Category Archives: astroinformatics

yt: An Integrated Science Environment for Astrophysical Simulations

Posted on September 7, 2012 by astrocompute

yt is a community-developed high-performance analysis and visualization toolkit for astrophysical simulation data. This video by Matthew Turk gives an excellent introduction to it: The yt webpage is, in my view, a model for the content of a collaborative software … Continue reading →

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Presentations at .astronomy 4 now on-line!

Posted on August 24, 2012 by astrocompute

Many of the presentations given at the .astronomy 4 conference have now been posted on-line. The conference was held in Heidelberg, Germany in July, and I gave an overview of some of the many highlights a few weeks ago. This … Continue reading →

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Software Training Discussion Session at .Astronomy 4

Posted on August 10, 2012 by astrocompute

The dotAstronomy 4 conference included a number of what are called “unconference” sessions, which are organized at the conference rather than as part of an agenda.  I organized such a session on how to provide software engineering training for scientists: … Continue reading →

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Exploring the Universe with Machine Learning

Posted on July 27, 2012 by astrocompute

A short while ago, I attended a webinar on the above topic by Alex Gray and Nick Ball. The traditional approach to analytics involves identifying which collections of data or collections of information follow sets of rules. Machine learning (ML) … Continue reading →

Posted in astroinformatics, Astronomy, astronomy surveys, Cloud computing, computer videos, cyberinfrastructure, Data Management, galaxies, galaxy formation, Grid Computing, information sharing, knowledge based discovery, Machine learning, Parallelization, programming, software engineering, software maintenance, software sustainability | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Report From The Front Lines of .Astronomy 4

Posted on July 20, 2012 by astrocompute

Last week, I had the great pleasure of attending the  .Astronomy 4 meeting in Heidelberg, Germany. This was the first time I have attended this annual meeting, and I had the honor delivering one of the keynote addresses, on “How … Continue reading →

Posted in astroinformatics, Astronomy, citzen science, Cloud computing, data archives, education, High performance computing, information sharing, programming, social media, social networking, software engineering, software sustainability, user communities, visualization, Web 2.0 | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The known and unknown pioneers of modern computing

Posted on June 27, 2012 by astrocompute

This topic is perhaps a little outside the normal scope of my blog, but I read a very good article last week in the International Science Grid This Week (ISGTW). The article honored the June birthdays of two computer science … Continue reading →

Posted in astroinformatics, computer videos, cyberinfrastructure, High performance computing, History of Computing!, information sharing | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

Creating a Scientific Visualization

Posted on June 14, 2012 by astrocompute

Here is a very useful video from the Advanced Visualization Laboratory of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) on the process of creating a scientific visualization, in this case a fly-through movie of a molecular cloud, detailed enough to … Continue reading →

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The Public Library of Science: Open Access Journals, and Advice For Scientists

Posted on June 11, 2012 by astrocompute

The Public Library of Science (PLoS) is a nonprofit open-access scientific publishing project aimed at creating a library of open access journals and other scientific literature under an open content license.  I learned of this organization the other day from … Continue reading →

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Software Carpentry Boot Camps: Software Engineering Training For Scientists

Posted on May 20, 2012 by astrocompute

Yes, up at 7 am for a 3 mile run, a cold shower, then a breakfast of gruel followed by a full day of software engineering techniques … well, not quite: the software engineering part is true though. The Software … Continue reading →

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NSF Leads Federal Efforts In Big Data – Webcast

Posted on March 31, 2012 by astrocompute

On March 29, the Federal Government held  a webcast Federal government science leds from OSTP, NSF, NIH, DOE, DOD, DARPA and USGS outlined how their agencies are engaged in Big Data research, followed by a panel of thought leaders from … Continue reading →

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