Stewart testifies before congressional committee
Indiana University Associate Dean for Research Technologies and Pervasive Technology Labs Chief Operating Officer Craig
Stewart testified before the United States House of Representatives
Committee on Science and Technology on July 31, on the conclusions
published in the 2007 President's Council of Advisors on Science and
Technology report: Leadership Under Challenge: Information
Technology R&D in a Competitive World.
In his testimony, Stewart, who chairs the Coalition for Academic Scientific Computing, states that with regard to networking and information technology, our current challenges are without precedent, and asserts that the United States must improve its networking and information technology ecosystem in order to maintain its competitive advantage.
"Without strong investment, the U.S. is at risk of losing its longstanding position of global leadership in networking and information technology, and the consequences of this would be catastrophic," Stewart testified. He urged adoption of the recommendations set forth in the Council's report, saying that to do so will improve America's prosperity, health, and security.
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Current interest:
The Indiana Spatial Data Portal (ISDP), built on IU's Massive Data Storage System, provides online access to over 14 terabytes of geospatial data. As part of the Statewide Digital Orthophotography Program, the ISDP archives more than 142,000 high resolution digital aerial photographs. Other archived datasets include Indiana elevation models, topographic maps, and National Agriculture Imagery sets. In 2007, users downloaded over 10.6 terabytes of geospatial data. UITS staff realized that users needed a simple interface to access the thousands of available files. Developers created the ISDP Multi-file Download Tool, a .NET application which allows end-users to select files from a geographic area of interest, see data about available files' size and format, and download one or many files. ESRI, a world leader in Geographical Information Systems (GIS) technology, has awarded University Information Technology Services their Special Achievement in GIS Award. Read more about this award.
The Open Systems Lab (OSL), one of the Pervasive Technology Laboratories at Indiana University, conducts research on science and technology for large-scale and pervasive hardware and software systems. OSL has announced the release of Version 0.9.0 of MPI.NET, a high-performance, easy-to-use implementation of the Message Passing Interface (MPI), for Microsoft's .NET environment. MPI.NET 1.0 is expected to be i available in the coming months, to coincide with the release of version 2.0 of Microsoft's High Performance Computing platform.
MPI is the de facto standard for writing parallel programs running on distributed memory systems. Most MPI implementations provide support for writing programs in C, C++, and Fortran. MPI.NET provides support for all of the .NET languages, especially C#, and includes significant extensions, such as automatic serialization of objects, that make it easier to build parallel programs - whether for clusters or multi-core processors.
Another Pervasive Technology Laboratory, the Community Grid Lab, has collaborated with OSL to show that MPI.NET works well and runs smoothly in conjunction with Microsoft's Concurrency and Coordination Runtime [CCR] to allow multi-CCR threads with multiple MPI processes.
More information, and an MPI.NET Tutorial, is available from http://www.osl.iu.edu/research/mpi.net/.
Computerworld has listed Indiana University among "leading-edge graduate schools moving at the pace of the IT workplace, delivering coursework that's relevant for today's IT professionals," in its August 18th edition. Read more...
The Research Technologies division of UITS maintains some of the most powerful supercomputers in the world, as part of a comprehensive strategy which includes computers, data storage systems, data collections, instruments and sensor networks, and technical support.
The mission of the Research Technologies division of UITS is to develop, deliver, and support advanced technology solutions that enable new possibilities in research, scholarly endeavors, and creative activity at Indiana University and beyond; and to complement this with education and technology translation activities to improve the quality of life of people in Indiana, the nation, and the world. Our values statement is also available online.
