NCSA NEWS

NCSA Conferences Address Wireless Communications, New Technologies

released May 10, 2001

 

Contact
Karen Green
NCSA Public Information Officer
kareng@ncsa.uiuc.edu
217.265.0748 phone
217.244.7396 fax

Center will Webcast Key Talks

URBANA, IL — How will wireless devices—cell phones, sensors, portable digital assistants, and other gadgets—change business, education, and scientific research in the years to come?

That's one of the questions that will be addressed by leading researchers in academia and industry at the "Grid on the Go" conference May 21 and 22 at the Holiday Inn Conference Center, Urbana, IL. "Grid on the Go," co-sponsored by the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center Programming Environment and Training (PET) Initiative and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is one of three conferences sponsored by NCSA during the week of May 21-25. From May 21-23, members of NCSA's Private Sector Partners (PSP) program will meet at the Holiday Inn. From May 23-25, partners in the National Computational Science Alliance (Alliance), which is led by NCSA, will meet to discuss strategies for developing and deploying new technologies.

Plenary sessions for the PSP meeting on Tuesday, May 22, and for the All-Hands meeting on Thursday, May 24, will be Webcast at http://mediavectra.ncsa.uiuc.edu/asxfiles/psplive.asx. Windows Media Player is needed to view the Webcasts. In addition, the main events of all three conferences will offered over the Access Grid, an integrated network environment that supports distributed meetings, remote visualization, and distance education. The Access Grid is an Alliance project led by Argonne National Laboratory. Twenty-nine organizations across the nation, most of them universities and research centers, currently have nodes on the Access Grid.

"Grid on the Go" will offer insights on high-speed wireless connections to the Internet and speculate on how the growth of wireless devices and wireless connectivity will impact the Grid—the high-performance information infrastructure that both NCSA and the Alliance are helping to create. Other topics that speakers will address include the use of remote sensors in research and industry and the use of wireless devices in the classroom. Scheduled speakers include Brian Redding, senior software engineer, Motorola; Dewayne Hendricks, CEO, Dandin Group; and William Lane, chief technologist of the Federal Communications Commission's Wireless Communications Bureau.

"Wireless communication technologies promise to free us from our desktops and make a wealth of information and other resources available to us, no matter where we are," said Alliance and NCSA Director Dan Reed, who will give the opening address at the "Grid on the Go" conference. "From tiny sensors that monitor the environment, to wearable computers, the wireless explosion is the next communications revolution."

The annual PSP meeting will bring together NCSA's Strategic Industrial Partners for updates on the center's technology development and deployment efforts. Keynote speakers will include Reed, Dave Turek, vice president of deep computing and Web servers at IBM, and Michael Tieman, chief technology officer at Red Hat, the makers of Red Hat Linux. The PSP luncheon on Tuesday, May 22, will be used to present NCSA's annual Industrial Grand Challenge Award to one of the PSP partners. This award is presented to a partner that accomplishes a competitive breakthrough application as a result of their partnership with NCSA.

The Alliance All-Hands meeting will be a chance for Alliance researchers to present their plans to deploy new software packages for the academic and private sector research communities. These packages include software to install high-performance Linux PC clusters, software to run high-resolution display walls, and software that makes it possible to use the resources of the Computational Grid and the Access Grid.

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications is the leading-edge site for the National Computational Science Alliance. NCSA is a leader in the development and deployment of cutting-edge high-performance computing, networking, and information technologies. The National Science Foundation, the state of Illinois, the University of Illinois, industrial partners, and other federal agencies fund NCSA.

The National Computational Science Alliance is a partnership to prototype an advanced computational infrastructure for the 21st century and includes more than 50 academic, government and industry research partners from across the United States. The Alliance is one of two partnerships funded by the National Science Foundation's Partnerships for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (PACI) program, and receives cost-sharing at partner institutions. NSF also supports the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (NPACI), led by the San Diego Supercomputer Center.

 

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