CENTER FOR COMPUTATION & TECHNOLOGY

CCT Weekly Dec. 22, 2009

LSU offers Eduroam wireless access to students, staff and faculty
Source: LSU Information Technology Services
LSU joins the University of Tennessee at Knoxville and Harvard University as the first universities in the United States to enable eduroam, or education roaming, a federated wireless access network. LSU Information Technology Services began offering eduroam wireless access to students, staff and faculty effective Dec. 14.

Eduroam is the secure, worldwide wireless network roaming access service developed for the international research and education community. Eduroam allows campus community members at any participating institution to use wireless network services at any other participating institution worldwide using the same login credentials issued by their host universities.  Members of the LSU campus community now can seamlessly access wireless networks and then the Internet, while visiting campuses around the world.      

The service is available in 36 countries and on hundreds of campuses around the globe. It is widely adopted in both Europe and Asia, and efforts are underway to broaden its use in the United States at leading research universities. 

Through eduroam, LSU students, researchers, staff and faculty will be able to use their @lsu.edu credentials to authenticate to wireless networks at universities abroad. Furthermore, guests from other eduroam institutions will be able to access the LSU wireless network using their own institutional credentials while visiting LSU. LSU expects this service to ease research collaborations with visiting international scholars and to make wireless access easier as LSU faculty travel overseas in scholarly pursuits.

“We are proud to be in a leadership position in the U.S., offering eduroam services to our faculty, students and staff when they visit campuses in other countries, and also enabling their colleagues who are visiting the Baton Rouge campus to similarly gain easy yet secure Internet access via wireless networking,” said Brian D. Voss, LSU vice chancellor for information technology.

Voss pointed out that LSU’s underlying information technology infrastructure, especially its pervasive wireless networking using the most advanced protocols on the market, positioned LSU to become a leader in this area.

“LSU has been building an excellent IT infrastructure and providing top tier services as a result of its Flagship IT Strategy. The deployment of eduroam is yet another sign that we are achieving national prominence in the provision of IT in support of the National Flagship Agenda,” he said.

“Researchers at our center often collaborate on projects as part of international teams, working frequently with colleagues in Europe and Asia and traveling there often to do work at other universities and scientific laboratories,” said LSU Center for Computation & Technology Interim Director Stephen David Beck. “Guaranteeing wireless access through eduroam will make it much easier and more convenient for LSU researchers to travel overseas to be part of international research teams, and they can focus directly on the research taking place without having to worry about accessing wireless or gaining credentials to use another university’s network.”

For more information about eduroam, visit www.eduroam.org . LSU’s Information Technology Services organization is available to support use of eduroam on campus. LSU’s traveling community members and interested people should look for details of where eduroam can be accessed worldwide and how to use it at www.lsu.edu/eduroam , or look for articles on eduroam in LSU’s groundbreaking online support environment, GROK, at http://grok.lsu.edu and search for eduroam.

Pats on the Back:
•    Juana Moreno has received a $26,876 grant award from Department of Energy through Northeastern University, titled "Building a unified computational model for the resonant X-ray scattering of strongly correlated materials."

•    Victor Taveras, a postdoc in Physics & Astronomy and CCT, won the Bergmann-Wheeler prize of the International Society of General Relativity and Gravitation “for contributions to loop quantum cosmology and the development of a novel extension of loop quantum gravity." This prize is for Ph.D. candidates who demonstrate research that brings novel approaches to quantum gravity.

•    Congratulations to Andrei Hutanu, who received his doctoral degree during the Fall 2009 commencement exercises last week.

CCT in the News:
•    Arts and sciences join to develop greener, more efficient conferences and exhibits
Source: Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News

•    Arts and sciences join to develop greener, more efficient conferences and exhibits
Source: NewsGuide.us

CCT Welcomes:
•    Yixin Luo, who joins the HPC group as a systems administrator.

Lectures This Week:
•    There are no lectures scheduled at this time.

Please Note:
•    The University will be closed Thursday, Dec. 24 through Friday, Jan. 1, in observance of the holiday season. All regular business operations will resume on Monday, Jan. 4, 2010.

•    CCT and Tulane University’s Center for Computational Science will host Scientific Computing Around Louisiana (SCALA) at LSU Feb. 5-6, 2010. This is an inaugural meeting to highlight cutting-edge topics in scientific computing, showcase research from Louisiana institutions, and promote collaboration across the state of Louisiana. Professor Susanne C. Brenner of LSU and Professor Lisa J. Fauci of Tulane are organizing this meeting. To register (free, but required) or learn more, please visit http://www.cct.lsu.edu/scala2010.

•    CCT is hosting the 17th annual Mardi Gras Conference on Computational Materials and Methods Feb. 11-14, 2010, at LSU’s Lod Cook Alumni Center. This conference brings together researchers working in this broad area to promote the cross-fertilization of ideas, foster information exchange, enable community building and expose graduate students and postdocs to the newest methods and advances. The conference will feature tutorial presentations, posters, in-depth discussions, and demonstrations in addition to several invited speakers. As always, the conference concludes with a Saturday afternoon trip to New Orleans for one of the city's largest Mardi Gras parades, Endymion. The conference is accepting poster submissions through Jan. 24, 2010. To register or learn more, please visit http://www.mardigrasconference.org .

•    Please remember to send your news concerning grants, awards, conferences, or other pertinent information to PR Manager Kristen Sunde at ksunde@cct.lsu.edu.

•    Follow CCT with social media to access photos and see news, events or updated information. Both these pages are public; you do not need a Facebook or Twitter account to view the information.
Facebook group: LSU Center for Computation & Technology
Twitter @ LSUCCT

Upcoming Grant Deadlines:

Cyber-Enabled Discovery and Innovation (CDI)      
January 04 2010 10:15 am
A Portion Of $ 36,000,000.00 available

Note: Please see the CCT deadline Web site , as many NSF deadlines are listed here.