Standing together for reproducibility in large-scale computing: report on reproducibility@XSEDE

This is the final report on reproducibility@xsede, a one-day workshop held in conjunction with XSEDE14, the annual conference of the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE). The workshop's discussion-oriented agenda focused on reproducibility in large-scale computational research. Two important themes capture the spirit of the workshop submissions and discussions: (1) organizational stakeholders, especially supercomputer centers, are in a unique position to promote, enable, and support reproducible research; and (2) individual researchers should conduct each experiment as though someone will replicate that experiment. Participants documented numerous issues, questions, technologies, practices, and potentially promising initiatives emerging from the discussion, but also highlighted four areas of particular interest to XSEDE: (1) documentation and training that promotes reproducible research; (2) system-level tools that provide build- and run-time information at the level of the individual job; (3) the need to model best practices in research collaborations involving XSEDE staff; and (4) continued work on gateways and related technologies. In addition, an intriguing question emerged from the day's interactions: would there be value in establishing an annual award for excellence in reproducible research? Overvie

Digitization and search: A non-traditional use of HPC

We describe our efforts in developing an open source cyberinfrastructure to provide a form of automated search of handwritten content within large digitized document archives. Such collections are a treasure trove of data ranging from decades ago to as far as the present. The information contained in these collections is also very relevant to both researchers who might extract numerical or statistical data from such sources as well as the general public. With the push to digitize our paper archives we are, how-ever, faced with the fact that though these digital versions are easier to share, they are not trivially searchable as the digitiza-tion process produces image data and not text. This inability to find and/or identify contents within these collections makes this data largely unusable without a lengthy and costly manual transcription process carried out by human beings

Beyond ecosystem modeling: a roadmap to community cyberinfrastructure for ecological data‐model integration

In an era of rapid global change, our ability to understand and predict Earth's natural systems is lagging behind our ability to monitor and measure changes in the biosphere. Bottlenecks to informing models with observations have reduced our capacity to fully exploit the growing volume and variety of available data. Here, we take a critical look at the information infrastructure that connects ecosystem modeling and measurement efforts, and propose a roadmap to community cyberinfrastructure development that can reduce the divisions between empirical research and modeling and accelerate the pace of discovery. A new era of data‐model integration requires investment in accessible, scalable, transparent tools that integrate the expertise of the whole community, including both modelers and empiricists. This roadmap focuses on five key opportunities for community tools: the underlying foundationsof community cyberinfrastructure; data ingest; calibration of models to data; model‐data benchmarking; and data assimilation and ecological forecasting. This community‐driven approach is key to meeting the pressing needs of science and society in the 21st century

COOLVR: Implementing Audio in a Virtual Environment Toolkit

COOLVR (Complete Object Oriented Library for Virtual Reality) is a toolkit currently being developed at the Graphics, Visualization, and Usability Center (GVU) at Georgia Tech. The toolkit is written to allow programmers to easily create virtual environments (VE's) which will compile cross platform. Unlike most VE toolkits which focus effort primarily on the visual senses, COOLVR aims to equally engage both the sense of sight and the sense of hearing. One of the main design goals of the COOLVR toolkit is to give the programmer an intuitive method to enrich the virtual world with auditory cues. COOLVR uses a set of cross platform audio rendering modules to conduct real time sound processing. By providing potential designers with the capability of easily integrating spatial audio in a virtual world, a heightened level of immersivity or presence can be achieved in COOLVR environments. (This short paper was presented at the 1997 International Conference on Auditory Display at Xerox PARC