Muscles in Motion

Stephen Marshall, associate professor of epidemiology and orthopedics in the University of North Carolina’s Schools of Public Health and Medicine and biostatistician at UNC’s Injury Prevention Research Center, expected to analyze his research findings at his personal computer until he heard about the visualization wall at RENCI’s Health Sciences Collaboration Center. Read more

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PCAST subcommittee delivers draft report

The Networking and Information Technology Subcommittee of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) delivered a report on the National Coordination Office’s Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) program at the April 24 PCAST meeting in Washington.

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RENCI, SmileTiger work to improve disaster communications

Doug Hoell, director of North Carolina’s Emergency Management Association (EMA), was able to reach a larger audience than usual on April 30, when he delivered his annual overview of emergency management in North Carolina.

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Topsail soars in new performance tests

CHAPEL HILL, NC—New benchmarking results on Topsail, the Renaissance Computing Institute’s (RENCI) Dell cluster, showed a maximum performance of 28.77 teraflops—nearly 30 trillion calculations per second—more than quadruple the machine’s previous maximum performance.

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Study finds a possible genetic trigger in schizophrenia development

Advances in science require collaboration, innovation and a lot of painstaking hard work. An ongoing research project at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill that studies the possible genetic causes of schizophrenia is no exception. Read more

RENCI Distinguished Lecture to feature Oscar-winning filmmaker

CHAPEL HILL, NC –  An Oscar winning independent filmmaker who began his career in fluid mechanics and worked his way into animated filmmaking will speak about his experiences at the second 2007 Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI) Distinguished Lecture.

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Reed to lecture in Second Life

RENCI director Dan Reed will lecture in the virtual world Second Life on Friday, March 16, at 1 p.m.  Reed’s lecture, titled “Computing the Future:  The 3D Net,” explores what technology advances the next decade – a geological epoch on the computing time scale – could bring to education and research.

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Open house to introduce NCSU campus community to RENCI

RALEIGH, March 2, 2007—The Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI) at North Carolina State University will open its doors to the Triangle research community on Friday, March 23, for an open house that will showcase RENCI technologies and collaborations with NC State researchers.

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First international HASTAC conference set for April

The Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Advanced Collaboratory (HASTAC, pronounced “haystack”) will hold its first international conference April 19 – 21, at Duke University and the Marriott Civic Center in Durham, NC. It is sponsored by RENCI, Duke University and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Registration is now open and space is limited. For a registration form, hotel information and a full conference agenda, see www.hastac.org.

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Workflows enhance NC bioportal and assist biology researchers

The end results of research in genetics, proteomics and other fields that use bioinformatics are often dramatic: discoveries that reveal the causes of cancer or that lead to new drugs and treatments. But the research process can be redundant, time consuming and tedious.

Enter workflows, technology that automates many redundant processes used in analyzing biological problems, such as launching a group of applications and moving data among applications. Workflows aim to take the “busy work” out of science. Instead of reentering data in countless different formats to accomplish different steps in problem solving, the scientist simply loads the data into the front end of the workflow and lets the underlying infrastructure handle the busy work.   Read more

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