NCSA NEWS

Chautauqua Comes to University of Kansas

released July 18, 2000

The second of this year's Alliance Chautauqua conferences will be held at the University of Kansas in Lawrence Aug. 1-3. Chautauqua is the name given by the National Computational Science Alliance (Alliance) to its series of conferences designed to introduce new audiences to developing Alliance technologies, including the Access Grid.

The Access Grid is a collaborative virtual workspace, connected by high-speed networks such as the vBNS and Abilene, that brings people together in real time regardless of their physical location. The benefits of such advanced communications technologies for science, business, education and government are enormous.

The Alliance has been at the cutting edge in developing digital communication and collaboration techniques that in five or 10 years will be commonplace. The Chautauquas make it possible to share these developments with a wider group of university researchers and educators and stimulate the growth of the nationwide digital research community that will drive scientific research and technology development in the future.

Participants in the KU conference will hear presentations like "The Vision for Scientific Computing," presented by Alliance Director Dan Reed; and "Living on the Grid: An Overview of Emerging Grid Technologies," presented by Alliance chief computational architect Rick Stevens. The Chautauqua will also present information about specific uses of advanced technologies, including its use in storm and severe weather prediction, bioinformatics, and chemical engineering.

While hosted in Lawrence, the conference will be nationwide in scope. Its sessions will be linked via the Access Grid for interactive participation at several Alliance partner sites. These include the Alliance Center for Collaboration, Education, Science and Software (ACCESS) in Arlington, VA; Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago; the Maui High Performance Computing Center, Boston University, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois, the University of Kentucky, the Atlanta University Center, and the University of New Mexico.

The Kansas conference is the fifth in a two-year series of Chautauquas at Alliance sites. Others have been held at the University of Kentucky, the University of New Mexico, Boston University, and the Ohio Supercomputing Center.

Local sponsors for the conference are several offices and departments of the University of Kansas and the National Science Foundation's Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR).

For further information and registration materials see http://www.kuce.org/app/chautauqua/ or contact Louise Hanson at 785-832-9234 or lhanson@hansoninfo.com.

 

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