James E. Dobson

Virtual data Grid middleware services for data-intensive science

The GriPhyN virtual data system provides a suite of components and services for data‐intensive sciences that enables scientists to systematically and efficiently describe, discover, and share large‐scale data and computational resources. We describe the design and implementation of such middleware services in terms of a virtual data system interface called Chiron, and present virtual data integration examples from the QuarkNet education project and from functional‐MRI‐based neuroscience research. The Chiron interface also serves as an online ‘educator’ for virtual data applications. Copyright

Neuroimaging databases as a resource for scientific discovery.

NATIONAL REVIEW OF 55 OBIOLOGY, VOL. 66 Copyright 2005, Elsevier In All rights reserve 0.1016/S0074-7742(05)66002-3 0074-7742/05

Brain Image Registration Analysis Workflow for fMRI Studies on Global Grids

35.0 II. E xamining Cognitive Function with fMRI III. L arge-Scale Archiving of fMRI Study Data IV. T he Emergence of ‘‘Discovery Science’’ V. D ata Sharing in Neuroscience VI. T he Role of Computation in Neuroscience VII. B rain Data Repositories as a Shared Resource for Neuroscience VIII. f MRI Data Archiving, Mining, and Visualization IX. N euroinformatics—The Nexus of Brain, Computational, and Computer Sciences X. C urrent Challenges for Neuroscience Databases XI. C onclusion R eferences

The dartmouth green grid

Scientific applications like neuroscience data analysis are usually compute and data-intensive. With the use of globally distributed resources and suitable middlewares, we can achieve much shorter execution time, distribute compute and storage load, and add greater flexibility to the execution of these scientific applications than we could ever achieve in a single compute resource.In this paper, we present the processing of Image Registration (IR) for Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging(fMRI) studies on global Grids. We characterize the application, list its requirements and transform it to a workflow. We then execute the application on Grid’5000 platform and present extensive performance results. We show that the IR application can have 1) significantly improved makespan, 2) distribution of compute and storage load among resources used, and 3) flexibility when executing multiple times on global Grids.

Bits of Autobiography: Radical Deindividualization and Everydayness

The Green Grid is an ambitious project to create a shared high performance computing infrastructure for science and engineering at Dartmouth College. The Green Grid was created with the support of the Dean of the Faculty of Arts & Sciences to promote collaborative computing for the entire Dartmouth community. We will share our design for building campus grids and experiences in Grid-enabling applications from several academic departments.

“An Alien at Home”: Henry James’s Failed Homecoming

This essay focuses on the autobiographical strategies deployed by Ambrose Bierce in response to shifting conceptions of the literary representation of everyday life. I place Bierce at the transition point between nineteenth- and twentieth-century realism, between an understanding of typical experience as comfortably generic and a growing sense that the common story has produced a horrify anonymity. “Bits of autobiography” are fragmentary and hypersubjective narratives that Bierce uses in his attempt to re-individuate by breaking with the repetitiveness that he associates with this latter understanding.

The American Modernity Crisis and Disruptive Technologies

“Henry James’s Failed Homecoming” offers up James’s late travel narrative The American Scene as a case study in examining the logic of homecoming at the fin-de-siecle. This chapter argues that James’s construction of what he initially conceived of as a detached sociological perspective for his return trip to the USA fails to provide him with a comforting objective perspective when he discovers himself to be excessively alienated—he can no longer find his childhood homes or any possible refuge from the irrefutable fact of modernity as evidenced even in the form of American hotel culture. James’s sense of alienation stems from a loss of his own distinctiveness and troubles his ability to produce the distinctions he needs to understand the new variety of American types that he has found on his return home.

Modernity and the Dialectic of Detachment

This introductory chapter provides a theoretical and historical account of nineteenth-century disruptive technologies and ways in which these disrupt the phenomenology of autobiographical narrative. The chapter closes with a reading of Mark Twain’s The Autobiography of Mark Twain in which I argue that this text registers Twain’s ambivalence to the mediation produced by his increasingly technologized act of composition.

Theodore Dreiser, Temporary Homes, and the Compensatory Commemorative State

This chapter takes up ambivalences toward the spatial distancing effects of modernity. Railroad travel was the instrumental nineteenth-century technology responsible for what was then known as space–time compression. This chapter examines the relay between the Enlightenment ideal of detachment and first-person travelogues during the long nineteenth century, from Washington Irving’s myth-making in “Rip Van Winkle” to Hamlin Garland’s late nineteenth-century autobiographical sketches.

The Telephonic Self: Non-Systemic Systems and Autobiographical Self-Representation

This chapter discusses the philosophical ground of Dreiser’s automobile-driven autobiography, A Hoosier Holiday. Dreiser’s text records his failure to reconnect to a stable home as he discovers, on his return to Indiana, that his many childhood homes have all been moved, destroyed, or rendered unrecognizable. His increasing concern over the figure of the homeless wanderer signals his discovery that the detachment that made his realism possible has its limits. Withdrawing into nostalgic sentimentalism, Dreiser’s backward-looking glance seeks to eternalize his experience by producing moments of temporal confusion in which he blurs the past and present.