74,103 research outputs found
e-Science Infrastructure for the Social Sciences
When the term âe-Scienceâ became popular, it frequently was referred to as âenhanced scienceâ or âelectronic scienceâ. More telling is the definition âe-Science is about global collaboration in key areas of science and the next generation of infrastructure that will enable itâ (Taylor, 2001). The question arises to what extent can the social sciences profit from recent developments in e- Science infrastructure? While computing, storage and network capacities so far were sufficient to accommodate and access social science data bases, new capacities and technologies support new types of research, e.g. linking and analysing transactional or audio-visual data. Increasingly collaborative working by researchers in distributed networks is efficiently supported and new resources are available for e-learning. Whether these new developments become transformative or just helpful will very much depend on whether their full potential is recognized and creatively integrated into new research designs by theoretically innovative scientists. Progress in e-Science was very much linked to the vision of the Grid as âa software infrastructure that enables flexible, secure, coordinated resource sharing among dynamic collections of individuals, institutions and resourcesâ and virtually unlimited computing capacities (Foster et al. 2000). In the Social Sciences there has been considerable progress in using modern IT- technologies for multilingual access to virtual distributed research databases across Europe and beyond (e.g. NESSTAR, CESSDA â Portal), data portals for access to statistical offices and for linking access to data, literature, project, expert and other data bases (e.g. Digital Libraries, VASCODA/SOWIPORT). Whether future developments will need GRID enabling of social science databases or can be further developed using WEB 2.0 support is currently an open question. The challenges here are seamless integration and interoperability of data bases, a requirement that is also stipulated by internationalisation and trans-disciplinary research. This goes along with the need for standards and harmonisation of data and metadata. Progress powered by e- infrastructure is, among others, dependent on regulatory frameworks and human capital well trained in both, data science and research methods. It is also dependent on sufficient critical mass of the institutional infrastructure to efficiently support a dynamic research community that wants to âtake the lead without catching upâ.
Sharing a conceptual model of grid resources and services
Grid technologies aim at enabling a coordinated resource-sharing and
problem-solving capabilities over local and wide area networks and span
locations, organizations, machine architectures and software boundaries. The
heterogeneity of involved resources and the need for interoperability among
different grid middlewares require the sharing of a common information model.
Abstractions of different flavors of resources and services and conceptual
schemas of domain specific entities require a collaboration effort in order to
enable a coherent information services cooperation.
With this paper, we present the result of our experience in grid resources
and services modelling carried out within the Grid Laboratory Uniform
Environment (GLUE) effort, a joint US and EU High Energy Physics projects
collaboration towards grid interoperability. The first implementation-neutral
agreement on services such as batch computing and storage manager, resources
such as the hierarchy cluster, sub-cluster, host and the storage library are
presented. Design guidelines and operational results are depicted together with
open issues and future evolutions.Comment: 4 pages, 0 figures, CHEP 200
COEL: A Web-based Chemistry Simulation Framework
The chemical reaction network (CRN) is a widely used formalism to describe
macroscopic behavior of chemical systems. Available tools for CRN modelling and
simulation require local access, installation, and often involve local file
storage, which is susceptible to loss, lacks searchable structure, and does not
support concurrency. Furthermore, simulations are often single-threaded, and
user interfaces are non-trivial to use. Therefore there are significant hurdles
to conducting efficient and collaborative chemical research. In this paper, we
introduce a new enterprise chemistry simulation framework, COEL, which
addresses these issues. COEL is the first web-based framework of its kind. A
visually pleasing and intuitive user interface, simulations that run on a large
computational grid, reliable database storage, and transactional services make
COEL ideal for collaborative research and education. COEL's most prominent
features include ODE-based simulations of chemical reaction networks and
multicompartment reaction networks, with rich options for user interactions
with those networks. COEL provides DNA-strand displacement transformations and
visualization (and is to our knowledge the first CRN framework to do so), GA
optimization of rate constants, expression validation, an application-wide
plotting engine, and SBML/Octave/Matlab export. We also present an overview of
the underlying software and technologies employed and describe the main
architectural decisions driving our development. COEL is available at
http://coel-sim.org for selected research teams only. We plan to provide a part
of COEL's functionality to the general public in the near future.Comment: 23 pages, 12 figures, 1 tabl
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CleanTX Analysis on the Smart Grid
The utility industry in the United States has an opportunity to revolutionize its electric grid system by utilizing emerging software, hardware and wireless technologies and renewable energy sources. As electricity generation in the U.S. increases by over 30% from todayâs generation of 4,100 Terawatt hours per year to a production of 5,400 Terawatt hours per year by 2030, a new type of grid is necessary to ensure reliable and quality power. The projected U.S. population increase and economic growth will require a grid that can transmit and distribute significantly more power than it does today. Known as a Smart Grid, this system enables two- way transmission of electrons and information to create a demand-response system that will optimize electricity delivery to consumers. This paper outlines the issues with the current grid infrastructure, discusses the economic advantages of the Smart Grid for both consumers and utilities, and examines the emerging technologies that will enable cleaner, more efficient and cost- effective power transmission and consumption.IC2 Institut
Adapting SAM for CDF
The CDF and D0 experiments probe the high-energy frontier and as they do so
have accumulated hundreds of Terabytes of data on the way to petabytes of data
over the next two years. The experiments have made a commitment to use the
developing Grid based on the SAM system to handle these data. The D0 SAM has
been extended for use in CDF as common patterns of design emerged to meet the
similar requirements of these experiments. The process by which the merger was
achieved is explained with particular emphasis on lessons learned concerning
the database design patterns plus realization of the use cases.Comment: Talk from the 2003 Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics
(CHEP03), La Jolla, Ca, USA, March 2003, 4 pages, pdf format, TUAT00
Charging ahead on the transition to electric vehicles with standard 120 v wall outlets
Electrification of transportation is needed soon and at significant scale to meet climate goals, but electric vehicle adoption has been slow and there has been little systematic analysis to show that today's electric vehicles meet the needs of drivers. We apply detailed physics-based models of electric vehicles with data on how drivers use their cars on a daily basis. We show that the energy storage limits of today's electric vehicles are outweighed by their high efficiency and the fact that driving in the United States seldom exceeds 100 km of daily travel. When accounting for these factors, we show that the normal daily travel of 85-89% of drivers in the United States can be satisfied with electric vehicles charging with standard 120 V wall outlets at home only. Further, we show that 77-79% of drivers on their normal daily driving will have over 60 km of buffer range for unexpected trips. We quantify the sensitivities to terrain, high ancillary power draw, and battery degradation and show that an extreme case with all trips on a 3% uphill grade still shows the daily travel of 70% of drivers being satisfied with electric vehicles. These findings show that today's electric vehicles can satisfy the daily driving needs of a significant majority of drivers using only 120 V wall outlets that are already the standard across the United States
The Dark Energy Survey Data Management System
The Dark Energy Survey collaboration will study cosmic acceleration with a
5000 deg2 griZY survey in the southern sky over 525 nights from 2011-2016. The
DES data management (DESDM) system will be used to process and archive these
data and the resulting science ready data products. The DESDM system consists
of an integrated archive, a processing framework, an ensemble of astronomy
codes and a data access framework. We are developing the DESDM system for
operation in the high performance computing (HPC) environments at NCSA and
Fermilab. Operating the DESDM system in an HPC environment offers both speed
and flexibility. We will employ it for our regular nightly processing needs,
and for more compute-intensive tasks such as large scale image coaddition
campaigns, extraction of weak lensing shear from the full survey dataset, and
massive seasonal reprocessing of the DES data. Data products will be available
to the Collaboration and later to the public through a virtual-observatory
compatible web portal. Our approach leverages investments in publicly available
HPC systems, greatly reducing hardware and maintenance costs to the project,
which must deploy and maintain only the storage, database platforms and
orchestration and web portal nodes that are specific to DESDM. In Fall 2007, we
tested the current DESDM system on both simulated and real survey data. We used
Teragrid to process 10 simulated DES nights (3TB of raw data), ingesting and
calibrating approximately 250 million objects into the DES Archive database. We
also used DESDM to process and calibrate over 50 nights of survey data acquired
with the Mosaic2 camera. Comparison to truth tables in the case of the
simulated data and internal crosschecks in the case of the real data indicate
that astrometric and photometric data quality is excellent.Comment: To be published in the proceedings of the SPIE conference on
Astronomical Instrumentation (held in Marseille in June 2008). This preprint
is made available with the permission of SPIE. Further information together
with preprint containing full quality images is available at
http://desweb.cosmology.uiuc.edu/wik
The AliEn system, status and perspectives
AliEn is a production environment that implements several components of the
Grid paradigm needed to simulate, reconstruct and analyse HEP data in a
distributed way. The system is built around Open Source components, uses the
Web Services model and standard network protocols to implement the computing
platform that is currently being used to produce and analyse Monte Carlo data
at over 30 sites on four continents. The aim of this paper is to present the
current AliEn architecture and outline its future developments in the light of
emerging standards.Comment: Talk from the 2003 Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics
(CHEP03), La Jolla, Ca, USA, March 2003, 10 pages, Word, 10 figures. PSN
MOAT00
Polish grid infrastructure for science and research
Structure, functionality, parameters and organization of the computing Grid
in Poland is described, mainly from the perspective of high-energy particle
physics community, currently its largest consumer and developer. It represents
distributed Tier-2 in the worldwide Grid infrastructure. It also provides
services and resources for data-intensive applications in other sciences.Comment: Proceeedings of IEEE Eurocon 2007, Warsaw, Poland, 9-12 Sep. 2007,
p.44
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