Newsletter September 2011
1. ALMA Opens Its Eyes
2. Executive Director of Clara, receives the Lifetime Achievement Award 2011 from LACNIC
3. Open Science Data Cloud Sessions at SC11
ALMA Opens Its Eyes
Humanity’s most complex ground-based astronomy observatory, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), has officially opened for astronomers at its 16,500-feet elevation site in northern Chile.
Thousands of scientists from around the world competed to be the first few researchers to explore some of the darkest, coldest, farthest, and most hidden secrets of the Cosmos with this new astronomical tool.
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“We went to one of the most extreme locations on Earth to build the world’s largest array of millimeter/sub-millimeter telescopes having a level of technical sophistica=tion that was merely a dream only a decade ago,” said Dr. Mark McKinnon, North American ALMA Project Manager at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) in Charlottesville, Virginia. “And, now, here we are at the start of ALMA Early Science. We made the impossible possible. This truly is a great occasion!”
For the start of Early Science, around one third of ALMA’s eventual 66 radio telescopes will make up the growing array, with about half of those delivered by NRAO. Even while still under construction, ALMA has become the best telescope of its kind — a fact that was apparently well known to the astronomers who requested to observe with it.
Considering the limited number of hours allocated to this first phase of science, ALMA could only take about a hundred projects. “We were stunned when we received over nine hundred requests from all over the world!” said Dr. Lewis Ball, ALMA Deputy Director and NRAO’s ALMA Chief of Staff. “No other telescope on ground or in space has ever had this magnitude of over-demand.” The successful projects were chosen based on their scientific value, their regional diversity, and also their relevance to ALMA’s major science goals.
Link to full article here.
Lifetime Achievement Award 2011 from LACNIC
The Internet Address Registry for Latin America and the Caribbean (Latin American and Caribean Internet Adresses Registry), LACNIC, announced that as a result of the analysis of the nominations received, the third edition of the Outstanding Achievement Award (2011) has been granted to Florencio Utreras, Executive Director of CLARA.
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This initiative highlights and distinguishes those who have made significant contributions to the development of Internet and the Information Society in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Link to full article here.
Open Science Data Cloud Sessions at SC11
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The OSDC-PIRE project aims to narrow the growing gap between the capability of modern scientific instruments to produce data and the ability of researchers to manage, analyze, and share those data in a reliable and timely manner. The emerging technology of cloud computing is a step forward from the current cyberinfrastructure. Cloud computing involves clusters (the “clouds”) of distributed computers that provide potentially less expensive, more flexible, and more powerful on-demand resources and services over a network, usually the Internet, while providing the scale and the reliability of a data center. Please join us at the SC11 in Seattle for the following sessions:
Date: Sunday, November 13th from 3:30PM – 5:00PM
Presenters: Heidi Alvarez, Manish Parashar
Session: BE Session IV: Cloud Computing
Event Type: Broader Engagement
Room: WSCC 3A/3B
Date: Tuesday, November 15th from 12:15PM – 1:15PM
Session Leaders: Robert Grossman, Heidi Alvarez
Session: Open Science Data Cloud Collaborative Opportunities
Event Type: Birds of a Feather
Room: TCC 102