Star formation in infrared bright and infrared faint starburst interacting galaxies

Short wavelength IUE spectra of Arp 248b and UGC 8315N are combined with optical spectra and interpreted using a combination of spectrum synthesis and spectral diagnostics to place constraints on the massive star populations of the central regions of these galaxies and to deduce information about the star formation histories in the last 10(exp 8) years. The authors find that both galaxies have substantial fractions of their optical light coming from massive stars and that Arp 248b may be dominated in the UV by WR stars. The UV spectra are dominated by radiation from evolved massive stars and the authors place and age on the burst in Arp 248b of a few tens of millions of years

A Bold Investment in Research for the University of Illinois

In order for the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to attain its vision of being the pre-eminent public research university in an era where research across all disciplines is critically dependent upon digital resources and services, the university must coherently accelerate the evolution of its digital research infrastructure. As a leading institution in computing and information technology with a culture of innovation, many efforts have arisen over the years that have been the product of this culture. While the largely organic development of digital infrastructure, resources, and support services has served campus researchers well, the lack of a coherent and unified approach is an impediment to this campus remaining at the forefront of research and limits its opportunity to be the leader in digitally-enabled research across all disciplines. In order to continue to excel, this university must make a bold move to proactively develop the coordinated digital support ecosystem required to realize its vision of preeminence in research

Prioritizing a Bold Investment in Research for the University of Illinois

This document provides supplemental information to the proposal “A Bold Investment in Research for the University of Illinois” (v2.0) submitted on April 29, 2016 to the Vice Chancellor for Research (Peter Schiffer), the Chief Information Officer (Mark Henderson), the Dean of the Library (John Wilkin) and the Director of NCSA (Ed Seidel) for their consideration. The Deputy CIO for Research IT (John Towns) subsequently discussed this proposal with this group and, based on their feedback, this document was prepared to consider prioritization of efforts and options for scoping efforts at different budget levels. This document also addresses some comments made with respect to the proposal such as providing context and history of campus involvement in the proposal development proces

Jetstream: A Distributed Cloud Infrastructure for Under-resourced Higher Education Communities

The US National Science Foundation (NSF) in 2015 awarded funding for a first-of-a-kind distributed cyberinfrastructure (DCI) system called Jetstream. Jetstream will be the NSF’s first production cloud for general-purpose science and engineering research and education. Jetstream, scheduled for production in January 2016, will be based on the OpenStack cloud environment software with a menu-driven interface to make it easy for users to select a pre-composed Virtual Machine (VM) to perform a particular discipline-specific analysis. Jetstream will use the Atmosphere user interface developed as part of iPlant, providing a low barrier to use by practicing scientists, engineers, educators, and students, and Globus services from the University of Chicago for seamless integration into the national cyberinfrastructure fabric. The team implementing Jetstream has as their primary mission extending the reach of the NSF’s eXtreme Digital (XD) program to researchers, educators, and research students who have not previously used NSF XD program resources, including those in communities and at institutions that traditionally lack significant cyberinfrastructure resources. We will, for example, use virtual Linux Desktops to deliver DCI capabilities supporting research and research education at small colleges and universities, including Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs), Tribal colleges, and higher education institutions in states designated by the NSF as eligible for funding via the Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR). Jetstream will be a novel distributed cyberinfrastructure, with production components in Indiana and Texas. In particular, Jetstream will deliver virtual Linux desktops to tablet devices and PDAs with reasonable responsiveness running over cellular networks. This paper will discuss design and application plans for Jetstream as a novel Distributed CyberInfrastructure system for research education.National Science Foundation (NSF) grant ACI-1445604. NSF grant OCI-1053575 for campus bridging activitie

University of Illinois Year of Cyberinfrastructure Final Report

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is a leader in computing and information technology (IT). Our leadership role has both produced and been produced by a culture of innovation. Many efforts have arisen over the years that have been the product of this culture. While the university’s commitment to developing digital infrastructure, resources, and support services has served campus researchers well, it has become clear that a more coherent and unified approach to assessing and addressing the IT services and support needs of campus researchers is imperative. With the support of the Vice Chancellor for Research and the Chief Information Officer, we embarked on the Year of Cyberinfrastructure (Year of CI). Through this effort, we engaged researchers across disciplines to gain an understanding of the challenges they face in order to inform how we, as a campus, should move together to address these needs. We confirmed that researchers tend to assemble needed resources and services on their own, often out of necessity. While this practice has allowed those with the ambition or, more frequently, the absolute need, to advance their fields, it has primarily benefitted only those researchers and their collaborators. Providers of resources and services have brought value to the research process, but this value has been accrued in a largely disjointed manner that has tended to favor the power users of technology. The Year of CI effort has made clear that our research support landscape is not only lacking coherence but is also very uneven across academic and research units. To support modern research practices and to be competitive and preeminent in the academic community and the world, the 21st century research university must provide a foundation of research IT infrastructure and services that are accessible by all disciplines. Our campus needs a strong vision for how IT supports research, along with the ability to realize and evolve that vision in lockstep with the changing needs of the research community and the technologies available to meet those needs. Though Illinois faces significant financial challenges, it is time to be bold and make an investment to allow the university to emerge from these challenges as the premier destination for faculty, postdocs, graduate students, undergraduate students, and research staff who seek to work in a world-class modern research environment. It is time to provide the infrastructure that will grow the campus research portfolio to new heights. The Year of CI has provided the initial assessment of the campus and indicates the steps we must take to develop the digital support ecosystem that will allow the campus to realize its vision of preeminence in research.Ope

Three dimensional numerical relativity: the evolution of black holes

We report on a new 3D numerical code designed to solve the Einstein equations for general vacuum spacetimes. This code is based on the standard 3+1 approach using cartesian coordinates. We discuss the numerical techniques used in developing this code, and its performance on massively parallel and vector supercomputers. As a test case, we present evolutions for the first 3D black hole spacetimes. We identify a number of difficulties in evolving 3D black holes and suggest approaches to overcome them. We show how special treatment of the conformal factor can lead to more accurate evolution, and discuss techniques we developed to handle black hole spacetimes in the absence of symmetries. Many different slicing conditions are tested, including geodesic, maximal, and various algebraic conditions on the lapse. With current resolutions, limited by computer memory sizes, we show that with certain lapse conditions we can evolve the black hole to about $t=50M$, where $M$ is the black hole mass. Comparisons are made with results obtained by evolving spherical initial black hole data sets with a 1D spherically symmetric code. We also demonstrate that an ``apparent horizon locking shift'' can be used to prevent the development of large gradients in the metric functions that result from singularity avoiding time slicings. We compute the mass of the apparent horizon in these spacetimes, and find that in many cases it can be conserved to within about 5\% throughout the evolution with our techniques and current resolution.Comment: 35 pages, LaTeX with RevTeX 3.0 macros. 27 postscript figures taking 7 MB of space, uuencoded and gz-compressed into a 2MB uufile. Also available at http://jean-luc.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Papers/ and mpeg simulations at http://jean-luc.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Movies/ Submitted to Physical Review