Cloud Computing for Science

Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) Cloud computing is emerging as a viable alternative to the acquisition and management of physical resources. The Nimbus project works towards enabling scientific communities to leverage cloud computing by providing (1) an IaaS toolkit allowing providers to configure clouds, (2) user-level tools for contextualization and scaling allowing users to easily take advantage of IaaS, and (3) an extensible open source implementation of both allowing users to customize the implementation to their needs. The talk will give an overview of the challenges and potential of cloud computing projects in science as well as the way in which the Nimbus project at Argonne National Laboratory addresses them. I will also describe what attracted various scientific communities to cloud computing and give examples of how they integrated this new model into their work. Finally, I will describe how scientific projects collaborating with us inspire technological development and take advantage of various Nimbus features

Emerging markets, sustainable methods: political economy empowerment in South Africa's Rooibos tea sector

2013 Spring.Includes bibliographical references.Twenty-first century markets require rapid and coordinated response to emerging trends in standards and certification, yet inequitable functioning is hindering the ability of global commodity networks to achieve more effective alignment. To begin addressing this concern, I designed and co-implemented a year-long political economy action research project in South Africa's emerging Rooibos tea sector. Via participatory action research (PAR) with a team of farmer leaders and training service providers, I developed a 'Participatory Commodity Network Research' (PCNR) approach to producer-industry support. This dissertation details its conceptual framework, outlines the implementation process, and incorporates action research findings to discuss emerging Rooibos sector constraints and prospects and further problematize commodity networking potential. As I have conceptually designed the PCNR framework to ensure sociocultural flexibility, actors may adapt specific strategies to ground action analysis in diverse product sectors and regions. Complementary theories and methods frame the PCNR approach: (1) commodity network analysis, (2) sociopolitical theories of power, (3) the human capabilities approach, (4) PAR, and (5) participatory action training-of-trainers (PAToT). From this meta-framework, my project partners and I first developed a set of community workshops for initial capabilities assessment and leadership elections. Democratically elected farmer leaders then participated in multiple PAToT sessions in areas identified as most critical to market access. Training included managerial, commodity network, and research coursework and activities. As part of this process, the leaders helped develop a set of training materials and designed and facilitated workshops in their communities. In terms of research, the leaders operated as interview respondents, assisted with farmer fieldwork interviews, led final community surveys, and participated in data analysis in order to clarify the multifaceted considerations facing emerging Rooibos farmers as they seek greater representation in trade networks. The leaders also engaged with numerous industry entities and co-facilitated a commodity network policy seminar to explore opportunities for participatory information exchange (PIE) and action planning (PAP). Despite the promising efforts of many committed groups, emerging Rooibos farmers continue to operate within inequitable terrain that limits their participation and diminishes horizons. These structural impediments are mirrored throughout the value chain, with South African entities constrained by Northern conventions and control, and Northern actors impeded by overly competitive efficiency and pricing demands that hinder potential for long-term investment. Yet this dissertation also demonstrates the presence of agency throughout the Rooibos network, and it draws from the deep well of humanist knowledge to provide a set of pragmatic methods for building upon the best of this agency. If our rapidly globalizing world is to move beyond its current impasse of violent and unbridled cycles of socioeconomic growth and collapse, actors operating across the trade spectrum must transcend dichotomous and outdated assumptions in order to regain control over existing tools, knowledge, and resources and actively collaborate to more effectively realize social, economic, and environmental sustainability

The measurement of auditory interhemispheric transfer time (IHTT) in children with normal auditory processing abilities

Interhemispheric transfer time (IHTT) is the time it takes for information to be transmitted from one hemisphere to the other. The goal of this study was to determine if differences existed in the IHTT of children 6 to 9 years of age with normal auditory processing abilities by the use of an objective measure (auditory late evoked potentials [ALEPs]), specifically waves P1, N1 and P2. It was hypothesized that there would be no difference in IHTT between the groups due to the age range of participants being tested. The 16 participants were divided into two groups based on age and a 2000 Hz tone burst was presented to the test ear for the quiet condition while competing speech babble was presented to the non-test ear for the noise condition. When observing latency in the noise condition, the left ear shifted to a greater extent than the right ear in both groups; however, the younger group revealed longer latency for P1, N1 and P2. Although IHTT was longer in noise than in quiet, both groups reacted similarly due to the similarity in age of participants tested

Experiences and Roles of Stepfathers in the Routines and ADLs of Stepchildren with Autism Spectrum Disorder

Project Aim: Describe the experiences and roles of stepfathers in the routines and activities of daily living (ADLs) of their stepchildren with ASD

Improving Fertilizer Nitrogen Use Efficiency Using Alternatlve Legume Interseeding in Continuous Corn Production Systems

Many alternative management systems have been evaluated for corn (Zea mays l.), soybeans (Glycine max l.), and wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) production, however, most have involved rotations from one year to the next. Legume interseeding systems which employ canopy reduction techniques in corn have not been thoroughly evaluated. One study was initiated in 1994 at the Panhandle Research Station near Goodwell, OK, on a Richfield clay loam soil, to evaluate five legume species: yellow sweet clover (Melilotus officinalis L.), subterranean clover (Trifolium subterraneum L.), alfalfa (Medicago sativa l.), arrowleaf clover (T. vesiculosum l.) and crimson clover (T. incarnatum l.) interseeded into established corn. In addition, the effect of removing the corn canopy above the ear (canopy reduction) at physiological maturity was evaluated. Canopy reduction increased liight interception beneath the corn thus enhancing legume growth in late summer, early fall, and early spring; the following year prior to planting. Legumes incorporated prior to planting were expected to lower the amount of inorganic nitrogen fertilizer needed for corn production. Crimson clover appeared to be more shade tolerant than the other species evaluated. Grain yields were not affected by removing the tops at physiological maturity when compared to conventionat management. Following two years, no response to applied N as fertilizer or incorporated green manure legumes was observed. Added time will be required to evaluate these practices at this site where residual soil N was high

Fine-Grained Authorization for Job and Resource Management Using Akenti and the Globus Toolkit

As the Grid paradigm is adopted as a standard way of sharing remote resources across organizational domains, the need for fine-grained access control to these resources increases. This paper presents an authorization solution for job submission and control, developed as part of the National Fusion Collaboratory, that uses the Globus Toolkit 2 and the Akenti authorization service in order to perform fine-grained authorization of job and resource management requests in a Grid environment. At job startup, it allows the system to evaluate a user's Resource Specification Language request against authorization policies on resource usage (determining how many CPUs or memory a user can use on a given resource or which executables the user can run). Furthermore, based on authorization policies, it allows other virtual organization members to manage the user's job.Comment: CHEP03, La Jolla, Mar 24-27, TUB2006, Grid Security, 7 pages, 5 figure

KheOps: Cost-effective Repeatability, Reproducibility, and Replicability of Edge-to-Cloud Experiments

Distributed infrastructures for computation and analytics are now evolving towards an interconnected ecosystem allowing complex scientific workflows to be executed across hybrid systems spanning from IoT Edge devices to Clouds, and sometimes to supercomputers (the Computing Continuum). Understanding the performance trade-offs of large-scale workflows deployed on such complex Edge-to-Cloud Continuum is challenging. To achieve this, one needs to systematically perform experiments, to enable their reproducibility and allow other researchers to replicate the study and the obtained conclusions on different infrastructures. This breaks down to the tedious process of reconciling the numerous experimental requirements and constraints with low-level infrastructure design choices.To address the limitations of the main state-of-the-art approaches for distributed, collaborative experimentation, such as Google Colab, Kaggle, and Code Ocean, we propose KheOps, a collaborative environment specifically designed to enable cost-effective reproducibility and replicability of Edge-to-Cloud experiments. KheOps is composed of three core elements: (1) an experiment repository; (2) a notebook environment; and (3) a multi-platform experiment methodology.We illustrate KheOps with a real-life Edge-to-Cloud application. The evaluations explore the point of view of the authors of an experiment described in an article (who aim to make their experiments reproducible) and the perspective of their readers (who aim to replicate the experiment). The results show how KheOps helps authors to systematically perform repeatable and reproducible experiments on the Grid5000 + FIT IoT LAB testbeds. Furthermore, KheOps helps readers to cost-effectively replicate authors experiments in different infrastructures such as Chameleon Cloud + CHI@Edge testbeds, and obtain the same conclusions with high accuracies (> 88% for all performance metrics)

On the Use of Cloud Computing for Scientific Workflows

This paper explores the use of cloud computing for scientific workflows, focusing on a widely used astronomy application-Montage. The approach is to evaluate from the point of view of a scientific workflow the tradeoffs between running in a local environment, if such is available, and running in a virtual environment via remote, wide-area network resource access. Our results show that for Montage, a workflow with short job runtimes, the virtual environment can provide good compute time performance but it can suffer from resource scheduling delays and wide-area communications

Description and outcomes of a simple surgical technique to treat thrombosed autogenous accesses

ObjectiveOwing to the difficulty of removing acute and chronic thrombus from autogenous accesses (AA) by standard surgical and endovascular techniques, many surgeons consider efforts to salvage a thrombosed AA as being futile. We describe a simple technique to extract acute and chronic thrombus from a failed AA. This technique involves making an incision adjacent to the anastomosis, directly extracting the arterial plug, and manually milking thrombus from the access. This report details the outcomes of a series of thrombosed AAs treated by surgical thrombectomy/intervention using this technique for manual clot extraction.MethodsA total of 146 surgical thrombectomies/interventions were performed in 102 patients to salvage a thrombosed AA. Mean follow-up was 15.6 months. Office, hospital, and dialysis unit records were reviewed to identify patient demographics, define procedure type, and determine functional patency rates. Kaplan-Meier survival analysis was used to estimate primary and secondary functional patency rates.ResultsComplete extraction of thrombus from the AA was achieved in 140 of 146 cases (95%). The studied procedure itself was technically successful in 127 cases (87%). Reasons for failure were the inability to completely extract thrombus from the AA in six, failed angioplasty due to long segment vein stenosis or sclerosis in seven or vein rupture in two, and central vein occlusion in one. Three failures occurred for unknown causes ≤3 days of successful thrombectomy. No single factor analyzed (age, sex, race, diabetes status, access type or location) was associated with technical failure. The estimated primary and secondary functional patency rates were 27% ± 5% and 61% ± 6% at 12 months.ConclusionsThe manual clot extraction technique described in this report effectively removed acute and chronic thrombus from failed AAs. Its use, combined with an intervention to treat the underlying cause for AA failure, significantly extended access durability