“Nontraditional” TeraGrid Science

Economics

•Predictions based on the life-cycle model– John Rust and his team did the first realistic life-

cycle model treatment of housing and mortgages, resolving a previously puzzling question about why people hold a large fraction of investment in housing assets.

– He also developed and tested a proposal by which the Social Security Administration can improve its disability benefit process, targeting those who are truly disabled at less cost than current procedures.

Economics

•Are entrepreneurs uniquely optimistic and more willing to assume risks, or are environmental factors-like bankruptcy laws and the availability of credit-more significant?

•Economics researchers Anne Villamil and Stefan Krasa have developed a model that considers individual differences in willingness to bear risk and optimism and that can evaluate the effect of bankruptcy rules on small firms. – "The empirical analysis can be done on a laptop, but running the

model with so many policy parameters and integrations gets very long," Krasa says. Without the resources provided by the TeraGrid, "it would have taken years.”

– Krasa adds that this behavior accounts for why entrepreneurs in developed nations--dynamic settings where bankruptcy institutions may seem lenient but are efficient--often succeed, while entrepreneurs with the same level of optimism and risk-taking characteristics in developing countries may not succeed.

Political & Social Science

•Kosuke Imai, Princeton University– "We propose to estimate the ideal points of legislators in

U.S. House and Senate over time using the Bayesian dynamic factor analysis model. Since the estimation is based on a Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm, model fitting is computationally intensive. We plan to analyze all the roll call votes over several decades, which means that the data used for this project are quite large. Therefore, the proposed project will greatly benefit from computing resources available through TeraGrid.”

•Maria Esteva, UT-Austin– Visualizing the social relationships within an organization

over a 10 year span using the corpus of electronic documents produced by all organization employees.

Anthropology

•The anthropology research group at Arizona is using statistical methods to understand the patterns of diversity seen today and the process that leads to these patterns. The research group collected DNA sample datasets from populations on the Indonesian island of Sumba. – Traditionally, simple summary statistics methods have been used to

characterize the genetic profiles observed in such datasets.These methods are suitable to describe the patterns of diversity that are seen today, but they do not provide information about the historical demographic processes that led to those patterns.

•The new Monte Carlo Markov Chain based simulation method, called 'Isolation with Migration (IM)', will explain the historical demographic process that leads to the patterns. – Using a DAC allocation the research group is currently running

preliminary simulations on SDSC's IA-64 cluster, each of which take a few hundreds of hours to complete.

City Planning

• Design of a Cyber City of the Future – the Istanbul Project– This animation was produced for The Metropolitan Municipality of

Istanbul, Turkey. It is a 5-minute movie flythrough of a proposed city to be constructed on the banks of the Black Sea. The city concept was created by researchers at Purdue University and from Istanbul, Turkey. (Technical information: 720x480 9,000 frame animation, more than 30,000 frames rendered including testing and production, totaling more than 10,000 CPU hours of TeraDRE).

Undergraduate Student Animations

• Undergraduate students have access to the TeraGrid in two courses in Computer Graphics Technology– A number of the students from these courses rendered using

TeraDRE. One of the projects is the creation of an introductory movie for the game Nano Factor, which is a challenging new creation toolkit that gives Jr. High-schoolers the opportunity to design and perform exciting experiments based on real world nano and micro technologies

Urban Water Distribution

•Urban water distribution systems cover hundreds of square miles but are largely unmonitored. This creates a thread to health.

•Using data from the Greater Cincinnati Water Works they arer showing officials how to cope with problem situations.

• Kumar Mahinthakumar, North Carolina State University, and Jim Uber, University of Cincinnati

TeraGrid Data Use

•Humanities– HASTAC is dedicated to the idea that this complex and world-

changing digital environment requires all the lessons of history, introspection, theory, and equity that the modern humanities (broadly defined) have to offer. Our aim is to promote expansive models for research, teaching, and thinking.

•Art History– Judah L. Magnes is a Jewish museum of art and history with one of

the largest collections of artifacts and archival documents in its field in the United States (approximately 30,000 collection items). The museum is in the process of reviewing and digitizing the collection in order to make it accessible electronically to researchers worldwide.

•Anthropology– New developments in digital archaeology pioneered by the UCSD

Levantine Archaeology Laboratory require relatively(for the field of Social Sciences) large amounts of digital storage space. This project users DataCentral storage to develop a portal system similar to GEON to facilitate public and research team access to the data.