NEWS
South Africa’s observation capacity in the Southern Ocean now on international standard
Web link: http://www.csir.co.za/enews/2009_climate/05.html
When the SA Agulhas sets out on its annual trip to the Antarctic in December this year, it will have R6-million-worth
of state-of-the-art equipment of the Southern Oceans Carbon and Climate Observatory programme on board. The programme is a CSIR-led consortium, which, up to now, includes the University of Cape Town, Stellenbosch University, the Department of Environmental Affairs and the Applied Centre for Climate and Earth Systems Science (ACCESS). Funded by the Department of Science and Technology (DST) and CSIR, the new equipment will enable the SA Agulhas to become a sampling platform of international standard. This investment in the carbon and climate capability of the Southern Ocean is closely linked with DST’s Global Change Grand Challenge science plan and the equipment will later form part of the planned SA National Antarctic Programme (SANAP) and Polar Entity National Facility, including the new polar ship to be launched in February 2012.
e-IRG Data Management Task Force: Final report and recommendations endorsed by e-IRG and ESFRI
Source: e-IRGSP2 project
Web link: http://www.beliefproject.org/
In 2008, the e-IRG decided to launch a task force to investigate the numerous European activities related to the
management of scientific data, and to contribute to the definition of common and shared policies in this field. After months of intensive discussion and work, the task force released its final report investigating the issue in a comprehensive way, and setting a few recommendations. The final report and the recommendations were jointly endorsed by the e-IRG, on 30 November 2009, and by ESFRI, on 11 December 2009.
NeISS Press Release: Virtual world predicts dire future for British cities
Source: http://www.geog.leeds.ac.uk/projects/neiss/news.php
A SimCity like computer simulation which enables social scientists to understand how real life populations react to change has predicted a depressing future for British cities by the year 2031. Researchers at the universities of Leeds and Manchester used new, powerful simulation software to create a virtual Leeds, revealing a worrying picture of how the city’s congestion and deprivation could mushroom over 30 years. Researchers from the MoSeS project, part of the ESRC funded National Centre for e-Social Science (NCeSS) coordinated by University of Manchester, also showed how co-dependent couples (two adults in a single household, both aged over 65) become hugely prevalent across the Yorkshire City by 2031. A new £1.4 million project at NCeSS funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) will take the MoSeS project a stage further by creating video simulation for any British city. It was launched in April 2009.
European interoperability goes global
Source: EGEE web site
Web link: http://www.eu-egee.org
In October this year, OMII-UK and the NGS began work on a demonstrator to show that open standards adopted by different middleware platforms are the route to interoperability across service providers – potentially from around the world. This month, the Japanese-based NAREGI grid infrastructure provider joined our European-wide interoperability demonstrator, and allowed us to take one step closer to a future of globally integrated computing. E-Researchers who can harness more compute and data resources will solve scientific problems more quickly. Interoperability could provide researchers with access to the combined resources of service providers from around the world.
PRACE Benchmark Suite Finalised
Source: PRACE project
Web link: http://www.prace-project.eu/news/prace-benchmark-suite-finalised
PRACE, the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe, selected 22 applications for the final PRACE application
benchmark suite. The benchmark suite covers application areas from the PRACE Research Infrastructure’s future user base, ranging from particle physics through computational chemistry and fluid dynamics to earth sciences and
astronomy. The selected applications have enough scalability potential to run on petascale systems and beyond.
