kettimut's blog

I am pleased to honor Joel Brownstein from the University of Utah as the Globus User of the Month for December 2013. Professor Joel Brownstein is the data archivist of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey-IV (SDSS-IV), which is the continuation of the SDSS-I, -II, and -III surveys.

The SDSS-I, -II, and -III surveys have together amassed hundreds of terabytes of data from millions of stars throughout the Milky Way, and distant galaxies and quasars that allow us to study the structure and evolution of galaxies, the nature of dark energy and dark matter, and the cosmological history of the universe.

It is my pleasure to announce that we have selected Vadim Roytershteyn as the user of the month for May 2013.

Vadim is a plasma physicist at SciberQuest, Inc., where he uses large-scale simulations to study a variety of processes in laboratory, space, and astrophysical plasmas. He primarily works with so-called fully kinetic simulations, which use computational particles to represent plasma species (such as electrons and ions). Such simulations are very attractive because they provide essentially first-principle description of plasma under fairly general conditions. At the same time, fully kinetic simulations generate a very large amount of data, which can be challenging to deal with. 

I am happy to announce that the user of the month for January 2013 is Ann Syrowski from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Ann is a Research Professional in the Atmospheric Science department's Convective Modeling Group. She develops numerical simulations of severe storms using the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model and several HPCs throughout the country. Ann has moved more than 100 TB of data using Globus Online—50 TB in the past month alone—among a variety of HPC resources including XSEDE resources, NCSA's mass storage system, and PSC's data archiver.

It is my pleasure to announce that the user of the month for December 2012 is Kurt LaButti from the Department of Energy's Joint Genome Institute.

Kurt has been in the genomics industry since 2001. He started at what is now the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT working on the human genome. He performed closure on chromosomes 17 and 11. He then transitioned into bioinformatics and assembly analysis, working primarily on fungi and virus genomes. At the Joint Genome Institute, he assembles and analyzes data from the DOE community, sequencing relevant organisms. His group handles microbes, metagenomes, fungi, and other interesting projects. 

ESnet (Energy Sciences Network) has deployed three anonymous read-only GridFTP servers for testing purposes. These GridFTP servers are available as endpoints on Globus Online: esnet#anl-diskpt1, esnet#bnl-diskpt1 and esnet#lbl-diskpt1. Globus Online users can use these endpoints for testing purposes. Since these endpoints allow anonymous access, you do not need a username and password to access them. It should be noted that you can only read data from these endpoints and not write data to them.

I am pleased to announce that the user of the month for October 2012 is Dmitry Ozerov from DESY in Germany.

Dmitry has a background in particle physics research and is currently working as an IT data management specialist in the Scientific Data Management and Grid Computing team at DESY, Hamburg. The team manages 7.5 petabytes of disk and 4 petabytes of tape storage, and the batch facility for the scientists from the High Energy Physics and Photon Science.

I am happy to announce that the user of the month for September 2012 is Kenneth Aird from University of Chicago.

Ken is a software engineer at the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at University of Chicago where he manages the local computing resources, data storage, access, and backup for the South Pole Telescope. The South Pole telescope is the largest telescope ever deployed at the South Pole. It is designed to study the Cosmic Microwave background and explore dark energy, the phenomena that may be causing the expansion of the universe to accelerate. The collaboration currently has about 250TB of telescope observation data and intermediate data products. Ken is using Globus Online to archive all of this data – as well as data from ongoing observations and analysis – to the High Performance Storage System (HPSS) at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC).

It is my pleasure to announce that Oliver Witzel from Boston University has been selected as the user of the month for August 2012.

For July’s User of the Month, the winner is Jeff Porter from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory!

Jeff Porter currently works to support computing needs of experimental High Energy Nuclear Physics (HENP) groups at NERSC and is leading a project to build an ALICE production Grid facility in the US, co-located at NERSC/PDSF and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

It is my pleasure to announce that Brian O'Shea from Michigan State University has been selected as the user of the month for June 2012. In the month of June, Brian moved more than 250TBs of data in less than 15 days - an average data rate of 1.6 Gbps with peaks as high as 2.5 Gbps!