Ohio Supercomputer Center Offers New Workshop for Users with Large Datasets

COLUMBUS, Ohio (May 1, 2006) — 

Spending two days at a new Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC) workshop may save you hundreds of hours and make your computing life easier.

Whether your discipline is bioinformatics or astronomy, the OSC workshop, "I/O Approaches for Data Intensive Computing," is specially designed for users with extremely large datasets. It will be held on May 9 and 10 from 9:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. in OSC's BALE theater and is offered at no charge. The workshop and materials are geared toward those with parallel programming experience, using MPI in either C or Fortran.

This I/O workshop will cover techniques for storing simulation data in formats that are portable, language independent, self-documenting, and easily annotated. Special emphasis will be placed on approaches that are highly scalable or exhibit high performance for common usage patterns.

As both computing power and storage capacity increase, scientists are able to generate and store simulation results at an unprecedented rate. These increases in capability and capacity can easily lead to situations in which researchers produce data faster than they can analyze it.

This can be exacerbated by homegrown data file formats, which may be tied to a particular platform or programming language. In addition, some applications' data access patterns may lend themselves to more sophisticated storage services such as relational databases, parallel file systems, or hierarchical storage management.

"My goal for this workshop is to show researchers some new ways to think about how they store and organize their data," said Troy Baer, workshop instructor and OSC systems developer/engineer.   "It's not too hard to generate multiple terabytes of data these days, and the tools to keep such large volumes of data usable in new and potentially unforeseen ways are out there.   People just need to know about them."

Special topics covered will include low-level I/O APIs, I/O middleware, and high-level I/O frameworks. Each major topic area will include at least one case study describing how one of the APIs discussed in that section could be applied to a particular science area.

Registration is limited. To register or get more information, write trn-contact@osc.edu , or call 614/292-0890.

About OSC
OSC is Ohio's high performance computing, networking, and research center. The Center provides scientific computing, networking, educational outreach, and information technology resources to state and national high performance computing and networking groups. OSC empowers its academic, industrial, and government partners to make Ohio the education and technology state of the future. More information about OSC can be found at www.osc.edu.

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