. The relationship between movement and moments is what we want to describe as that between the virtual and the actual. Moreover, it is this vocabulary that helps us understand or make visible the constant rewriting that any technology goes through as it is configured and reconfigured as humans and non-humans are arranged in historically contingent ways. We are then going to play out the virtual or arrive at it as we look to notice the arrangements of people and technology in a photographic club where members are beginning to use digital technologies

The Materiality of Virtuality: Towards an Intensification of Invisibilities

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