Announcements

IDRE and Anderson School Make it to iTunes U Site

Posted September 3, 2008

The IDRE (Institute for Digital Research and Education) lecture series and the Anderson School Distinguished Speakers collection have both been added to the iTunes U home page. IDRE is featured in the “More to Explore” area, and Anderson made it into the “New and Noteworthy” section. UCLA has also been added to the iTunes U “Universities and Colleges” page.

iTunes U is a campus–wide project being undertaken in conjunction with Apple Computers. The project is part of Apples’s free, hosted service for colleges and universities. Through iTunes U, Apple provides easy access to educational content 24 hours a day, seven days a week. There are now more than 812 individual UCLA–created podcasts for the public to view or subscribe to. The Office of Information Technology is one of 20 campus units involved in the pilot project.

Go to Apple’s iTunes Store and then to iTunes U. Alternatively, you can go straight to UCLA’s iTunes U site (itunes.ucla.edu) and click on “Open UCLA on iTunes U”. Either way, you will need to have Apple’s iTunes application installed on your computer to view this.

Hoffman Cluster to be unavailable after May 31, 2008

Posted May 8, 2008

The new Hoffman2 Cluster was made available on January 28, 2008 and everyone was asked to migrate their work from the old Hoffman Cluster to the new Hoffman2 Cluster. May 31, 2008 will be the last day that the old Hoffman Cluster will be available. If you still have any files on the old Hoffman Cluster that you want to keep, please migrate them off before that date.

If you have any other questions, please contact the ATS Account Administrator at atshpcucla.edu

Research Conducted using the UCLA Physics Saxon Cluster

Posted March 4, 2008

A team of UCLA particle physics researchers (led by Charles Plager), which has been searching for the Flavor Changing Neutral Current (FCNC) decay of the top quark, announced a breakthrough on Feb. 14, 2008. UCLA researchers are participating in large physics experiments both at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (atom-smasher) near Geneva Switzerland and the DOE's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. The UCLA team required a sizable amount of computing power, which was supplied to them by the Saxon Cluster. The Saxon cluster is owned by Professor David Saltzberg of the UCLA Department of Physics and Astronomy. It was installed by - and is maintained by - Academic Technology Services staff as part of the Institute for Digital Research and Education’s Cluster Hosting Program. Read all about the UCLA discovery and the physics.

You can read more about the Large Hadron Collider in the February 2008 Scientific American magazine, “The Future of Physics – The Discovery Machine,” by Graham P. Collins.

UCCSC Call for Proposals

Posted February 21, 2008

The UCCSC 2008 has begun accepting abstracts for the conference. This year's conference will be held July 20-22 at UC Santa Barbara and focuses on the life stages of IT services, from conception through maturity to legacy status. What interesting projects are you involved in? What do you want to share with your colleagues in the UC System? Submit a presentation abstract (of 200-250 words). The deadline for submissions is February 29, 2008.

Hoffman2 is Launched!

Posted February 1, 2008

IDRE and ATS are pleased to announce the availability of the new and powerful Hoffman2 Cluster. The Hoffman2 Cluster represents a significant increase in compute capacity and services over any cluster previously built on the UCLA campus. Read more...

Scott Friedman Gets Honorable Mention at SC07

Posted February 1, 2008

UCLA researcher Scott Friedman gained an Honorable Mention in the SC07 Bandwidth Challenge this year -- not only for a high and extremely smooth data exchange rate, but for doing so with a live application and one that mandated low latency, exchanging high-definition video frames during the live manipulation of a remote data set at UCLA. "We hadn't actually planned to do this specifically for the Bandwidth Challenge," says UCLA researcher Scott Friedman at UCLA Academic Technology Services. "We had already performed a long-distance test between UCLA and UC Davis and wanted to see how the latency between here and Reno would affect the behavior of the application."

The next steps for this project involve further testing between UCLA and UC Davis in order to increase performance and test the limits of acceptable latency for the visualization application. Friedman hopes to present on this topic and feature a live demo at the 2008 CENIC Annual Conference, Lightpath to the Stars, which will offer attendees Gigabit connectivity to CalREN. Read more about the project: Making Interactivity go the Distance.

Joan Slottow Gives UC Grid Update at CENIC 08

Posted February 1, 2008

ATS technologist Joan Slottow (bio) will present a talk at the CENIC 08 Lightpath to the Stars conference on March 10, 2008.  The talk will discuss the progress to date in creating the University of California Grid, which features a UGP-powered grid portal at each University of California campus. The University of California Grid is a collaboration among technologists at all of the campuses and is based on a grid portal that was developed at UCLA.