News | globus

Globus Online at TeraGrid 2011: Day 1 Highlights

July 19, 2011 | Vas Vasiliadis

Globus Online is well represented at TG11 this year – we ran 2 tutorials on Monday, we’re delivering 2 talks today (on GO and GridFTP) and we’ve got a BOF later in the week.

July 2011 User of the Month: Katrin Heitmann

July 1, 2011 | Paul Dave

A few months back, we launched a “User of the Month” program to highlight innovative and impactful usage of Globus Online that the entire user community might want to hear about.

For our 3rd User of the Month, I’m very pleased to announce that we have chosen Katrin Heitmann from Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL).

GO Under the Covers: Endpoint Activation with the Transfer API

June 16, 2011 | Bryce Allen

In the Transfer Web Interface (Web GUI), when you first access an endpoint you are prompted for your MyProxy username and passphrase. Once you provide this information, you can browse your files and perform transfers to and from the endpoint. This blog post is about what happens behind the scenes to make that happen.

Advice from the Experts: Ensuring Data Integrity

June 12, 2011 | Lisa Childers

Part of my work for Globus Online User Services involves moving a great deal of data. Indeed, within the past 7 months I have singlehandedly moved over a petabyte of data using Globus Online. For any given transfer, verifying that the data at the destination matches the source is not always necessary (such as when executing a test run preparatory to a large transfer, or trying to better understand the user interactions enabled by a new GO feature.) In these cases the transferred data is a mere side effect.

The Problem With Australian Laptops ..

June 10, 2011 | Vas Vasiliadis

.. is that they now come with enormous disks. So we are seeing research workers storing everything from patient Xrays to car proving-ground videos on their Windows-7 machines with terabyte disks.

Medical NLP in the Cloud

June 7, 2011 | Vas Vasiliadis

Natural Language Processing (NLP) has the potential to dramatically influence the way in which clinical care and medical research is conducted. Pilot studies have shown that NLP engines, such as MedLEE and MetaMap, and the use of community-defined medical ontologies like the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS), can help to more accurately identify disease risks and environmental factors in patient clinical narratives. In addition to helping improve disease diagnosis, NLP can help automate the analysis of patient narratives over extended visits and across a wide sampling of subjects.

June 2011 User of the Month: Steven Gottlieb

June 1, 2011 | Raj Kettimuthu

Last month we launched a “User of the Month” program to draw attention to particularly impressive, innovative and/or widely applicable usage scenarios that the entire user community should know about. For our 2nd User of the Month, I’m happy to announce that we have selected Steven Gottlieb from Indiana University.

Getting a Bigger 'N' for Studies of Rare Conditions

May 25, 2011 | Lee Liming

I get a kick out of seeing "ordinary" information technologies make new kinds of science possible. For example, the ability to move and share digital data is a pretty mundane topic in computer science circles. The mass market entertainment industry (think: iTunes, Netflix) has even brought streaming data and multi-megabyte files into our living rooms--for fun! Despite this dramatic adoption and transformation in some industries, there are still plenty of areas where the effects are being felt for the first time.

When Trivial Becomes Critical: File Transfer and its Role in Genomic Sequencing

May 19, 2011 | Brigitte Raumann

I think I can speak for most biologists when I say I never thought I would be worrying about file transfer. Compute power, yes. Storage space, maybe. But file transfer? Never. Unlike some other scientific disciplines, biology is not a traditionally ‘big data’ science. Generally, biologists produce data on the scale suited to e-mail attachments. However, seemingly overnight, biology has been propelled into the ranks of the big data sciences. Now a biologist can easily find herself confronted with terabytes of data. Why the change? The answer lies in the recent quantum leaps in DNA sequencing technology.

GO Behind the Scenes: Globus Online relies on Amazon's EC2

May 16, 2011 | Stuart Martin

I am delighted to write this inaugural post for "GO Behind the Scenes" -- our Dev column in the new Globus Online (GO) blog. Entries could come from any member of the GO development team. We're looking to provide a small window into what we do to make GO ..er..uh.. go! This one comes from Stuart Martin, the GO software development manager for the backend. (The backend is the engine that takes the file transfer requests and moves the bytes from point A to point B.) Since we like to plan big, we run all of GO on Amazon's EC2. This way, when the time comes, we will be able to run instances worldwide.