eScience @ Microsoft : Tech Interop

eclipse4SL: Eclipse Tools for Microsoft Silverlight

eScience — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 23:47:58 GMT

Just saw a posting that eclipse4SL - the Eclipse tools for Silverlight project is available. It is an eclipse plug-in that enables Eclipse developers to use the Eclipse IDE to create applications that run on the Microsoft Silverlight runtime platform.

The purpose of this project is the creation of open source tools integrated with the Eclipse development platform that enable Java developers to use the Eclipse platform to create applications that run on the Microsoft Silverlight runtime platform. Specifically, the project will be an Eclipse plug-in that works with the Eclipse Integrated Development Environment (IDE) and Eclipse Rich Client Platform (RCP) to provide both a Silverlight development environment and greater interoperability between Silverlight and Java, to facilitate the integration of Silverlight-based applications into Java-based web sites and services. The project has been submitted to the Eclipse Foundation and released as an open Eclipse project.

Eclipse Tools for Microsoft Silverlight

Cross Posted from Dan Fay's Blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/dan_fay)

Data Mining Services in the Cloud – Mine your Data, Any Place, Any Time

eScience — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 22:24:38 GMT

This is great news - Software-plus-Services that any scientist/researcher could use. The SQL Server Data Mining folks have a Data Mining Service in the cloud they are testing out…I posted previously [OLAP and Scientific Data & Data Mining Addins for Office 2007 (Excel & Visio)] about the Excel addins that allow anyone with Excel to do Data Mining on Excel tables. Now the team is testing out SQL Server Data Mining Services – from which you can do the data mining directly from Excel 2007 or even upload a csv file.

So for fun – I downloaded a csv file of a stream gauge near Redmond into Excel and ran the “Highlight Exceptions” tool to find outliers in the dataset – it read the table, uploaded it to the service and in seconds returned the results - which included the number of outliers - in this case air temperature and it also highlighted in the table the rows. It was so easy. I can see it being used for many scientific datasets - even to clean them before doing other analysis, charting, graphs, uploads, etc.

The Table Analysis Tools included are:

Analyze Key Influencers
Detect Categories
Fill from Example
Forecast
Highlight Exceptions
Scenario Analysis
Prediction Calculator
Shopping Basket Analysis

Microsoft SQL Server Data Mining Services

Mine your Data, Any Place, Any Time

The SQL Server Data Mining team is working to extend the power and ease of use of SQL Server Data Mining to the Cloud. Our goal is provide services that allow you to build rich, predictive applications without worrying about server infrastructure, and showcase these services with cool applications that give you a glimpse of what’s possible. We bring you a technology preview of our work below. Enjoy!

Current Projects

Table Analysis Tools for the Cloud

Build powerful predictive reports on your data with just a few clicks!
- No data mining expertise required
- No server installation required
- All you need is your Internet connection

http://www.sqlserverdatamining.com/cloud/

Cross Posted from Dan Fay's Blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/dan_fay)

SQL Server 2005 Driver for PHP - Released

eScience — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 23:42:54 GMT

PHP developers can now integrate data from SQL Server now that the driver is available for download. Also glad to see that it works with SQL Server Express edition.

It is my pleasure to announce that version 1.0 of the Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Driver for PHP has released! This release marks another step in Microsoft’s continued commitment to interoperability. To keep up with our announcements and customer feedback, please check out our team blog.

SQL Server 2005 Driver for PHP Team Blog

Cross Posted from Dan Fay's Blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/dan_fay)

NY Times Reader Beta for the Mac OS Now Available

eScience — Tue, 27 May 2008 20:33:39 GMT

Just saw this post that the NY Times Reader for the Mac is available - I'm interested in seeing how the Silverlight version works. I've been using the WPF version for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and really like the ease of reading articles. I'd like to see some research journals and magazines adopt this model as well.

NY Times Reader Beta for the Mac OS Now Available

If anyone out there has not had an opportunity to use the NY Times Reader to read the NY Times, you're missing out on a great experience! The Times Reader is a Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) application that let's you read the paper on or offline in a rich format. It's been available for over a year now, but you do have to pay a subscription fee to use it. <...>

The NY Times has now released a beta edition of the Times Reader for the Mac. What's interesting about this version is that it is built using Silverlight in combination with Cocoa (the native Mac programming language), and the Safari WebKit. The application runs as a stand alone desktop application on the Mac and is very similar to the WPF PC version. Tim Heuer posted about it on his blog. The NY Times folks have shared some technical details over on their blog.

[Thanks JrzyShr Dev Guy]

Cross Posted from Dan Fay's Blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/dan_fay)

Windows HPC Server 2008 Beta 2 is Here

eScience — Fri, 23 May 2008 18:32:47 GMT

Windows HPC Server 2008 Beta 2 is available on Microsoft Connect and Ryan Waite goes into detail on much of the new stuff. I'm really excited to start seeing scientists utilize and evaluate the new version - I think many of the new pieces especially Network Direct, PowerShell integration, and the HPC Basic Profile will surprise users. The other piece I'm looking forward to is the release of the next Top500 list in June...

We completed a few great Top500 runs in the last few weeks. We can’t talk about the numbers until the International Supercomputing Conference in June but it looks like Beta 2’s new MPI stack and new Network Direct RDMA interface are starting to hum.
Windows HPC Server 2008 Beta 2 is Here

HPC Server 2008 Beta Technical Overview

Cross Posted from Dan Fay's Blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/dan_fay)

Dual Boot CCS and Linux Whitepaper

eScience — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 01:45:43 GMT

Just saw VolkerW post info on the whitepaper to help understand how to setup a cluster to dual boot between WinCCS and Linux...very helpful.

Dual Boot CCS and Linux

Hot off the (virtual) press: "Windows^® Compute Cluster Server 2003 and Linux." Many partners, especially in academia, have asked about and experimented with getting a system to dual boot a Linux distro and Windows Compute Cluster Server (CCS). Microsoft has published a whitepaper describing the installation and configuration of a High-Performance Computing (HPC) cluster for a dual boot of Microsoft Windows CCS and the Linux OpenSuSE Operating System (OS).
Download the doc here.
Virtually Yours

VolkerW's WebLog : Dual Boot CCS and Linux

Cross Posted from Dan Fay's Blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/dan_fay)

Reporting@Home: Delivering Dynamic Graphical Feedback in Community Computing Projects

eScience — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 02:18:52 GMT

I meant to do an entry on this paper by Stuart Ozer (MSR) and David Kim & David Baker (Rosetta@Home) months ago...it's a great way to integrate SQL Reporting services w/ something like Rosetta@Home, and provide really great service for not only the community users - but also for the researchers using the system. Below is the architecture diagram...

Reporting@Home: Delivering Dynamic Graphical Feedback to Participants and Researchers in Community Computing Projects

Stuart Ozer; David Kim; David Baker
February 2007
Available Documents:Word 638 Kb PDF 482 Kb
A new generation of computationally intensive scientific research projects relies on volunteers from around the world contributing idle computer time to calculate mathematical models. Many of these projects utilize a common architecture to manage the scheduling and distribution of calculations and collection of results from participants. User engagement is critical to the success of these projects, and feedback to participants illustrating their role in the project’s progress is known to increase interest and strengthen the community. This article describes how one project -- University of Washington’s Rosetta@Home, which predicts and designs the folded conformations of proteins and protein complexes -- created a web-based, on-demand reporting system that graphically illustrates a user or team’s contributions to the project. The reporting service is also useful to the project scientists in assessing the utility of alternative models and computational techniques. The system relies on a comprehensive database platform that includes tools for data integration, data management, querying and web-based reporting. The reporting components integrate seamlessly with the rest of the project’s data and web infrastructure, and the report pages have proven to be popular among both participants and lab members.

Source: Reporting@Home: Delivering Dynamic Graphical Feedback to Participants and Researchers in Community Computing Projects

Cross Posted from Dan Fay's Blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/dan_fay)

Interoperability by Design - Dan'l Lewin

eScience — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 08:37:24 GMT

Good column by Dan'l Lewin on Interoperability by Design - Products, Community, Access, and Standards...

The Facts on MS Interoperability
Edge of the Valley By Dan’l Lewin
Contrary to what Bruce Chizen, Adobe CEO, has said about our lack of intention to maintain a cross-platform solution, we have historically demonstrated a market-driven pursuit of interoperability on behalf of our customers. That won’t change, hasn’t changed. Cross-platform support is a small part of our overall interop commitment, and we have a strong commitment to both. We think it’s an important point because our support for real interoperability affects the ability of our customers to drive value from their IT investments and affects the ability of our ISV partners — large and small — to provide solutions that work in the heterogeneous world in which we live and work. We get that. We want to reach out to the broadest audience, and that means going where the audience is — on our platform, yes absolutely, and on others.

Source: The Facts on MS Interoperability | AlwaysOn

Cross Posted from Dan Fay's Blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/dan_fay)

SecPAL v1.1 Now Available

eScience — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 10:33:17 GMT

Just got a note from Jason that SecPAL 1.1 is available - this is great - take a look at the codeplex site for more details - Jason/Blair and team, you're doing great things...let's see if the community recognize what you've been up to...

Summary of New Features in the SecPAL Research Release v1.1

SecPAL v1.1 is a minor release of SecPAL that maintains compability with our first reasearch release of SecPAL. Changes for v1.1 include:
New / Upgraded Features

We have updated the SecPAL grammar to a new and much more readable grammar. I will post a longer explanation in the coming weeks, but in short when you read a SecPAL policy conditions will now be prefaced by an "IF" statement, and constriaints will now be prefaced by a "WHERE" statement. These changes along with improved readibility of fact qualifiers should make the English representation of your policies / assertions much simpler to read. Note: This change should have no impact on existing policies, as it only affects the output of policies / tokens when you call .ToString() on them.
The 'CanActAs' predicate can now be used as a conditional fact within an assertion.
No breaking changes were made to API's so any SecPAL dependent code that you have written should behave the same.

SecPAL v1.1 Now Available

Just a quick note to let everyone know that we have just released a minor update to our SecPAL library. In addition to a couple of minor bug fixes there are two features which I think you are really going to like. The first is an update to our grammar - making it much clearer what conditions and constraints are. The second (which was actually a bug fix) is that our graphical proof graphs now work.

Source: The Hogg Blog : SecPAL v1.1 Now Available

Cross Posted from Dan Fay's Blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/dan_fay)

MSR Asirra: A Human Interactive Proof

eScience — Thu, 17 May 2007 00:06:52 GMT

Nice to see Asirra available and ready to add to web sites...

Asirra

Asirra is a human interactive proof that asks users to identify photos of cats and dogs. It's powered by over two million photos from our unique partnership with Petfinder.com. Protect your web site with Asirra — free!

The JavaScript works in all major browsers; it has been tested in IE6, IE7, Firefox 2, Safari, and Opera 9.

Source: MSR Asirra: A Human Interactive Proof

Cross Posted from Dan Fay's Blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/dan_fay)

2007 Microsoft eScience Workshop at RENCI

eScience — Sat, 05 May 2007 00:02:20 GMT

Announcing the 2007 Microsoft eScience Workshop at RENCI

http://research.microsoft.com/workshops/escience2007/

October 21-23 2007

The Friday Center for Continuing Education
UNC-Chapel Hill
100 Friday Center Drive
Chapel Hill NC 27599-1020

The use of computers creates many challenges as it expands the realm of the possible in scientific research and many of these challenges are common to researchers in different areas. The insights gained in one area may catalyze change and accelerate discovery in many others.

This workshop is explicitly cross-disciplinary, with the goal of bringing together scientists from different areas to share their research and experiences of how computing is shaping their work, providing new insights and changing what can be done in science. The focus is on the research, and the technologies that make that research possible.

The workshop will be co-chaired by Dan Reed, Director of the Renaissance Computing Institute and Tony Hey, Corporate Vice President for Technical Computing at Microsoft Corporation. The keynote presentation will be given by Kelvin Droegemeier, Director of the Sasaki Institute.

We would like to invite contributions from any area of eScience; examples include:

Modeling of natural systems
Knowledge discovery and merging datasets
Science data analysis, mining, and visualization
Healthcare and biomedical informatics
High performance computing in science
Innovations in publishing scientific literature, results, and data
The impact of eScience on teaching and learning
Applying novel information technologies to disaster management
Robotics in science
Scientific challenges with no obvious computing solutions

Registration will open shortly, and abstracts will be solicited as part of the registration process.

The deadline for abstract submission is August 1^st 2007.

All applicants will be notified of acceptance of their presentation by August 21^st 2007; those abstracts not selected for verbal presentation may be presented as posters.

Please send questions to mses07@microsoft.com

Cross Posted from Dan Fay's Blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/dan_fay)

LinuxInsider: Security: Microsoft Invites Collaboration With Grid Computing Research

eScience — Wed, 02 May 2007 00:25:34 GMT

Article on SecPAL from LinuxInsider...

Microsoft Invites Collaboration With Grid Computing Research

Microsoft's Security Policy Assertion Language, or SecPAL, is the company's attempt to develop a language for expressing decentralized authorization policies. The software firm hopes that making available the implementation and design information from its SecPAL project will encourage the security and grid research communities to test and experiment with it.

Source: Linux News: Security: Microsoft Invites Collaboration With Grid Computing Research

Cross Posted from Dan Fay's Blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/dan_fay)

[Data Service] Microsoft Project Codename "Astoria"

eScience — Tue, 01 May 2007 19:15:08 GMT

Time to think about how Scientific data could utilized the Astoria service...

The goal of Microsoft Codename Astoria is to enable applications to expose data as a data service that can be consumed by web clients within a corporate network and across the internet. The data service is reachable over HTTP, and URIs are used to identify the various pieces of information available through the service. Interactions with the data service happens in terms of HTTP verbs such as GET, POST, PUT and DELETE, and the data exchanged in those interactions is represented in simple formats such as XML and JSON.
We are delivering this first early release of Astoria as a Community Tech Preview you can download and also as an experimental online service you can access over the internet.

Source: Microsoft Project Codename "Astoria"

Cross Posted from Dan Fay's Blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/dan_fay)

MSDN Nuggets

eScience — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 15:30:49 GMT

Just ran across the MSDN Nugget resource - I like the short takes on the topics and the ability to download them and watch them on the road.

MSDN Nuggets

Don't have the time to read a 10-page how-to article or watch a full length webcast? Try an MSDN Nugget, a webcast that takes you step-by-step to discovering new functionality or exploring a hot developer topic, all in 10-15 minutes. View them online now or download for later reference.

Here are a couple of Nuggets I found interesting...

ASP.NET AJAX - Browser Compatibility
A look at browser compatibility in ASP.NET AJAX, showing a variety of features rendered in both IE and Firefox for comparison. In addition, what happens when the browser has JavaScript disabled?
Building a Custom Task Pane for the 2007 Microsoft Office System
A guide to building Custom Task Panes for the 2007 Microsoft Office system.
Layout in WPF
Layout is one of WPF's fundamentals and can be used to create complex layouts which scale according to desktop contstraints. In this nugget, we look at the various types of Panels which enable developers to create elegant layouts in our applications.
Windows Workflow Foundation: Exposing Web Services
Workflow Foundation has built-in capabilities that allow a Workflow to be published as an ASP.NET Web Service - in this session we'll look at how this is done and how it works.
Windows Workflow Foundation: Using Persistence
It is possible to save Workflow Instances into a persistent format in order to save resources or to allow a Workflow host to be recycled. In this session we'll look at using the SQL Persistence Service to achieve this.

Source: MSDN Nuggets

Cross Posted from Dan Fay's Blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/dan_fay)

SecPAL Preview Release for Microsoft .NET

eScience — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 20:30:03 GMT

Grid folks and security researchers should be interested in the SecPAL preview release - The goal of the SecPAL project is to develop a language for expressing decentralized authorization policies, and to investigate language design and semantics, as well as related algorithms and analysis techniques.

SecPAL Preview Release for Microsoft .NET
The Security Policy Assertion Language (SecPAL) provides a flexible and robust declarative authorization language developed for large-scale Grid Computing Environments. This installable MSI includes a preview release of the .NET implementation of SecPAL, developer document describing the SecPAL programming model and scenario based samples intended to support evaluation of SecPAL.

Source: SecPAL Preview Release for Microsoft .NET

Cross Posted from Dan Fay's Blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/dan_fay)