CHAPEL HILL, Dec. 9, 2011–RENCI at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and Duke University in partnership with IBM will lead a new project to build a nationwide test bed for networking and networked cloud computing. Read more
RENCI, Duke to build experimental networking infrastructure
RENCI networking pros tapped for project to design the future Internet
CHAPEL HILL–RENCI’s networking research group is part of a team that will design a blueprint for a future version of the Internet.
The University of Massachusetts, Amherst, leads the $2.7 million, three-year project, named ChoiceNet, which is funded by the National Science Foundation. In addition to RENCI at UNC Chapel Hill, North Carolina State University and the University of Kentucky have roles in the project. The project complements the work of the NSF program, Future Internet Architecture (FIA). FIA’s goal is to stimulate innovative and creative research to explore, design, and evaluate trustworthy future Internet architectures. Read more
Exploring the genetics of schizophrenia
RENCI’s Clark Jeffries and Dr. Diana Perkins of the UNC School of Medicine’s psychiatry department talk about their research that examines the genetic basis of schizophrenia in a Radio In Vivo interview.
Director hired to lead development of statewide portal for university research expertise
CHAPEL HILL, NC – Sharlini Sankaran, formerly assistant director of the NC Department of Commerce Office of Science and Technology, has been named the first executive director of the Research, Engagement, and Capabilities Hub of North Carolina, or REACH NC. Read more
International data grids to be highlighted in RENCI SC11 booth
SEATTLE, Nov. 9, 2011 – The RENCI/North Carolina booth (#2942) will be one of several on the SC11 show floor to participate in a demonstration that will connect booths in the Washington State Convention Center with large data sets in the U.S. and Europe, creating a distributed, high-speed international data grid that allows researchers to share, store and manage large data sets. Read more
RENCI@SC11, Washington State Convention Center, Seattle
RENCI and its North Carolina partners at Duke and NC State universities will feature their work in an exhibit at SC11, the world’s premier conference for high performance computing, networking, storage and analysis, Nov. 14 – 17. Read more
RENCI to demonstrate on-demand resources and provisioning at SC11
SEATTLE, Nov. 1, 2011–Scientists studying data or compute-intensive problems require high bandwidth and computational resources, often from heterogeneous systems at different sites.
But they don’t need these resources all the time.
Ideally, a scientist studying the properties of new materials for producing solar energy, for example, would be able to grab a “slice” of a high-bandwidth pipeline, set their workflow in motion, grab compute resources in the cloud and then release those resources, so they could be used by other researchers in different configurations. Read more
Look out PowerPoint: UNC students use Social Computing Room as a presentation tool
To paraphrase Marshall McLuhan, change the communication medium and you’ve changed the message.
It’s a concept that’s well understood by the students in Rebecca Nesvet’s English 102, (Writing in the Disciplines) classes at UNC Chapel Hill.
This semester, students worked in teams to develop presentations on a wide range of scientific fields of inquiry. But instead of expecting the usual PowerPoint slides filled with bulleted talking points, Nesvet brought them to RENCI’s Social Computing Room and turned them loose. The room, with a floor-to-ceiling computer desktop that projects on all four walls, allows users to immerse themselves in panoramic montages of data and images. Read more
Putting data in its place
Understanding data often requires understanding the geography associated with it.
Hurricane and storm surge models mean little unless tied to a specific location. Trends in diseases and public health can be spotted and analyzed by comparing data from different counties, regions or states. Read more
To understand human-induced global changes, there’s no place like dome
Story by Nancy Foltz
ASHEVILLE, NC—Experts from American institutions known for their pioneering efforts in Earth systems research, education and evaluation have come together to turn economic literacy education on its ear, and RENCI is part of the effort.
The new initiative known as the Worldviews Network seeks to create innovative approaches for engaging the American public in dialogues about human-induced global changes. Using immersive visualization within the nation’s 600 planetariums and other domed settings to enhance the visual experience, the Worldviews partners are creating tools and techniques for science educators that will help audiences visualize, comprehend and address complex issues from whole-systems perspectives. The goal is to illustrate how large-scale global processes such as biodiversity loss, climate change and ocean acidification relate to the places where we live by customizing content for issues of regional importance. Read more