An old family photo used in the new “Cedars in the Pines” exhibit at the N.C. Museum of History.

RENCI Web Interface Designer Joe Hope is working with staff at the Digital Innovation Lab at UNC Chapel Hill and Akram Khater, Professor of History and Director of the Middle Eastern Studies Program at NC State University, to build a set of interactive maps for “Cedars in the Pines,” an exhibit opening Saturday, February 22 at the North Carolina Museum of History.

“Cedars in the Pines” is the first exhibition to commemorate the history of the Lebanese immigrants who have made North Carolina their home since the 1880s. The multimedia exhibit will feature personal stories, photographs, home movies, letters, artifacts, and audio recordings that will highlight the diverse experiences and contributions of Lebanese Americans in the state. Other interactive components will include maps, computer games, Arabic music, and a dance floor to learn dance steps. The exhibit runs through August 31, 2014. Read more

Chapel Hill, NC, February 18, 2014 – The iRODS Consortium today announced the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, a leading institution in the Human Genome Project now focused on understanding the role of genetics in health and disease, as its newest member. The Sanger Institute is located in Hinxton, UK, near Cambridge. Read more

CHAPEL HILL, NC — Leading researchers in data science and genomics are recommending strategies to help genomic scientists better manage, share, analyze and archive massive research and clinical data sets in an effort to ensure that the big data explosion results in better health outcomes and faster research discoveries. Read more

Image courtesy of CERN

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the most powerful particle accelerator ever built, smashes tiny particles into each other in an effort to reproduce the conditions that existed within a billionth of a second after the Big Bang.

But simulating collisions of these particles and their activity during an infinitesimal slice of time creates major computational challenges. When particles collide at high speeds, not only is energy released, but many subatomic particles pop into existence briefly. Different LHC detectors register results differently, and computational simulations must be able to account for these differences in hardware and sort through the background noise in order to accurately simulate an event.

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NEWTON, MA–(Marketwired – Jan 14, 2014) – Kaminario, the leading scale-out all-flash array provider, and the Renaissance Computing Institute at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill (RENCI), today announced a joint report that provides guidelines on how to test storage for deploying High Performance Virtual Clusters (HPVCs). Aimed at IT administrators, the paper outlines two successful reference architectures for building HPVCs that support large and medium cluster workload requirements and allow for future growth. Read more

DENVER, Nov. 20, 2013 – The iRODS Consortium today announced that DataDirect Networks (DDN), a leading provider of high performance, high capacity, scalable storage systems for big data, has become its first private sector member. Read more

CHAPEL HILL, NC, Nov. 19, 2013 – The National Consortium for Data Science (NCDS) has named five faculty members at North Carolina universities as its inaugural Data Science Faculty Fellows.

The Faculty Fellows will each receive $30,000 to support research projects that address novel and innovative data science research issues. Their work will be expected to advance the mission and vision of the NCDS, which formed in early 2013 as a public-private partnership to address the challenges related to collecting, sharing and using large, diverse data collections, or big data.  Twenty faculty members from seven institutions applied for Fellowships. Their proposals were reviewed by a subcommittee from NCDS member institutions.

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DENVER, Nov. 13, 2013 – The Data Intensive Cyber Environments (DICE) Group at the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill and the University of California at San Diego (UCSD), and RENCI, (UNC-Chapel Hill’s Renaissance Computing Institute), announced today a plan to merge the two main branches of the iRODS (integrated Rule-Oriented Data System) data management platform into a single, sustainable and production-oriented product. Read more

The University Economic Development Association (UEDA) announced its 2013 Awards of Excellence winners during its Annual Summit held Oct. 29 in Pittsburgh. The awards recognize UEDA members who are transforming their campuses into engines of economic prosperity through initiatives in five categories: 1) community connected campus; 2) research and analysis; 3) leadership and collaboration; 4) innovation and entrepreneurship; and 5) talent development.

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