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Researchers who move data over the Internet with tools such as FTP on the TCP communication protocol to detect and retransmit data packets that have become corrupted in transit. It turns out that in doing so, they are leaning on an extremely weak reed. A 16-bit checksum means that 1 in 65,536 bad packets will be erroneously accepted as correct. You might think that corrupted packets are rare.

Did you miss GlobusWORLD? It was a great event, with a wide range of attendees, and three days of tutorials, presentations, networking--and some flooding in suburban Chicago for good measure. For a nice overview of the topics and issues examined in-depth at GlobusWORLD, check out this post by Rob Mitchum, which first appeared on the Computation Institute blog.

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People who work in laboratories take a lot of things for granted. When they come into work in the morning, they expect the equipment to have power, the sink to produce hot and cold water, and the internet and e-mail to be functional. Because these routine services are taken care of “behind the scenes” by facilities and IT staff, scientists can get started right away on their research. 

For 2012’s first User of the Month, I’m happy to announce that we have selected Greg Salvesen from the University of Colorado.

If This Then That (www.ifttt.com) is an intriguing new service for managing and integrating social media. It lets you specify simple rules of the form:

if <this event> then do <that action>

...where <this event> may be something like arrival of an email, a local weather forecast of rain, or a new blog post on Tumblr, and <that action> can be something like send an SMS message or an email, or post to EverNote or Facebook.

In collaboration with the XSEDE Project, Globus Online is happy to announce support for MyProxy oAuth, an authentication and x509 credential retrieval service developed by the MyProxy Team at NCSA.

For November's User of the Month, I’m happy to announce that we have selected Jin-Ho Yoon from Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

In our work with many hundreds of researchers who work in smaller labs, we’ve learned a few things about what is likely to be adopted and what is likely to go nowhere. For these scientists, who represent the majority of researchers working today, cyberinfrastructure can’t be delivered by providing software to be installed in a lab: they too often lack the local infrastructure and expertise.

For October's User of the Month, I’m happy to announce that we have selected Gary Bates from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Picture this: You just got access to an awesome dataset, and you can't wait to start tinkering with it. Maybe it's stored in some remote observatory, or maybe it's right there in your laptop. Wherever it is, Globus Online can help you move it somewhere with serious computational muscle, so you can start hacking away at those oodles of data.

Except... you don't actually have an account on one of those fancy clusters or supercomputers.

We've been operating the Globus Online file transfer service for 10 months now, and along the way we've learned a thing or two about handling data for scientists.