Director’s Colloquium Thursday
How researchers are using supercomputers to survey microbial life in the world’s oceans is the subject of a Director’s Colloquium Thursday afternoon in the Physics Building Auditorium.
Larry Smarr, founding director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, will talk on “Using Supercomputers and Super Networks to Explore the Ocean of Life” beginning at 1:10 p.m. The unclassified Director’s Colloquium is open to the Laboratory work force. It also will be shown on LABNET Channel 9 and on desktop computers using Real Media and IPTV technology.
Smarr, who also is a professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at University of California, San Diego, will talk about the Community Cyber infrastructure for Advanced Marine Microbial Ecology Research and Analysis, or CAMERA. According to Smarr, CAMERA will be used for “analyzing microbial genomic sequence data in the context of other microbial species, as well as in relation to the chemical and physical conditions in which microbes are sampled.”
The CAMERA project contains results of the J. Craig Venter Institute’s Sorcerer II Expedition, which carried out the first large-scale genomic survey of microbial life in the world's oceans to produce the largest gene catalogue ever assembled. In addition to Sorcerer II's ecological genomic data, the CAMERA database will be augmented by the full genomes of more than 150 critical marine microbes enabling new comparative genomics studies.
Smarr also serves as the principal investigator on the National Science Foundation OptIPuter Lambda Grid project and is Co-PI on the NSF LOOKING ocean observatory prototype. He also is founding director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and the National Computational Science Alliance.
Smarr is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1990 he received the Franklin Institute's Delmer S. Fahrney Gold Medal for Leadership in Science or Technology. He was a member of the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee, and serves on the Advisory Committee to the Director of the National Institutes of Health and the NASA Advisory Council. He was chair of NASA's Earth System Science and Applications Advisory Committee and was the first chair of the newly formed NASA Science Advisory Council.
