EE Times delivers reports from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst of “observing and measuring the conductivity of long wires, 3 to 5 nanometers in diameter, emanating [what an interesting choice of verbs] from the Geobacter bacteria.” Researchers have known for years of Geobacters ability to metabolize metals from soils and water, applying it to environmental cleanup.

“‘The microbial world never stops surprising us,’ said Aristides Patrinos, associate director of the DOE’s Office of Biological and Environmental Research. ‘This discovery illustrates the continuing relevance of the physical sciences to today’s biological investigations.’”

Find out more from UMass’ Derek Lovely’s team and read the research group’s article (.pdf) in Nature.

NSF recently awarded a group of universities $10 million over five years to set up and operate a grid that will allow researchers and students to access physics data produced by the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. The Data Intensive Science University Network, or DISUN for short, will provide access to results from the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment, which will account for a portion of the petabytes of data produced by the Collider annually. The CMS effort will also contribute to other grid projects including the Open Science Grid.

More detailed information about the project can be found in Supercomputing Online’s story about DISUN from last week.

The unveiling of the new Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center Cray XT3, called Big Ben, represents another step in the goal of increasing the rate of educational capacity and emerging technologies for computational science especially since its another resource added to the TeraGrid. Sporting 2090 processors, Big Ben is somewhat smaller than its brethren at ORNL. However the ORNL machine proves the XT3 has substantial scalability, having gone from 3700 processors to over 5000 in just a few weeks. CTWatch caught up with HPC Challenge benchmark suite co-developer Dr. Piotr Luszczek and asked him about the new Cray. While discussing differences between the higher end supercomputers and clusters, Luszczek pointed out Cray’s use of AMD processors with Hypertransport technology as an advantage over other machines that rely on some form of PCI and the resulting bottlenecks in processor data throughput. He further stated that

Big Ben’s bandwidth performance is an example of good use of existing technology by Cray since it’s a system that could not be easily replicated with other processors.

More detailed information about Big Ben and PSC can be found here.