#they are...fitting powers for a geoscientist

[streamlass]

I'm a human rain attractor. But nearly always only when it's inconvenient.

I can also tell you what way is north without thinking about it, except where the rocks are too full of iron.

They say everyone has a mundane superpower

Small things, little things, things you might not even notice if the circumstances aren't exactly right. Like, someone out there always manages to wake up right with the alarm. Someone never, ever sprains their ankle. Someone has never assumed there was one more step in the staircase. That kinda thing. Personally, I'm immune to the hazards of those giant retail mazes. like. I go to CostCo. I get my toilet paper or paper towels. I get my basil butter salmon. I eat my hot dog and chocolate chip cookie. I leave. I go to IKEA. I get my bookshelf. I glance at a few trinkets without leaving the path. I eat my meatballs and slice of Daim cake. I leave. I go to the Labyrinth. I fight the minotaur. I walk directly to the exit. I give Ariadne a hug. I eat my gyro and baklava. I leave. It's very simple, I'm very efficient, and you should always take me with you.

[kayla1993-world]

Why Alberta oil and gas workers are pivoting to tech jobs

As Alberta's oil and gas sector struggles through a labour shortage, some former industry workers are pivoting to careers at technology companies.

For almost seven years, Daniel Afekhume worked as a geoscientist in the oil and gas industry in Nigeria and the United States. But after moving to Canada during the COVID-19 pandemic, Afekhume changed his career path.

"The volatility in the oil and gas industry, it's getting more rapid," Afekhume said.

"It's just tough for me basically to do long-term planning for career growth opportunities."

Afekhume took part in the EDGE UP program, led by Calgary Economic Development, which offers free training to workers transitioning from energy to tech. Over 300 workers took part in the program.

For the past two months, Afekhume has been working as a data engineer at Neo Financial, a financial tech company. He hopes to find more stability in the tech industry.

"I needed a fresh start. I needed to move my experience, my skill set, to another industry, and the tech industry was almost a natural fit for me."

According to commercial real estate and investment firm CBRE, Calgary had a 17.9 percent growth in its tech worker numbers between 2015 and 2020. That's an increase of 46,700 workers. With multinational companies like Amazon Web Services (AWS) setting up shop in Calgary, the city's tech sector appears to be gaining momentum.

Vince O'Gorman, CEO of Calgary-based Vog App Developers, said hiring among tech employers is extremely competitive. His company has been hiring oil and gas workers with applicable skills to the tech sector.

"There's many people in there that have the knowledge in project management and maybe some technical background that is transferable," O'Gorman said.

But with the oil and gas sector experiencing a boom due to price surges, O'Gorman said it may become harder to recruit energy workers into tech.

Kris Read, co-founder and head of technology at Neo Financial, agrees that despite the positive growth in Calgary's tech sector, hiring remains competitive. In less than four years, Read's company has hired over 600 employees, but recruiting is still a challenge.

"Everyone wants the best talent. So, it's going to always be competitive," Read said.

Companies like AWS are turning to post-secondary schools for recruitment. The company partnered with Mount Royal University in November 2021 to create a training program that prepares workers for entry-level jobs in cloud computing.

The recruitment power of larger companies like AWS may be another factor that makes it harder for smaller tech companies in Calgary to hire top talent.

Felipe Moreno, 46, is a mechanical engineer by trade, but for the past year he has worked as a technical analyst at Neo Financial.

Moreno used to work at a sustainability company that was involved in projects in the oil and gas industry. He said the skills he gained in his former work are like what he does in his current tech job.

"It's just a different type of problem solving, using computers and data to analyze problems," Moreno said.

But the transition to working in tech isn't always a breeze. Moreno said the IT industry is always changing, so workers like him need to be constantly learning new skills.

Afekhume also said the biggest challenge of transitioning out of the oil and gas sector was the number of new tools and technologies he had to learn.

"You need to be up to speed. So, it keeps you on your feet, but the good side is that you're always learning … your perspective is always growing and broadening every day."

[asfeedin]

Tomanowos, the meteorite that survived mega-floods and human folly

This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Space.com’s Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

Daniel Garcia-Castellanos, Earth scientist, Instituto de Ciencias de la Tierra Jaume Almera (ICTJA – CSIC)

The rock with arguably the most fascinating story on Earth has an ancient name: Tomanowos. It means “the visitor from heaven” in the extinct language of Oregon’s Clackamas Indian tribe.

The Clackamas revered the Tomanowos – also known as the Willamette meteorite – believing it came to unite heaven, earth and water for their people.

Rare extraterrestrial rocks like Tomanowos have a kind of fatal attraction for us humans. When European Americans found the pockmarked, 15-ton rock near the Willamette River more than a century ago, Tomanowos went through a violent uprooting, a series of lawsuits and a period under armed guard. It’s one of the strangest rock stories I’ve come across in my years as a geoscientist. But let me start the tale from its real beginning, billions of years ago.

History of a rock

Tomanowos is a 15-ton meteorite made, as most metal meteorites are, of iron with about 8% nickel mixed in. These iron and nickel atoms were formed at the core of large stars that ended their lives in supernovae explosions.

Those massive explosions spattered outer space with the products of nuclear fusion – raw elements that then ended up in a nebula, or cloud of dust and gas.

Supernovae disperse the iron produced in heavy stars. (Image credit: NASA)

Those massive explosions spattered outer space with the products of nuclear fusion – raw elements that then ended up in a nebula, or cloud of dust and gas.

Eventually the elements were forced together by gravity, forming the earliest planet-like orbs, or protoplanets of our solar system.

Some 4.5 billion years ago, Tomanowos was part of the core of one of these protoplanets, where heavier metals like iron and nickel accumulate.

Some time after that, this protoplanet must have collided with another planetary body, sending this meteorite and an unknowable number of other chunks back out into space.

Riding the flood

Subsequent impacts over billions of years eventually pushed Tomanowos’ orbit across that of the Earth. As a result of this cosmic billiards game, the Tomanowos meteorite entered Earth’s atmosphere around 17,000 years ago and landed on an ice cap in Canada.

Over the following decades, flowing ice slowly transported Tomanowos southwards, towards a glacier in the Fork River of Montana in what is now the United States. This glacier had created a 2,000-foot-high ice dam across the river, impounding the enormous Lake Missoula upstream.

The ice dam crumbled when Tomanowos was nearing it, releasing one of the largest floods ever documented: the Missoula Floods, which shaped the Scablands of Washington State with the power of several thousand Niagara Falls.

Trapped in ice and rafted down river by the flood, Tomanowos crossed modern-day Idaho, Washington and Oregon along the swollen Columbia River at speeds sometimes faster than 40 miles per hour, according to simulations by modern geologists. While floating near what’s now the city of Portland, the meteorite’s ice case broke apart, and Tomanowos sank to the river bottom.

It is one of hundreds of other “erratic” rocks – rocks made of elements that do not match the local geology – that have been found along the Columbia River. All are souvenirs from the cataclysmic Missoula floods, but none is as rare as Tomanowos.

A rock worth suing for

As flood waters ebbed, Tomanowos was exposed to the elements. Over thousands of years, rain mixed with iron sulfide in the meteorite. This produced sulfuric acid that gradually dissolved the exposed side of the rock, creating the cratered surface it bears today.

Several thousand years after the Missoula floods, the Clackamas arrived to Oregon and discovered the meteorite. Did they know it came from the heavens, despite the lack of a crater? The name Tomanowos, or Visitor from the Sky, suggests that they may have suspected the rock’s extraterrestrial origins.

Millennia of peaceful rest in the Willamette valley ended in 1902 when an Oregon man named Ellis Hughes secretly moved the iron rock to his own land and claimed it as his property.

Hauling a 15-ton rock on a wooden cart for nearly a mile without being noticed wasn’t easy, even in the Wild West. Hughes and his son labored for three back-breaking months. Once the meteorite was on his land, he began charging admission to view the “Willamette Meteorite.”

In fact, however, the legitimate owner of the iron rock turned out to be the Oregon Iron and Steel Company, which owned the land where Hughes had found the meteorite and sued for its return. While the suit worked its way through the courts, the company hired a guard who sat atop Tomanowos 24 hours a day with a loaded gun. They won the case in 1905, and sold Tomanowos to the American Museum of Natural History in New York a year later.

Floods

Today Tomanowos can be seen in the museum’s Hall of the Universe exhibition, which still refers to it as the Willamette Meteorite. In 2000 the museum signed an agreement with descendants of the Clackamas tribe, recognizing the meteorite’s spiritual significance to the Native people of Oregon.

The Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde hold an annual ceremonial visit with the ancient rock that, as their ancestors so aptly observed, brought the sky and the water together here on Earth. In 2019 several fragments of the meteorite that had been held separately were returned to the tribe.

But the museum’s written display tells only some of the rock’s long story. It omits the Missoula Floods, despite the significance of this event for modern earth science.

Present display of the Tomanowos meteorite, American Museum of Natural History. (Image credit: Daniel Garcia-Castellanos, CC-BY-ND)

Decades after geologists J. Harlen Bretz and Joseph T. Pardee separately posited the theory of the Missoula floods in the early 20th century, their research was used to explain how Tomanowos reached Oregon, where it was found. Their work also triggered one of the most significant paradigm shifts in recent geoscience: the recognition that catastrophic flooding events significantly contribute to the erosion and evolution of landscape

Previously, scientists had followed Lyell’s principle of uniformitarianism, which held that Earth’s landscape was sculpted by regular, natural processes distributed evenly over long times. Normal floods fit into this theory, but the notion of swift, catastrophic events like the Missoula Floods were somewhat heretic.

The idea of huge Ice Age floods helped geologists a century ago prevail over pre-scientific, religious explanations for unusual finds – such as how marine fossils could be found at high elevation, and how a giant metal rock from outer space came to rest in Oregon.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Follow all of the Expert Voices issues and debates — and become part of the discussion — on Facebook and Twitter. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher.  

Source link

Tags: folly, human, megafloods, meteorite, survived, Tomanowos

from WordPress https://ift.tt/2KEYnFD via IFTTT

[netmetic]

Continued HPC Visualization Advancements via Intel® Rendering Framework

At SC18 in Dallas, Intel reaffirmed its commitment to creating solutions for some of the most demanding visual workloads. Our efforts have been building very strategically over the last few months as we continue to invest in a portfolio of open source rendering libraries to enable a number of industries, from Hollywood studios, world-renowned universities, and supercomputing data centers to deliver optimum visual impact and discovery.

As Intel’s Corporate Vice President and General Manager of the Open Source Technology Center Imad Sousou wrote during IBC 2018 in Amsterdam, Intel recently established the Intel® Rendering Framework as the umbrella name for Intel’s open source visualization libraries, including:

Intel® Embree – A high performance, open source ray tracing library.

Intel® OSPRay – An open, scalable, and portable ray tracing engine.

Intel® OpenSWR – An open source software rasterizer library.

Intel® Open Image Denoise – A high performance library, which will be made available in open source later this year, that improves visual quality during interaction using machine learning methods including the Intel® MKL-DNN library to selectively filter noise.

These libraries provide a strong foundation and catalyst for the Software Defined Visualization (SDVis) industry initiative Intel has collaborated on with institutions like Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), Kitware, Inc. (developers of ParaView and VTK), SCI at University of Utah, VISUS at University of Stuttgart, University of Tennessee, University of Oregon, and Stephen Hawking Centre for Theoretical Cosmology at University of Cambridge

Also this year, Intel was proud to join the Academy Software Foundation, as I announced at SIGGRAPH 2018 in Vancouver, where we showed how Intel technology was used in the rendering the Moana island scene that Disney Studios recently made publicly  available.* The 160+ billion object scene required over 100GB of system memory to create. Disney has publicly released the data set for others to research and establish best practices. Furthering our work in motion pictures, Intel artificial intelligence libraries along with Total Chaos VRay with Intel Embree were used by FX studio Ziva to create the prehistoric, 75-foot long shark in this summer’s Warner Bros. action movie The Meg.*

Within high performance computing (HPC), one of the most exciting areas is in the realm of in situ visualization, the technique where visualizations are created together with the simulation code without utilizing storage. In situ visualization will be the norm in just a few years as more advanced supercomputers are built; visual analysis will be done right from the same memory used by the simulation with almost instant turn-around from compute to visualization without costly I/O.  The recent launch of Intel® Optane™ DC persistent memory will be an incredibly powerful tool in these scenarios.

Another exciting area we are enabling is visualization “in the cloud.” With the growing emphasis on HPC availability in private and public cloud infrastructures, the Intel Rendering Framework based on open source software rendering is a natural fit for cloud solutions because it doesn’t require special GPU hardware instances. One exciting project that will be discussed at the Intel Booth Wednesday at 3:30pm is Tapestry from the University of Tennessee. Tapestry is a container application available on DockerHub that utilizes Intel OSPRay for scalable rendering across multiple nodes in a private or public cloud infrastructure. Tapestry provides cloud capable rendering particularly suited to scientific visualizations.  It also includes a movie editing and rendering suite. Come by the Intel SC18 Booth for tutorials and presentations from our SDVis community partners Wednesday from 2pm to 4:30pm.

SC18 Demos

Intel Rendering Framework libraries and the SDVis applications that use it are the foundation that culminated in the release of our Intel® Selection Solutions for Professional Visualization, which harnesses SDVis for high performance, convenient and cost-effective deployment. At SC18 this year at the Intel booth, we will be showing four visualization uses showcasing the breadth of workloads that can be achieved with Intel Select Solutions and Intel Rendering Framework:

Auto CFD Virtual Windtunnel

OpenFOAM® Foundation v5.0* code1 + ParaView* + Intel OSPRay

~250GB of data—run on-site with an Intel Select Solutions for Pro Visualization PLUS cluster at 10-30 frames per second

  Water Formation in the Universe

SC’18 Visualization and Data Analytics Showcase Finalist

ParaView v5.6 + Intel OSPRay and Intel OpenSWR Animation

110 GBs of data, run remotely on Intel Select Solutions for Pro Visualization PLUS with AWS Nice DCV remote desktop app interactively at 10-30 frames per second

It is believed that as much as half of the water in our solar system predates the formation of the Sun. In order to better understand how this early water formed, scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory have coupled cosmological simulations with an inline, fully implicit, molecular chemistry solver. This combination allows scientists to observe the formation of water, methane, carbon dioxide, and other molecules in the early cosmos.

Using Intel’s OSPRay and OpenSWR rendering libraries allows for the interactive rendering of these simulations on compute clusters, enabling interactive data exploration.

Research data used courtesy of Joseph Smidt, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and Brandon Wiggins, Southern Utah University

Image courtesy of Greg Abram from TACC at University of Texas, Austin

  Argonne National Lab Theta supercomputer: Star Radiation Properties

October 2018 Nature cover story; SC’18 Vis and DA Showcase Finalist

The geometry visualized for the Vis Showcase was generated on the Theta Supercomputer at Argonne National Laboratory using ParaView

On the show flow, live rendering a ~350GB (in memory) version of the dataset run both on-site on Intel Select Solutions for Pro Vis PLUS cluster and remotely on Argonne Nat’l Labs Cooley supercomputer interactively at 30+ frames per second

30TB+ data set simulated by a team from the University of California, Santa Barbara, led by Lars Bildsten

This demo shows luminous blue variables: gigantic stars that are one hundred times bigger than the sun. Knowing the cause of the explosions of these luminous blue variables gives scientists a more complete picture of the life and death of the biggest stars in the universe.

  Energy / Oil and Gas Discovery: The Moroccan Ocean Shelf

Energy/Oil and Gas Discovery: The Moroccan Atlantic Margin

Beta “OSPRay Studio” Viewer showing 110GB data of detailed layering and geologic structures mapped by seismic geoscientists to identify oil/gas potential run remotely on Intel Select Solution for Pro Visualization PLUS cluster with AWS NICE DCV remote desktop application at up to 50 frames per second

Research data used courtesy of the Bureau of Economic Geology at The University of Texas at Austin and the Moroccan National Office of Hydrocarbon and Mining

  Look for more Intel Rendering Framework demos in partner booths including Atipa’s Intel Select Solutions for Pro Visualization running LAMMPS in situ via SENSEI and Intel OSPRay on two platforms with different processor configurations, demonstrating Intel OSPRay scalability. And don’t miss the HPE booth running the latest in Einstein general relativity and gravity analysis via Cosmic String simulations using GR-CHOMBO and Catalyst/ParaView in situ on a large scale HPE SMP supercomputer.

If you’ll be attending SC18, I encourage you to come by the Intel booth, Atipa booth and HPE Booth to see all of the demos we have showcasing our expertise in HPC for visual discovery across various workloads.

* Other brands and names may be claimed as property of others.

1 Data collected with OpenFOAM® Foundation v5.0. This offering is not approved or endorsed by OpenCFD Limited, producer and distributor of the OpenFOAM software via https://www.openfoam.com/, and owner of the OPENFOAM® and OpenCFD® trademarks.

The post Continued HPC Visualization Advancements via Intel® Rendering Framework appeared first on IT Peer Network.

Continued HPC Visualization Advancements via Intel® Rendering Framework published first on https://jiohow.tumblr.com/