OCC Offers Discovery and Innovation Awards

Walt Wells — Tue, 14 May 2013 16:57:43 +0000

Big data is important to transforming research and the OCC is giving away a limited number of Discovery Awards to encourage scientists to experiment with developing novel technology for analyzing big data. We also think it’s important to encourage use of big data in the business community and are giving away a limited number of Innovation Awards.

Both awards will give users free computing resources on the Open Science Data Cloud.

Our Discovery Awards (for scientific research) are for 50,000 OSDC core hours and are available to selected scientists and researchers. OCC Innovation Awards (for businesses) are for 30,000 OSDC core hours. We especially encourage small businesses to apply.

To learn more or to apply for a Discovery or Innovation Award, send an email with your OSDC username and a short paragraph describing what you’d like to do with the core hours awarded to info@opencloudconsortium.org.

Open Season in High Tech – NYTimes Bits

Walt Wells — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 17:14:59 +0000

The OCC received a namecheck in the NYTimes Bits Blog on 4/26. The article focuses on public clouds and the use of “open” in standards, software, and organizations.

That pattern you may have noticed in the names is no accident. By calling your group “open” in tech, you intimate that you believe in the free sharing of information to create superior products. It evokes the open source spirit that made the Linux operating system, as well as less-known Internet standards like the Apache Web server, so successful.

Read the full article here.

OCC Taking Part in Big Data Week

Walt Wells — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 15:18:08 +0000

The OCC will host a panel as part of the international event, Big Data Week. Big Data Week is being celebrated in over 30 major cities. The OCC panel will feature a panel discussion with a number of OCC partners and will focus on a variety of new OCC and OSDC initiatives. Our panel will take place at 6pm on Thursday, April 25th in downtown Chicago as part of the initiative’s Health & Science day.

“The festival connects a number of global cities through locally hosted meetups, events, networking functions, data visualisation demo’s, debates, discussion and hackathons. Events are designed to provide a platform to educate, inform and inspire – organised by people who are passionate and knowledgeable about data. “

Big Data Discussed at Pritzker Dinner

Walt Wells — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 14:34:32 +0000

University of Chicago’s efforts in Big Data were recently featured in an article in the Sunday, 4/14/13 edition of the Chicago Tribune. Robert Grossman and the efforts of the CRI and LAC teams were under discussion:

The first innovation behind the medical data hub was the sequencing of the human genome. Scientists can translate a person’s genetic code into a unique, multibillion-long combination of the letters A, T, C and G. More recently, scientists have built computers and algorithms that enable these sequences to be analyzed in bulk.

“So we’ll sequence thousands of tumors, understand the genomic variations and use that to guide how we diagnose and treat cancer,” said Robert Grossman, a professor at the University of Chicago who specializes in big data. “This is one of the techniques that will be at the center of personalized medicine.”

Read the full article here.

Open Science Data Cloud Gets a Facelift

Walt Wells — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 14:41:32 +0000

Our team has been hard at work revamping the Open Science Data Cloud to make it easier to use. The user interface has been streamlined, we’ve added elements so the public can meter available resources in real time, the number of datasets we have available to the public have grown and are now easier to access, and there’s also a console for using the OSDC exclusively through your web browser (more on this soon…).

Plus, we’ve made it even easier to become an OSDC user. If you don’t yet have an account, but are interested in using this resource managed by the Open Cloud Consortium, you can apply for access here. We currently offer a free account tier which gives a user access to 10 cores and 1TB of storage. For larger projects or for group usage, please contact us to discuss your needs further.

Our cloud services are based on the principles of openness and interoperability. The OSDC infrastructure is tailored towards the high performance storage and compute resources required for scientific discovery.

UDR: Big Data Synch at a Distance

Walt Wells — Sat, 23 Mar 2013 02:05:50 +0000

Learn more about how UDR can keep your Big Data synchronized over long distances.

“The rsync utility is a wonderfully useful tool for keeping two datasets synchronized, but it was never designed to keep two large datasets synchronized when they are separated by a long distance. Over the past couple of years, we developed a utility called UDR at the Laboratory for Advanced Computing at the University of Chicago which integrates rsync with the high performance network protocol UDT.”

UDR is open source and available from github.

Robert Grossman Named a Federal 100 Award Winner

Walt Wells — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 19:00:32 +0000

OCC Founder and Chair Robert Grossman has been named by Federal Computer Week to its Federal 10 0 Award list for 2013. The 24th annual list recognizes government, industry and academic leaders who have played pivotal roles in the federal government IT community. He and the other winners were honored during ceremonies on March 20, 2013 at the Grand Hyatt in Washington DC.

Learn more about Dr. Grossman taking the long view on big data.

Travel abroad with OSDC-PIRE Fellowship – Summer 2013

Walt Wells — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 16:37:27 +0000

The Open Science Data Cloud PIRE project provides international research and education experiences through training and study at universities and research institutes around the world with leading scientists in the field of computing. Our goal is to increase the participants with expertise in managing and analyzing data. The deadline to apply is fast approaching so if you or someone you know is interested, have them apply here:

http://news.opensciencedatacloud.org/pire-training/osdc-pire-application/

The OSDC Foreign partners that will host Summer 2013 fellows include:

School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom
Computer Science Institute, Universidade Federal Fluminense (UFF), Brazil
Science, Informatics Institute, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam
Universidade de São Paulo (USP), Brazil
Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), Japan.
Beijing Institute of Genomics (BIG), Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.

For more information please visit: http://news.opensciencedatacloud.org/osdc-pire-faq/

UChicago’s Laboratory for Advanced Computing – Now Hiring

Walt Wells — Thu, 28 Feb 2013 18:06:58 +0000

One of the OCC’s key members, University of Chicago, is hiring for 3 positions in their Laboratory for Advanced Computing (LAC). These positions will work closely with our OSDC and OCC team.

If you’re interested or know someone qualified who might be, applications are being accepted through the links below.

Director of Research:
jobopportunities.uchicago.edu/applicants/Central?quickFind=217851

Researcher in Networking
jobopportunities.uchicago.edu/applicants/Central?quickFind=217854

Data Scientist:
jobopportunities.uchicago.edu/applicants/Central?quickFind=217855

OCC Announces Development and Release of Tukey

Walt Wells — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 20:09:56 +0000

The Open Cloud Consortium is proud to announce the release of Tukey. Developed as open source middleware, Tukey is named after John Tukey, an American mathematician best known for development of the FFT algorithm and box plot.

Tukey was developed because nothing existed with all the features we needed for a portal to the Open Science Data Cloud. There are offerings like Elasticfox and Horizon which lacked features such as federated authentication using Shibboleth and OpenID, SSH keypair generation for gateway machines, and support for both Eucalyptus and OpenStack clouds.

Tukey is written in Python using the Django framework and Horizon, the OpenStack dashboard. The Tukey Portal project provides a web front end for tools used and developed for managing OSDC resources and the Tukey Middleware project provides a translation layer between cloud resource, primarily Eucalyptus, and the OpenStack API.

Lead developer Matt Greenway says:

“The idea to leverage Horizon came from an OSDC PIRE workshop in Edinburgh. Horizon is a nice interface that a lot of work has gone into and we want Tukey to be able to use all of Horizons new features while adding features to Tukey that are unrelated to OpenStack.”

Tukey is available at https://github.com/opencloudconsortium and is licensed under the
Apache License, Version 2.0. Please let us know if you want to help out!