E-Science in the classroom - Towards viability

E-Science has the potential to transform school science by enabling learners, teachers and research scientists to engage together in authentic scientific enquiry, collaboration and learning. However, if we are to reap the benefits of this potential as part of everyday teaching and learning, we need to explicitly think about and support the work required to set up and run e-Science experiences within any particular educational context. In this paper, we present a framework for identifying and describing the resources, tools and services necessary to move e-Science into the classroom together with examples of these. This framework is derived from previous experiences conducting educational e-Science projects and systematic analysis of the categories of ‘hidden work’ needed to run these projects (Smith, Underwood, Fitzpatrick, & Luckin, forthcoming). The articulation of resources, tools and services based on these categories provides a starting point for more methodical design and deployment of future educational e- Science projects, reflection on which can also help further develop the framework. It also points to the technological infrastructure from which such tools and services could be built. As such it provides an agenda of work to develop both processes and technologies that would make it practical for teachers to deliver active, and collaborative e-Science learning experiences on a larger scale within and across schools. Routine school e- Science will only be possible if such support is specified, implemented and made available to teachers within their work contexts in an appropriate and usable form

Cosmological Simulations on a Grid of Computers

The work presented in this paper aims at restricting the input parameter values of the semi-analytical model used in GALICS and MOMAF, so as to derive which parameters influence the most the results, e.g., star formation, feedback and halo recycling efficiencies, etc. Our approach is to proceed empirically: we run lots of simulations and derive the correct ranges of values. The computation time needed is so large, that we need to run on a grid of computers. Hence, we model GALICS and MOMAF execution time and output files size, and run the simulation using a grid middleware: DIET. All the complexity of accessing resources, scheduling simulations and managing data is harnessed by DIET and hidden behind a web portal accessible to the users.Comment: Accepted and Published in AIP Conference Proceedings 1241, 2010, pages 816-82

Acceleration-as-a-Service: Exploiting Virtualised GPUs for a Financial Application

'How can GPU acceleration be obtained as a service in a cluster?' This question has become increasingly significant due to the inefficiency of installing GPUs on all nodes of a cluster. The research reported in this paper is motivated to address the above question by employing rCUDA (remote CUDA), a framework that facilitates Acceleration-as-a-Service (AaaS), such that the nodes of a cluster can request the acceleration of a set of remote GPUs on demand. The rCUDA framework exploits virtualisation and ensures that multiple nodes can share the same GPU. In this paper we test the feasibility of the rCUDA framework on a real-world application employed in the financial risk industry that can benefit from AaaS in the production setting. The results confirm the feasibility of rCUDA and highlight that rCUDA achieves similar performance compared to CUDA, provides consistent results, and more importantly, allows for a single application to benefit from all the GPUs available in the cluster without loosing efficiency.Comment: 11th IEEE International Conference on eScience (IEEE eScience) - Munich, Germany, 201

How Many and What Types of SPARQL Queries can be Answered through Zero-Knowledge Link Traversal?

The current de-facto way to query the Web of Data is through the SPARQL protocol, where a client sends queries to a server through a SPARQL endpoint. Contrary to an HTTP server, providing and maintaining a robust and reliable endpoint requires a significant effort that not all publishers are willing or able to make. An alternative query evaluation method is through link traversal, where a query is answered by dereferencing online web resources (URIs) at real time. While several approaches for such a lookup-based query evaluation method have been proposed, there exists no analysis of the types (patterns) of queries that can be directly answered on the live Web, without accessing local or remote endpoints and without a-priori knowledge of available data sources. In this paper, we first provide a method for checking if a SPARQL query (to be evaluated on a SPARQL endpoint) can be answered through zero-knowledge link traversal (without accessing the endpoint), and analyse a large corpus of real SPARQL query logs for finding the frequency and distribution of answerable and non-answerable query patterns. Subsequently, we provide an algorithm for transforming answerable queries to SPARQL-LD queries that bypass the endpoints. We report experimental results about the efficiency of the transformed queries and discuss the benefits and the limitations of this query evaluation method.Comment: Preprint of paper accepted for publication in the 34th ACM/SIGAPP Symposium On Applied Computing (SAC 2019

Performance evaluation of a distributed integrative architecture for robotics

The eld of robotics employs a vast amount of coupled sub-systems. These need to interact cooperatively and concurrently in order to yield the desired results. Some hybrid algorithms also require intensive cooperative interactions internally. The architecture proposed lends it- self amenable to problem domains that require rigorous calculations that are usually impeded by the capacity of a single machine, and incompatibility issues between software computing elements. Implementations are abstracted away from the physical hardware for ease of de- velopment and competition in simulation leagues. Monolithic developments are complex, and the desire for decoupled architectures arises. Decoupling also lowers the threshold for using distributed and parallel resources. The ability to re-use and re-combine components on de- mand, therefore is essential, while maintaining the necessary degree of interaction. For this reason we propose to build software components on top of a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) using Web Services. An additional bene t is platform independence regarding both the operating system and the implementation language. The robot soccer platform as well as the associated simulation leagues are the target domain for the development. Furthermore are machine vision and remote process control related portions of the architecture currently in development and testing for industrial environments. We provide numerical data based on the Python frameworks ZSI and SOAPpy undermining the suitability of this approach for the eld of robotics. Response times of signi cantly less than 50 ms even for fully interpreted, dynamic languages provides hard information showing the feasibility of Web Services based SOAs even in time critical robotic applications