10.1 External Relations
10.1.1 External Relations Highlights
ER team meeting minutes from the quarter and presentation to the TeraGrid Forum are posted on
the wiki:
http://www.teragridforum.org/mediawiki/index.php?title=ER_Meeting_Agendas_and_Minutes#
2010
Much of the work in the first part of this quarter involved preparation for the 2010 Science
Highlights book. This year, once again, the effort was led by Warren Froelich (SDSC). Carlton
Bruett Design is designing the book that will be delivered in time for SC’10 in New Orleans.
Most all members of the ER team helped with writing or editing.
One of the stories featured the science and technology behind efforts to mitigate the oil spill
disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. The story was also featured on a poster that will be handed out at
the NSF Science and Technology Expo in Washington DC October 23-24, 2010. The booth is
sponsored by NSF, Blue Waters, and TeraGrid. ER team leader Elizabeth Leake (TeraGridUChicago) and Bill Bell (NCSA) served on the planning committee for the Expo—Bell on
behalf of Blue Waters. ER committee member Robert Ping (IU) served as booth facilitator and
planner. Bell wrote and disseminated a press release to promote the event.
The story content from the 2010 Science Highlights book will also be featured in the SC’10
booth. Carlton Bruett Design is also assisting with the design of the booth graphics. There will be
two large (16’ tall) posters and 12-15 smaller posters featuring images from the 2010 Science
Highlights book. An engagement activity, featuring 22 campus champions on trading cards, is
planned. The cards will be distributed among RP site booths. Participants will collect all 22 cards
and return to the TeraGrid booth where they will register to win a prize. Shandra Williams (PSC)
is providing the graphic design.
http://www.teragridforum.org/mediawiki/index.php?title=TeraGrid_and_RP_Booth_Engagemen
t_Activity
Leake issued the quarterly deadline announcement for TRAC on July 7. The announcement was
picked up by 13 sources in addition to the TeraGrid.org web site. A letter is provided to all
TRAC reviewers, to emphasize the importance of promoting science through the efforts of the
ER team. The letter is co-signed by Dan Katz (TeraGrid Science Director) and Leake.
July included much of the preparation for the August 2-5 TeraGrid’10 conference in Pittsburgh.
Many of the ER team members were active with the planning. Tim Dudek (UChicago-TeraGrid)
provided assistance with the web presence: https://www.teragrid.org/web/events/tg10
Froelich was deputy conference chair. Leake and Jan Zverina (SDSC) were communication
committee co-chairs. Five stories were written for HPCWire to recap the event. Faith Singer-
Villalobos (TACC) handled the writing assignments. Zverina covered keynote speaker Bob
Wilhelmson. Mike Schneider (PSC) covered keynote Gabrielle Allen; Singer covered keynote
Tim Kileen; Bill Bell (NCSA) covered the student program; and Leake wrote about the Campus
Champions program. The stories are posted on the TG’10 public web site:
https://www.teragrid.org/web/events/tg10/hpcwire_coverage
Leake helped promote the first DEISA/TG Joint Summer School on High Performance
Computing Challenges to be held October 4-7, 2010 in Sicily. A flier, registration tool, and web
page were developed. Fifty-five applications were received and 25 students were selected to
attend. A FaceBook community was developed to encourage collaboration before, during, and
after the event.
External relations personnel were instrumental in the initial planning for the 2011 conference.
We aren’t sure what it will be called, but it will promote and highlight the winning XD bid.
Three cities are being considered: St. Louis, MO; Salt Lake City, UT; and Boulder, CO. Froelich
is assisting Moore and Towns with surveying each of the communities to determine which one
would best serve the needs of the winning XD bid.
10.1.2 RP Operations: External Relations
NCAR
NCAR participated in the TeraGrid External Relations meeting at the TeraGrid10 conference.
PSC
Discover Magazine: The September 2010 issue of Discover magazine (Grant, Andrew, “Virtual
Everything,” Discover magazine, New York, NY, September, 2010) published two PSCdeveloped visualization images, shown below (cropped and reduced in size), as part of a gallerylike article featuring six HPC projects. One image shows data from simulation of the human
cranial arterial system specifically modeling the complicated blood flow patterns in the Circle of
Willis done by Leopold Grinberg (Brown University), et al. This image depicts a collateral flow
pattern in the Circle of Willis, an arrangement of circulation redundancies that will maintain the
brain's blood supply should a part of the circle or a supply artery become restricted or blocked.
The second image visualizes data from a simulation of a small earthquake in the region of
Thessaloniki, Greece that was run on the earthquake simulator software Hercules, developed by
Jacobo Bielak, Ricardo Taborda and Haydar Karaoglu of the Quake Group at Carnegie Mellon
University. The color scale indicates horizontal velocity of the free surface in the North
direction. The earthquake source is five kilometers beneath the center of a soft soil valley that
traps and amplifies waves (blue and red). Weaker waves (green and yellow) radiate from the
valley onto the rock surroundings. Both images were created by Greg Foss of PSC.
Circle of Willis
Earthquake near Thessaloniki, Greece
iSGTW: Phil Blood was among the panelists in a “live chat with computational experts” that
was hosted by International Science Grid This Week (iSGTW) on July 14, 2010.
The website for the chat (http://www.isgtw.org/?pid=1002633) says, “During the moderated
chat, experts from around the world will discuss the characteristics that make a given type of
computational resource appropriate for certain forms of research, but not others.”
TG ’10 Video: Adam Fest and Kevin Sullivan of PSC processed raw video that was shot during
the TeraGrid ’10 conference into a polished presentation for TeraGrid External Relations
purposes. They utilized PSC’s new UV machine Blacklight to process the raw video
(videography by Bill Bell of NCSA) into the following three formats: High Definition, a
compressed version for web streaming (MPEG4), and a version for viewing on mobile devices.
The resulting video has been made available for public viewing on the PSC website located at
http://www.psc.edu/video/TG10Videos.html. It should be noted that no commercial video
hosting service was found that could support this amount of video or process the video into the
needed format.
SDSC
During this quarter, TeraGrid RP local external relations staff developed local site-specific
content as well as contributed to TeraGrid-wide activities and publications. External relations
staff provide web and print media outlets detailing the successes of the TeraGrid project and its
user community. They also develop materials for Supercomputing and TeraGrid conferences.
During this quarter, the SDSC Communications staff continued to lead efforts to coordinate and
provide tactical support for TG’10 in Pittsburgh. Warren Froelich, SDSC’s communications
director, served as deputy chair of this meeting, working with co-chairs Richard Moore (SDSC)
and Dan Katz (UC/ANL) on the planning and follow-through for this conference. Jan Zverina,
SDSC’s media manager, was co-chair of the communications committee, working with Elizabeth
Leake (TG ER) on TG’10 website content, publications, marketing, and media relations
activities. Ben Tolo, SDSC’s graphic/website manager, worked on graphics for the website, in
addition to designing the program and posters. Froelich is assisting Richard Moore and John
Towns in the early phases of TG’11. And he was chosen to be lead editor for 2010 TG Science
Highlights, coordinating, editing and providing graphic oversight for the publication. Zverina, in
his new role as TG science writer, edited and contributed several TG-related press releases
during this quarter including news about SDSC’s new Trestles supercomputer, and the latest
simulation of the “Big One” – a massive 8.0 magnitude earthquake along the southern San
Andreas Fault.
TACC
Two TACC ER representatives (Faith Singer-Villalobos and Aaron Dubrow) now serve on TG
ER committee and provide support to the overall communication efforts. This quarter the
primary activities included: assisting in the writing and editing of the 2010 Science Highlights
book (for which TACC contributed six science stories), and planning the Supercomputing 2010
conference in New Orleans.
Below are five feature articles (with links) published on the TACC website, from Q3 2010, that
highlight TeraGrid resources and projects:
Good OMENs Purdue researchers match experimental results with simulations of nanoscale
transistors using Ranger
Getting Ahead of the Spill University of Texas researchers aid Gulf oil spill effort with satellite
detection and supercomputer-enabled forecasts
Safe Travels New computational system developed by UTSA researchers simulates metal fatigue
on aircraft
Solving an Earth-sized Jigsaw Puzzle Petascale simulations by Caltech and University of Texas
researchers map the motions of the Earth’s mantle
Morphing Metals Texas A&M researchers exploit shape memory transformations to design
smart materials for industry
10.1.3 News featured in Q3 on TeraGrid.org










9/28/2010: Apply for computational time on TeraGrid by October 15, 2010
9/23/2010: Researchers Generate Compelling Computational Results on TACC's
Longhorn Visualization Cluster
9/18/2010: Apply by October 1, 2010--Pan-American Advanced Studies Institute —
Scientific Computing in the Americas: the challenge of massive parallelism (3-14 Jan.
2011)
9/15/2010: SDSC: Grand Challenges in Data-Intensive Discovery
8/30/2010: TACC to Deploy $9 Million Lonestar System for Open Science Community
8/26/2010: TeraGrid Helps Make Possible Largest-Ever Earthquake Simulation (Selected
as Gordon Bell Prize Finalist for 2010)
8/23/2010: SDSC-Norman named director of San Diego Supercomputer Center
8/20/2010: TeraGrid'10 Conference Recap
8/16/2010: SDSC to Host Grand Challenges in Data-Intensive Discovery Conference
October 26-28, 2010
8/12/2010: IU-CloudCom 2010 November 30 through December 3, 2010. Papers Due
August 20, posters and exhibits September 15







8/10/2010: ORNL-TeraGrid resources help ornithologists make ecological sense of
millions of records of bird sightings.
7/30/2010: HPC Summer School in Italy—US Grads and Postdocs may apply for grants
by August 29, 2010
7/25/2010: UCES 2010 - Computational Science Award Program
7/21/2010: TACC--Supercomputing curriculum helps students gain advanced computing
knowledge essential to research
7/14/2010: Purdue gives students hands-on experience with a supercomputer
7/13/2010: iSGTW organizes online live chat with computational resource experts
7/7/2010: Apply for computational time on TeraGrid by July 15, 2010 (by 12:00
Midnight submitter’s local time)