Thursday 11 December 2008

Day 4 - nanotechnology and avalanches

A quick round up of some of the presentations I attended today on day 4 of the ieee conference.

Mike Jones from Research Computing Services at the University of Manchester and, of course, the National Grid Service, gave a presentation on nano-CMOS. The nano-CMOS project is using e-science and grid technology to tackle some of the challenges in nano-CMOS transistor design in the semi-conductor industry.

Mikes presentation looked at storing the vast amounts of data with the options being databases with an OGSA-dAI interface, SRB or AFS. In this presentation Mike spoke of the comparison between SRB and AFS. AFS came out as the top choice due to being compatible with grids especially the NGS, control of the main data lies with the stakeholder, it is robust and provides easy access. The NGS actually has AFS available which is unusual for a grid system so in that respect the NGS is pretty unique.

Following Mikes presentation was Sebastian Michel from Switzerland who spoke about SwissEx. The talk was entitled "Sensor metadata management and its application in collaborative environmental research" and looked at bringing together the vast number of environmental monitoring experiments that take place in Switzerland.

SwissEx is an infrastucture of web based technologies, wireless communications and low cost high density sensors. They are building a portal or wiki for SwissEx to enable people to share data about their projects. SwissEx involves looking at several environmental events such as flooding, earthquakes, river restoration and "mass movements" which I took to be avalanches but I may be wrong! This seems to be a project which heavily involves the scientists ie the actual users which can only be a good thing!

PS incase you are wondering about the photo - it's part of the Christmas decorations here in Indianpolis!

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