• Discovery Lab in Full Swing
• From the Director
• Spring Training Begins
• ARSC Participates in Engineering Open House
• New Students Join ARSC

Discovery Lab in Full Swing

Use of the ARSC Discovery Lab has grown steadily during the first year of operation. In addition to ongoing research, lectures and student tours, interest in using the lab as a teaching tool is rapidly increasing. The center initiated a lecture series entitled Discovery Tuesdays in an effort to get interested UAF faculty, staff and students more involved with the center.
Discovery Tuesdays began on February 3, 2004, and will continue on the first Tuesday of each month through the spring semester. Each month will feature a new topic. The series began with a lecture by ARSC/UAF Computer Science Joint Appointee, Chris Hartman. Hartman’s lecture, titled “Interactivity and Discovery Lab Application Design,” provided students, users, faculty and staff with insight into methods of designing interactive programs for use in the virtual reality environment.
Spring semester 2004 was the first time the Discovery Lab has hosted a Chemistry class. An introductory Chemistry class took advantage of the lab’s visualization capabilities as a teaching tool. Dr. Kelly Drew, of UAF’s Institute for Arctic Biology, worked with ARSC visualization specialist Roger Edberg, to create interactive virtual reality applications to demonstrate principles of stereochemistry and the 3D structure of biomolecules, such as amino acids, proteins and nucleotides. Many biomolecules can exist in mirror-image structures known as stereoisomers, which contain identical numbers and types of atoms and chemical bonds, but differ in spatial arrangement of the atoms. Stereochemistry can be a difficult concept for students to learn because it requires the ability to imagine 3D structures based on 2D drawings. Computer graphics can easily create molecular structures that can be manipulated and viewed in 3D to illustrate basic concepts and familiarize students with structures of important biomolecules: amino acids, protein and nucleotides.
Edberg is developing software to create and manipulate 3D structures of organic and biological molecules in the Discovery Lab. Introductory Chemistry students have already used an early version of the software to learn about stereochemistry concepts and classification rules, and to learn structures of the 20 amino acids. Application development continues with two goals: research-level visualizations of large, complex biomolecular systems, and interactive courseware for UAF chemistry classes. Additional Discovery Lab demonstrations for undergraduate chemistry classes are scheduled for Spring and Fall semesters in 2004.

“I wish this technology had been available when I was an undergraduate student,” said Edberg. “At that time the only way to learn stereochemistry was to draw structures with pencil and paper, or build molecular models using Styrofoam balls and toothpicks. Three-dimensional immersive visualization is an ideal tool for teaching biomolecular structure.”

For more information about teaching opportunities in the Discovery Lab, write to consult@arsc.edu. [Back to Top]

From the Director

ARSC is embracing its second decade with passion. Passion for new systems and passion for the science and engineering they will support. We’ve installed two new systems, expanded our research endeavors, and begun forging new paths in bringing together computation, visualization and learning tools.

The ARSC Cray X1 is now in use by researchers, while the IBM p690/p655+ is just now through acceptance. Soon, we will be retiring some of our older systems. As more of our users begin the transition to the new systems, ARSC staff will strive to make this transition as easy as possible for researchers. We recognize that any change presents its own particular challenges, but we also know that new, bigger, faster technology can allow scientists to break new ground in their research. Already, we’ve helped many users move onto the Cray X1 and begin achieving results, and we plan to do the same with the IBM p690/p655+ in the coming months.

ARSC visualization experts have also implemented a successful lecture series in our Discovery Lab to serve the UAF campus. This series is providing opportunities for interested researchers, faculty and students to come into the lab and meet face to face with the experts who are making science come to life. This spring, introductory chemistry students had the opportunity to use the Discovery Lab as a tool to understand molecular structures, and to help us learn new ways of using the lab as a teaching tool.

At the same time, ARSC is gearing up for a busy summer. ARSC students are working on updating a virtual tour of the machine room so that summer public tour visitors will be able to explore the home of our computers. We’re planning our fourth annual Faculty Camp, which will bring researchers from UAF and around the country to the center to spend three weeks doing hands-on learning with our systems. Staff are already planning projects for military and civilian interns who venture to ARSC each year. Soon the center will be brimming with summer interns, visiting researchers and the many other visitors who gather here during the summer months.

All of this activity is part of ARSC’s continued contribution to education, outreach and science. We look forward to the challenges and rewards we will experience over the coming months. [Back to Top]

Spring Training Begins

The Arctic Region Supercomputing Center offers ongoing training opportunities to keep researchers up-to-date with high performance computing skills and to help train new users to best use the resources available at the center. For the spring 2004 semester, ARSC redesigned its training program by combining it with a semester-length course in an effort to expand the accessibility of the class to students, faculty and researchers. Now students can register for the three-credit, graduate-level course, while researchers and faculty can drop in on the segments that are applicable to their particular projects or skills.
ARSC staff members Tom Logan, Kate Hedstrom, Shawn Houston, Ed Kornkven, Roger Edberg, Jim Long and Sergei Maurits will teach various sections of the course, while UAF faculty Dave Newman, Antonius Otto, Dave Musgrave and Brenton Watkins will also contribute. The class will be held from 9:15 am to 11:15 am, Tuesdays and Thursdays in the University of Alaska Fairbanks Gruening building, room 211. Those interested in attending individual topics throughout the semester must pre-register by sending an email to training@arsc.edu. [Back to Top]

ARSC Participates in Engineering Open House

Each year as part of Engineering Week at the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF), the UAF Engineering Department hosts an Engineering Open House. The department invites the community to participate in tours of labs, hands-on activities for kids and live demonstrations. ARSC takes part in this event by opening the doors of its engineering department access lab to the public. Over the last five years, ARSC has hosted hundreds of children and their parents while staff members spend the day speaking with engineering students and researchers about how to get access to the lab and other ARSC resources.

Because the ARSC Duckering lab is equipped with an ImmersaDesk™, this year’s visitors were given the chance to “drive” some of ARSC’s virtual reality applications and talk to staff and students about the center. Community children participated in hands-on demonstrations of computers, virtual reality and science at the center.

ARSC is committed to reaching out to the Fairbanks community through events like these, as well as through K-12 education. Each year the center hosts over 500 students from Fairbanks and surrounding communities for tours and lectures about supercomputing, careers in computing and research at ARSC. Student groups visit the Discovery Lab and take a virtual walk through the center’s machine room, then experience other science and research demonstrations on the system. Allowing students to gain experience with these kinds of technologies increases the likelihood that they will choose a career in the fields of science and computing. [Back to Top]

New Students Join ARSC

Four new student assistants joined the ARSC student team this spring. Eric Peterson, Eddie Trochim, Jeremiah Dabney and Craig Rohwer began working at the center at the start of the spring semester. The new students will assist in lab staffing duties, as well as work on individual projects including organizing audio/visual equipment, conducting research in the Discovery Lab and writing documentation for various ARSC departments.

The students join several seasoned student employees who have been working at the center while earning their degrees. The goal of the ARSC student employment program is to provide undergraduate and graduate students with hands-on professional and research experience in the field of high performance computing, while they perform tasks to support the center. In the past, students at ARSC have assisted with the Body Language User Interface program, created sound applications for the Discovery Lab, performed comparative numerical analysis studies using the various computational platforms at ARSC, and evaluated computational approaches to studying large-scale gene expression data. ARSC students are also responsible for providing on-site help at the center's satellite labs located across the UAF campus. [Back to Top]