When we think of science we don’t immediately think of quality assurance and yet… scientists have to run their codes somewhere, they need hardware, the hardware needs software, and the software needs to be operated reliably and efficiently – enter the Quality Assurance (QA) team of TeraGrid: the most powerful open science resource.

Shava Smallen, the co-lead of the TeraGrid QA team, told me recently of their first venture into infrastructure clouds. The TeraGrid Science Gateway projects have been experiencing scalability problems with grid infrastructure. A potential solution came out in the form of GRAM 5; the scientists developed scalability tests to see if it solved their problem — but where could they run them? They tried Ranger, a top-of-the-line TeraGrid resource at Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC). But Ranger is a powerful resource, very much in demand for large scientific computations that cannot run elsewhere — and thus the QA team found itself with tests all ready to run – but no resources to run them on.

BaBar from the children’s books is a young elephant who comes to a big city, and brings back the benefits of civilization to other elephants in the jungle. He also happens to be a very apt mascot for a high-energy physics project.

The name BaBar actually derives from the B/B-bar subatomic particles produced at the SLAC collider in Stanford, California during electron-positron collisions. These experiments help us achieve a better understanding of the relationship between matter and anti-matter and ultimately answer questions about the nature of the universe. This groundbreaking research is moving forward at a brisk pace: the BaBar scientists have petabytes of data, a plethora of insight, and a recent Nobel prize to show for it.

HPC in the Cloud posted a nice article describing how scientists from the Canadian CANFAR projects are using cloud computing to deal with their data problem. Quoting from a recent white paper by Nicholas Ball and David Schade:

“in the past two decades, astronomy has gone from being starved for data to being flooded by it. This onslaught has now reached the stage where the exploitation of these data has become a named discipline in its own right”