Towards a Swiss National Research Infrastructure

In this position paper we describe the current status and plans for a Swiss National Research Infrastructure. Swiss academic and research institutions are very autonomous. While being loosely coupled, they do not rely on any centralized management entities. Therefore, a coordinated national research infrastructure can only be established by federating the various resources available locally at the individual institutions. The Swiss Multi-Science Computing Grid and the Swiss Academic Compute Cloud projects serve already a large number of diverse user communities. These projects also allow us to test the operational setup of such a heterogeneous federated infrastructure

Large Scale In Silico Screening on Grid Infrastructures

Large-scale grid infrastructures for in silico drug discovery open opportunities of particular interest to neglected and emerging diseases. In 2005 and 2006, we have been able to deploy large scale in silico docking within the framework of the WISDOM initiative against Malaria and Avian Flu requiring about 105 years of CPU on the EGEE, Auvergrid and TWGrid infrastructures. These achievements demonstrated the relevance of large-scale grid infrastructures for the virtual screening by molecular docking. This also allowed evaluating the performances of the grid infrastructures and to identify specific issues raised by large-scale deployment.Comment: 14 pages, 2 figures, 2 tables, The Third International Life Science Grid Workshop, LSGrid 2006, Yokohama, Japan, 13-14 october 2006, to appear in the proceeding

Searches for New Heavy Resonances in Final States with Leptons and Photons in ATLAS and CMS

Searches for resonances in final states with leptons and photons have always been a powerful tool for discovery in high energy physics. We present here the latest results from the ATLAS and CMS experiments, based on up to 36.1 fb$^{-1}$ of 13 TeV proton-proton collisions produced at the Large Hadron Collider. Detailed results on single lepton, dilepton, diphoton and Z$\gamma$ resonances are included

Spectroscopic [Fe/H] for 98 extra-solar planet-host stars: Exploring the probability of planet formation

We present stellar parameters and metallicities, obtained from a detailed spectroscopic analysis, for a large sample of 98 stars known to be orbited by planetary mass companions (almost all known targets), as well as for a volume-limited sample of 41 stars not known to host any planet. For most of the stars the stellar parameters are revised versions of the ones presented in our previous works. However, we also present parameters for 18 stars with planets not previously published, and a compilation of stellar parameters for the remaining 4 planet-hosts for which we could not obtain a spectrum. A comparison of our stellar parameters with values of Teff, log(g), and [Fe/H] available in the literature shows a remarkable agreement. The derived [Fe/H] values are then used to confirm the previously known result that planets are more prevalent around metal-rich stars. Furthermore, we confirm that the frequency of planets is a strongly rising function of the stellar metallicity, at least for stars with [Fe/H]>0. While only about 3% of the solar metallicity stars in the CORALIE planet search sample were found to be orbited by a planet, this number increases to more than 25% for stars with [Fe/H] above +0.3. Curiously, our results also suggest that these percentages might remain relatively constant for values of [Fe/H] lower than about solar, increasing then linearly with the mass fraction of heavy elements. These results are discussed in the context of the theories of planetary formation.Comment: 15 pages, 9 figures, Accepted for publication in A&A; Replaced after language editin

Towards a Mini-App for Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics at Exascale

The smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) technique is a purely Lagrangian method, used in numerical simulations of fluids in astrophysics and computational fluid dynamics, among many other fields. SPH simulations with detailed physics represent computationally-demanding calculations. The parallelization of SPH codes is not trivial due to the absence of a structured grid. Additionally, the performance of the SPH codes can be, in general, adversely impacted by several factors, such as multiple time-stepping, long-range interactions, and/or boundary conditions. This work presents insights into the current performance and functionalities of three SPH codes: SPHYNX, ChaNGa, and SPH-flow. These codes are the starting point of an interdisciplinary co-design project, SPH-EXA, for the development of an Exascale-ready SPH mini-app. To gain such insights, a rotating square patch test was implemented as a common test simulation for the three SPH codes and analyzed on two modern HPC systems. Furthermore, to stress the differences with the codes stemming from the astrophysics community (SPHYNX and ChaNGa), an additional test case, the Evrard collapse, has also been carried out. This work extrapolates the common basic SPH features in the three codes for the purpose of consolidating them into a pure-SPH, Exascale-ready, optimized, mini-app. Moreover, the outcome of this serves as direct feedback to the parent codes, to improve their performance and overall scalability.Comment: 18 pages, 4 figures, 5 tables, 2018 IEEE International Conference on Cluster Computing proceedings for WRAp1

Land cover maps for environmental modeling at multiple scales

As described in the ECOCHANGE proposal, Task01.02.02 “Map production and aggregation”, two major products are generated within this WP. Firstly, land cover maps at high spatial resolutions will be produced for the European Union and for the reference years of 1960, 1990 and 2000. Secondly, thematic and spatial aggregated products will be derived at coarser spatial resolutions in order to synthesize the fragmentation and variability within coarser cells for biodiversity assessment and modelling. The name of the official deliverable is D01.02.01 “Land cover maps for environmental modelling at multiple scales” and includes this report, the digital land cover products and an interactive website to view the data at all thematic and spatial scales