DigitalKoans

The National Endowment for the Humanities' Office of Digital Humanities has announced the Humanities High Performance Computing Initiative.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

As you may have seen in today's Chronicle of Higher Education, the NEH has just announced our new Humanities High Performance Computing initiative—HHPC for short. Our goal is to start a conversation about how high performance computers—supercomputers—can be used for humanities research. We are working with colleagues at the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation to provide you with information on how high performance/grid computing and data storage might be used for work in the humanities. We are also announcing a new grant competition with DOE to award time and training on their machines. I urge you to check out our HHPC Resources page for more information.

Here's an excerpt from the Humanities High Performance Computing Resource page:

So what do we mean by "HHPC?" Humanities High-Performance Computing (HHPC) refers to the use of high-performance machines for humanities and social science projects. Currently, only a small number of humanities scholars are taking advantage of high-performance computing. But just as the sciences have, over time, begun to tap the enormous potential of HPC, the humanities are beginning to as well. Humanities scholars often deal with large sets of unstructured data. This might take the form of historical newspapers, books, election data, archaeological fragments, audio or video contents, or a host of others. HHPC offers the humanist opportunities to sort through, mine, and better understand and visualize this data.

The Association of Research Libraries has established a Working Group on E-Science. Its members are:

• Wendy Lougee (Minnesota), Chair
• Pam Bjornson (CISTI)
• Clifford Lynch (CNI)
• Becky Lyon (NLM)
• Carol Mandel (NYU)
• Jim Mullins (Purdue)
• Gary Strong (UCLA)
• Betsy Wilson (Washington)

Read more about it at "E-News for ARL Directors, April 14, 2008."

EDUCAUSE has released a podcast of an interview with Clifford Lynch, Executive Director of the Coalition for Networked Information at the CNI Spring 2008 Task Force Meeting. Lynch discusses cyberinfrastructure, the role of universities in disseminating the knowledge they create, and other topics.

CERN's new Large Hadron Collider, which will come online this summer, is expected to generate 10 petabytes of data a year: roughly 1% of the world's entire data output. To deal with this data, CERN is using grid technology with a fiber optic network that links 55,000 servers in 11 global data centers at speeds that are 10,000 times faster than a normal broadband connection.

CERN's GridCafè Web site provides a concise, clear, and easily understood introduction to CERN's grid and grid technology in general.

Read more about it at "Coming Soon: Superfast Internet."

The Council on Library and Information Resources has released essays from its recent Core Functions of the Research Library in the 21st Century meeting.

Here's an excerpt from the meeting home page that lists the essays:

"The Future of the Library in the Research University," by Paul Courant

"Accelerating Learning and Discovery: Refining the Role of Academic Librarians," by Andrew Dillon

"A New Value Equation Challenge: The Emergence of eResearch and Roles for Research Libraries," by Richard E. Luce

"Co-teaching: The Library and Me," by Stephen G. Nichols

"Groundskeepers to Gatekeepers: How to Change Faculty Perceptions of Librarians and Ensure the Future of the Research Library," by Daphnee Rentfrow

"The Research Library in the 21st Century: Collecting, Preserving, and Making Accessible Resources for Scholarship," by Abby Smith

"The Role of the Library in 21st Century Scholarly Publishing," by Kate Wittenberg

"Leveraging Digital Technologies in Service to Culture and Society: The Role of Libraries as Collaborators," by Lee Zia

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation-funded SEASR (Software Environment for the Advancement of Scholarly Research) project is building digital humanities cyberinfrastructure.

Here's an excerpt about the project from its home page:

What can SEASR do for scholars?

• help scholars to access existing large data stores more readily
• provide scholars with enhanced data synthesis and query analysis: from focused data retrieval and data integration, to intelligent human-computer interactions for knowledge access, to semantic data enrichment, to entity and relationship discovery, to knowledge discovery and hypothesis generation
• empower collaboration among scholars by enhancing and innovating virtual research environments

What kind of innovations does SEASR provide for the humanities?

• a complete, fully integrated, state-of-the-art software environment for managing structured and unstructured data and analyzing digital libraries, repositories and archives, as well as educational platforms
• an open source, end-to-end software system that enables researchers to develop, evolve, and maintain data interoperability, evaluation, analysis, and visualization

Read more about it at "Placing SEASR within the Digital Library Movement."

The RAD Lab (Reliable Adaptive Distributed Systems Laboratory) is working to "enable one person to invent and run the next revolutionary IT service, operationally expressing a new business idea as a multi-million-user service over the course of a long weekend."

Read more about it at "RAD Lab Technical Vision" and "Trying to Figure Out How to Put a Google in Every Data Center."

The Data-Intensive Computing Environments group at the San Diego Supercomputer Center has released version 1.0 of the open-source iRODS (Integrated Rule-Oriented Data System) system, which can be used to support data grids, digital libraries, persistent archives, and real-time data systems.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

"iRODS is an innovative data grid system that incorporates and moves beyond ten years of experience in developing the widely used Storage Resource Broker (SRB) technology," said Reagan Moore, director of the DICE group at SDSC. "iRODS equips users to handle the full range of distributed data management needs, from extracting descriptive metadata and managing their data to moving it efficiently, sharing data securely with collaborators, publishing it in digital libraries, and finally archiving data for long-term preservation. . . ."

"You can start using it as a single user who only needs to manage a small stand-alone data collection," said Arcot Rajasekar, who leads the iRODS development team. "The same system lets you grow into a very large federated collaborative system that can span dozens of sites around the world, with hundreds or thousands of users and numerous data collections containing millions of files and petabytes of data—it’s a true full-scale distributed data system." A petabyte is one million gigabytes, about the storage capacity of 10,000 of today’s PCs. . . .

Version 1.0 of iRODS is supported on Linux, Solaris, Macintosh, and AIX platforms, with Windows coming soon. The iRODS Metadata Catalog (iCAT) will run on either the open source PostgreSQL database (which can be installed via the iRODS install package) or Oracle. And iRODS is easy to install—just answer a few questions and the install package automatically sets up the system.

Under the hood, the iRODS architecture stores data on one or more servers, which may be widely separated geographically; keeps track of system and user-defined information describing the data with the iRODS Metadata Catalog (iCAT); and offers users access through clients (currently a command line interface and Web client, with more to come). As directed by iRODS rules, the system can process data where it is stored using applications called "micro-services" executed on the remote server, making possible smaller and more targeted data transfers.

The U.S. National Telecommunications and Information Administration will shortly release a report, Networked Nation: Broadband in America, that critics say presents too optimistic a picture of broadband access in the U.S. Read more about it at "Study: U.S. Broadband Goal Nearly Reached."

Meanwhile, EDUCAUSE has released A Blueprint for Big Broadband: An EDUCAUSE White Paper, which says that: "The United States is facing a crisis in broadband connectivity."

Here's an excerpt from the EDUCAUSE report's "Executive Summary":

While other nations are preparing for the future, the United States is not. Most developed nations are deploying "big broadband" networks (100 Mbps) that provide faster connections at cheaper prices than those available in the United States. Japan has already announced a national commitment to build fiber networks to every home and business, and countries that have smaller economies and more rural territory than the United States (e.g., Finland, Sweden, and Canada) have better broadband services available.

Why is the United States so far behind? The failure of the United States to keep pace is the direct result of our failure to adopt a national broadband policy. The United States has taken a deregulatory approach under the assumption that the market will build enough capacity to meet the demand. While these steps may have had some positive influence, they are not sufficient. . . .

For these reasons, this paper proposes the creation of a new federal Universal Broadband Fund (UBF) that, together with matching funds from the states and the private and/or public sector, should be used to build open, big broadband networks of at least 100 Mbps (scalable upwards to 1 Gbps) to every home and business by 2012. U.S. state governors and foreign heads of state have found the resources to subsidize broadband deployment; the U.S. federal government should as well.