TGQR 2010Q4 Report.pdf - Teragridforum.org

team plan to extend these into the two to three hour range. The end goal is to understand how
atmospheric conditions and aircraft types affect the properties of a contrail that are important for
calculating climate impacts.
Their results have been published in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics in 2010 and also
presented in 2009 at meetings of the American Physical Society Division of Fluid Dynamics and
the American Geophysical Union.
2.2.14
Human Computer Interactions: A Window on the Archives of the Future (PIs: Robert
Chadduck, National Archives and Record Administration; Maria Esteva, and Weijia Xu,
TACC)
With the proliferation of digital records, the task of the archivist
has grown exponentially more complex. This problem is
especially acute for the National Archives and Records
Administration (NARA), the government agency responsible for
managing and preserving the nation’s historical records.
In 2014, NARA expects to receive 8.8 Petabytes (10 15 bites) of
electronic records, bringing their accumulated volume to more
than 35 Petabytes.
To find innovative and scalable solutions to large scale and
heterogeneous electronic records collections, NARA turned to the
TeraGrid and TACC, drawing on the expertise of the center’s
digital archivists and data experts.
Using data from NARA’s Cyberinfrastructure for a Billion
Electronic Records (“CI-BER”) research collaboration, a testbed
of documents collected by NARA, the researchers created a
visualization based on the “treemap” and relational database
systems to represent the collection’s arrangement and to show the
its properties at different levels of aggregation, classification and abstraction. The NARA treemap
presents a view of the 3-million-file collection that allows one to identify the differences between
groups of records through visual clues and distinguish patterns and outliers that would be difficult
to spot otherwise. Moreover, it allows archivists to learn by visually comparing and contrasting
groups of records.
TACC’s experts are currently building a multi-touch enabled tiled display system to improve
interactivity and to enhance the collaborative aspects of visual analysis. The group is also
experimenting with cloud-computing methods, using the distributed storage of Longhorn at
TACC with the open-source Hadoop package to scale data
analysis methods.
The collaboration between NARA and the TeraGrid is leading to
the development of tools that combine the power of advanced
computing with the experience and skills of archivists and data
curators and providing a window on the archives of the future.
2.2.15
Molecular and Cellular Biosciences: Computational
Approaches to Understanding Ion Channel and
Transporter Function (PI: Michael Grabe, U. Pittsburgh)
Work by the Grabe lab at PSC and TACC has established
previously elusive mechanisms of substrate transport in an
important class of cellular membrane channels that are key targets
Figure 2.14. Treemap view of electronic
records of 125 Federal Agencies in the
Cyber testbed collection developed for the
National Archives and Records
Administration. The different shades of
yellow represent ranges of number of files,
from more (bright yellow) to less (light
yellow).
Figure 2.15. Image of the sodium-galactose
cotransporter vSGLT (gray). The image
shows several snapshots of galactose
(colored molecule) coming unbound 22 from
vSGLT. The different colors show the time
progression of unbinding (red to purple).
Membrane lipids and water are not shown.