UO E-clips, March 21

Ducks flocking to rally (Register-Guard): Barack Obama made Nate Gulley cry. It wasn't anything he said. It's just that the Democratic presidential candidate scheduled what could be his only Eugene campaign appearance tonight, when Gulley, a student at the University of Oregon and an Obama supporter, is out of town. "I think I cried a little bit when I found out Barack was going to be there and I wasn't going to be able to make it," Gulley said from Honolulu, where he's working with other students in the Coalition Against Environmental Racism. "At the same time, I understand the senator has a pretty busy schedule these days."

Additional Obama rallies booked full (Albany Democrat-Herald): Presidential candidate Barack Obama has added two more campaign stops to his Oregon tour, in Salem and Medford, and they're already booked full. So is the rally in Portland. … Obama is holding a "Stand For Change Rally" starting at 9:30 a.m. Friday at Memorial Coliseum in Portland. His Salem rally starts at 1 p.m. Friday at the Salem Armory Auditorium, 1320 17th St. N.E. Obama's third rally will be at McArthur Court at the University of Oregon at 9 p.m. … In Medford, Obama will speak at Kids Unlimited, 821 N. Riverside Ave. on Saturday. Doors open at 7:30 a.m. and his talk starts at 9:30 a.m.

It's all about cheap labor (Miami Herald, opinion piece by UO professor Phillip Romero): As the saying goes, nature abhors a vacuum. On immigration policy, for most of the last 20 years -- since the last immigration ''reform'' act was passed in Congress in 1986 -- a vacuum is about all that has emanated from Washington. So states are attempting what the Feds won't do. The illegal immigrant problem that was first placed on the national radar by California in the early 1990s has expanded beyond a handful of border states to almost every state in the union, with only vacuous statements from our national "leaders.'' Amid the debate over how to control our borders, a simple truth is rarely voiced: Many industries have built their business models on cheap labor, and have no desire to end illegal immigration.

The POINT of Performance (HPC Wire): The National Science Foundation (NSF) has recently funded a project that will integrate, harden and deploy an open, portable, robust performance tools framework for productive performance engineering of petascale applications on the NSF TeraGrid systems. ... According to Allen Malony of the University of Oregon, the project's principal investigator, "Now is the time to transfer successful, robust parallel performance infrastructure to an integrated, extensible, and sustainable performance tools suite that will be improved and supported for the long term to enable productive use of petascale HPC systems. In addition, if HPC resources are to be maximized, human-centric investments must also be made to help train application developers to be good performance engineers."