Activities
Climate-G Testbed
Climate-G
Climate-G is a distributed testbed for climate change addressing challenging data and metadata management issues at a very large scale. The main scope of Climate-G is to allow scientists to carry out geographical and cross-institutional data discovery, access, visualization and sharing of climate data.
The Climate-G testbed is the result of an open, successful and wide collaboration joining grids and P2P paradigm, OGC services, visualization tools, etc. To enable geographical data sharing, search and discovery activities (through the Climate-G data grid portal interface) we adopted a distributed CMCC metadata solution leveraging P2P and grid technologies, the GRelC Data Access and Integration Service.
The Climate-G testbed provides a proof of concept concerning the involved technologies and right now it manages about 2TB of data provided by IPSL. Additional datasets coming from CMCC will be soon added to the digital library.
The Climate-G Data Distribution Centre is the data grid portal of the testbed and it is intended for scientists and researchers that want to carry out search and discovery activities on the available large scale digital library. It provides a ubiquitous and pervasive way to ease data publishing, metadata search & discovery, metadata annotation and validation, data access, etc.
Genesi-DR Interoperability
GENESI-DR is an acronym for Ground European Network for Earth Science Interoperations - Digital Repositories, and is a European research project. It is part of the Research Infrastructures part of the EU FP7 Capacities Programme.
GENESI-DR involves key Earth Science centres responsible for operational data acquisition, processing, archiving and distribution and additional data holding facilities, and aims to operate, validate and optimise the integrated access and use of available digital repositories for Earth scientists.
It's challenge is to offer a framework that allows scientists from different Earth Science disciplines to have access, to combine and to integrate all historical and present Earth-related data from space, airborne and in situ sensors available from all digital repositories dispersed all over Europe together.
The GENESI-DR interoperability activity aims to facilitate EGEE Earth Scientists the access to this infrastructure. For this purpose the EGEE Earth Science Cluster and the GENESI-DR project agreed on a Memorandum of Understanding, which contains the aim of allowing bidirectional access to infrastructure and data.
Seismology applications from IPGP (CNRS, France) on EGEE
gCSMT: Grid Centroid Seismic Moment Tensor
gCSMT application is designed to determine the main characteristics of large earthquakes occurring worldwide. These characteristics describes the seismic event in term of a centroid seismic moment tensor which is the equivalent point point source approximation of the earthquake located in space and time at the barycenter of the seismic rupture.
These characteristics are:
- The scalar moment M_0 (expressed in Newton.meters), which corresponds to the amount of seismic energy radiated by the earthquake. M_0 is also converted into M_w, the moment magnitude. M_w is directly related to the actual size of the rupture (the surface of the fault involved in the event), and the average amount of slip on the fault.
- The duration of the rupture.
- The moment tensor, which corresponds to the centroid mechanism itself, i.e. the orientation of the fault and the direction of the displacement on this fault. The main interpretation of this moment tensor is given in term of two planes, one is the fault plane, the other one being the auxiliary plane. The identification of the fault plane is not possible by the sole use of seismic waves (the two planes will radiate the same seismic pattern), the ambiguity is raised using tectonic considerations and aftershocks distribution.
Eric Clévédé, Geneviève Patau, David Weissenbach (IPGP / CNRS)
SEMUM3D: simulation code for 3D seismic wave propagation in elastic, heterogeneous media at local and regional scales
SEMUM3D is especially designed for the simulation of the seismic response of complex geological media such as sedimentary basins. Spatial discretization is based on a high-order Spectral Element approximation and time discretization is based on an energy and momentum conserving second-order Newmark scheme formulated in velocity. Perfectly Matched Layers (PML) are implemented in SEMUM3D to simulate wave propagation in unbounded domains. Seismic point source and incident plane wave field are also implemented in SEMUM3D...
SEMUM3D is written in Fortran 90. Complex geometries (surface topography, interfaces) are handled by SEMUM3D using unstructured hexahedra meshes. The mesh is generated using the Cubit software. Parallel implementation of SEMUM3D is based on domain decomposition and the mesh partitioning make use of the METIS software library. It has been written with a strategy of independence with respect to any Cartesian coordinate system and can handle unstructured meshes of arbitrary topology. Communications between elements are based on face, edge and vertex communications, and require topological information for each of these objects. These objects (elements, faces, edges and vertices) are explicitly explicitly identified as Fortran-structures which can handle and optimize the communications.
SEMUM3D runs on distributed parallel architectures, using the Message Passing Interface (MPI) library (mpich) and make use of the BLAS library. The code has already been compiled on Linux using different compilers: the Intel compiler ifort (32/64 bits), the Fujitsu (32 bits) compiler, the Pathscale and Portland (64 bits) compilers.
SEMUM3D software has been ported on the EGEE Grid and ran on the IBM cluster of the Parallel Computing Center of the Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris (distributed memory of 64 bipro Opteron nodes) and on the cluster of the FUNVISIS (Venezuela).
Elise Delavaud, Jean-Pierre Vilotte, Geneviève Moguilny (IPGP / CNRS)
European Grid Initiative
Since 2000 the pan-European distributed grid infrastructure has been developed and operated through a series of short term projects such as DataGrid, EGEE and DEISA. It has demonstrated to be successful and to be able to satisfy the needs of thousands of users from a variety scientific domains. The EGI Designed Study (DS) was partially funded by the EC as a project over 27 months fro
m September 2007 with the aim of bringing about the creation of a new European organizational model, which will be capable of fulfilling this
vision of a sustainable European grid infrastructure (EGI) for e-Science.
The main foundations of EGI are the National Grid Initiatives (NGI), which operate the grid infrastructures in each country. EGI will link existing NGIs and will actively support the setup and initiation of new NGIs.
See http://web.eu-egi.eu/fileadmin/public/EGI_DS_D5_4_V300b.pdf
EGI.org
EGI organisation
- UCO: User Coordination Officer
- CTO: Central Technical Officer
- CAO: Central Administration Officer
- COO: Central Operational Officer
ESA, CERN, EMBL-EBI (European Bioinformatics Institute) .... Associate members, they will sign a memorandum of understanding with EGI.org.
The maintenance, the support, interoperability and development of the middleware will not be a direct internal EGI activity.
The User Community Services (UCS) teams on behalf of the Specialised Support Centres, representing the various user communities.
- EGI office will be hosted in the Netherlands as it was decided at the User Forum in Catania.
- First meeting of the EGI council will be held in july that will gather the representatives of all the NGIs that sign the Memorandum of Understanding.
- The letter of intend for the MoU is in preparation by EGI-DS; deadline to sign at least before the council meeting.
Specialized Support Centre (SSC)
Specialised Support Centres (SSCs) will be created to provide continuity, cohesion and cost savings to the user communities currently served by European Grid projects, and establish collaborations with specific ESFRI (European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures) projects to set up the relevant services for these communities.
The SSCs fulfill a set of extended support services in the sense that they are endorsed electively by a subset of NGIs (National Grid Initiatives) and have a specific relationship with EGI.org.
More details see
http://knowledge.eu-egi.eu/knowledge/index.php/Specialised-Support-Centres
Table 3: SSC Requirements
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Req. 1 |
Must have a European-level existence. |
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Req. 2 |
Demonstrate its legitimacy for representing a given sector of the full EGI user community. |
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Req. 3 |
Be governed by the user community/stakeholders. |
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Req. 4 |
Establish a procedure for the addition and removal of partners. |
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Req. 5 |
Have a business plan including how EGI resources will be used and/or provided by the SSC’s stakeholders. |
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Req. 6 |
Have a sustainability plan/roadmap. |
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Req. 7 |
Have a clear work plan and roadmap with measurable milestones. |
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Req. 8 |
Demonstrate how the SSC advances the aims of EGI. |
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Req. 9 |
Accept the global EGI policies. |
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Req. 10 |
Commit to name people to fill relevant EGI/SSC contact points. |
GENESI-DR client
The gsearch tool provides an easy access over either a terminal application or a web front end to the GENESI-DR opensearch interface. Both front ends take a set of different search parameters, generates and transmit the search request to a central opensearch site, customizable by the user. The received results will be processed and displayed by gsearch. It also offers the possibilities to download a selection, or all of the found datasets to the local computer or respectively it can create a download script containing all necessary information to load the dataset directly on a Grid node. This generated script can be included inside an JDL start script.
Concerning the terminal application, the development of a generic library for accessing the opensearch interface is ongoing. In the current state it provides most of the necessary functionality to send search requests and receive results. Based upon the libxml2 library the received search results are parsed and displayed by the application. The user has two methods to define search parameters and presentation of the incoming results.
1. For simple usability a pure console application list the available dataset. With command line parameters the user is able to choose the datasets, which then can be downloaded. In addition, it creates a file containing the file name and their location of the downloaded datasets. This file can now be submitted with the user application to the job scheduler.
2. A Text User Interface (TUI), based on ncurses provides with a fully interactive application a more detailed selection and representation of datasets. There are also more features, like a comfortable search form and a detailed information screen about a selected dataset.
In addition to the user interface, there was also the development of a background application started for directly downloading the dataset into the grid storage. This download tool, called gdownload will be able to use the following protocols: http, https, ftp, gritftp and dap. At the moment for testing the tool chain only the http protocol is implemented. The other protocols will be added soon.
In order to test the different parts of the tool, an example was created. As a symbolic search dataset the XBT_XXX containing temperature profiles of the Mediterranean Sea was used. The user selects the datasets and the framework creates a JDL file with the given test application processing the data directly loaded by gdownload into the grid system. The tests have proved the efficiency of the framework and that it saves the user a considerably long time of finding the right dataset without gsearch and manually uploading the data into the grid system.
Future development:
- More functionality of the ncurses front end.
- Better handling of non conform results
- Implementation of more protocols: for instance opendap, hdf...
- Better test data cases and application