Sharing Science Gateway Artefacts Through Repositories

Researchers want to run scientific experiments focusing on their disciplines. They do not want to know how and where the experiments are executed. Science gateways hide details by coordinating the execution of experiments using different infrastructures and workflow systems. ER-flow/SHIWA and SCI-BUS project developed repositories to share artefacts such as applications, portlets, workflows, etc. inside and among research communities. Sharing artefacts in re-positories enable gateway developers to reuse them when building a new gateway and/or creating a new application

WS-PGRADE/gUSE in European Projects

Besides core project partners, the SCI-BUS project also supported several external user communities in developing and setting up customized science gateways. The focus was on large communities typically represented by other European research projects. However, smaller local efforts with the potential of generalizing the solution to wider communities were also supported. This chapter gives an overview of support activities related to user communities external to the SCI-BUS project. A generic overview of such activities is provided followed by the detailed description of three gateways developed in collaboration with European projects: the agINFRA Science Gateway for Workflows for agricultural research, the VERCE Science Gateway for seismology, and the DRIHM Science Gateway for weather research and forecasting

Genetic Progress From 50 Years of Smooth Bromegrass Breeding

Since its introduction from Eurasia, smooth bromegrass (Bromus inermis Leyss.) has become an important cool-season forage grass in North America. The objective of this study was to document breeding progress in smooth bromegrass between 1942 and 1995 in North America. Thirty cultivars or experimental populations were tested at up to seven sites in the eastern and central USA, with a range of soil types and climates. There have been small genetic changes in forage yield, brown leafspot resistance [caused by Pyrenophora bromi (Died) Drechs.], in vitro dry matter digestibility (IVDMD), and neutral detergent fiber (NDF) concentration. Brown leafspot resistance increased gradually, averaging 0.21 units decade(-1). Mean forage yield did not change for cultivars developed after 1942, but was 0.54 Mg ha(-1) (7.2%) higher for the post-1942 group than in \u27Lincoln\u27, a direct representative of smooth bromegrass introduced into North America. Selection for increased IVDMD led to an average increase in IVDMD of 9 g kg(-1) (1.4%), an increase in forage yield of 0.33 Mg ha(-1) (5.0%), and a decrease in NDF of -8 g kg(-1) (-1.2%) in the post-1942 group. The slow rate of progress for smooth bromegrass forage yield is due to its complex polypoid inheritance, emphasis on traits other than forage yield, and relatively little concentrated attention from public and private breeders

Latitudinal and Longitudinal Adaptation of Smooth Bromegrass Populations

Breeding progress has been slow in smooth bromegrass (Bromus inermis Leyss) since its introduction to North America. Much of the variability among cultivars appears to have arisen by natural selection and adaptive responses. The objective of this study was to determine if smooth bromegrass cultivars differ in latitudinal or longitudinal adaptation, as measured by forage yield, and if that variability relates to their breeding or selection history. The target region was defined as the Great Plains to the East Coast of the USA, from 38 to 47 degrees N latitude. Twenty-nine cultivars and experimental populations were evaluated for forage yield at up to seven locations ranging from central to eastern USA. Populations were classified according to pooled population main effect and population x location interaction effect (G + GL deviations). Cluster analysis resulted in eight clusters that explained 90% of the variation among G + GL deviations. One cluster consisted of populations average in adaptation, four clusters consisted of populations that were largely unadapted across the entire region, and three clusters consisted of populations that were specifically adapted to the entire region or a large part thereof. Much of the grouping and adaptation characteristics could be explained by similar pedigrees, selection history, and selection location. However, the phenotypic similarity of some superior, but divergent-pedigree populations suggested that alleles for high and stable forage yield in smooth bromegrass probably exist in numerous germplasm sources. Despite a history of little to no gains in forage yield, these results suggest unrealized potential for future improvement of forage yield of smooth bromegrass across a broad geographic region

ENABLING GENERIC DISTRIBUTED COMPUTING INFRASTRUCTURE COMPATIBILITY FOR WORKFLOW MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS

Solving workflow management system’s Distributed Computing Infrastructure (DCI) incompatibility and their workflow interoperability issues are very challenging and complex tasks. Workflow management systems (and therefore their workflows, workflow developers and also their end-users) are bounded tightly to some limited number of supported DCIs, and efforts required to allow additional DCI support. In this paper we are specifying a concept how to enable generic DCI compatibility for grid workflow management systems (such as ASKALON, MOTEUR, gUSE/WS-PGRADE, etc.) on job and indirectly on workflow level. To enable DCI compatibility among the different workflow management systems we have developed the DCI Bridge software solution. In this paper we will describe its internal architecture, provide usage scenarios to show how the developed service resolve the DCI interoperability issues between various middleware types. The generic DCI Bridge service enables the execution of jobs onto the existing major DCI platforms (such as Service Grids (Globus Toolkit 2 and 4, gLite, ARC, UNICORE), Desktop Grids, Web services, or even cloud based DCIs)

Rational land and housing bubbles in infinite-horizon economies

URL des Documents de travail : http://ces.univ-paris1.fr/cesdp/cesdp2016.htmlDocuments de travail du Centre d'Economie de la Sorbonne 2016.27 - ISSN : 1955-611XThis paper considers rational land and housing bubbles in an infinite-horizon general equilibrium model. Their demands rest on two different grounds: the land is an input to produce while the house may be consumed. Our work differs from the existing literature in two respects. First, dividends on both these long-lived assets are endogenous and their sequences are computed. Second, we introduce and study different concepts of bubbles, including individual and strong bubbles

Automatic segmentation of relevant textures in agricultural images

One important issue emerging strongly in agriculture is related with the automatization of tasks, where the optical sensors play an important role. They provide images that must be conveniently processed. The most relevantimage processing procedures require the identification of green plants, in our experiments they come from barley and corn crops including weeds, so that some types of action can be carried out, including site-specific treatments with chemical products or mechanical manipulations. Also the identification of textures belonging to the soil could be useful to know some variables, such as humidity, smoothness or any others. Finally, from the point of view of the autonomous robot navigation, where the robot is equipped with the imaging system, some times it is convenient to know not only the soil information and the plants growing in the soil but also additional information supplied by global references based on specific areas. This implies that the images to be processed contain textures of three main types to be identified: green plants, soil and sky if any. This paper proposes a new automatic approach for segmenting these main textures and also to refine the identification of sub-textures inside the main ones. Concerning the green identification, we propose a new approach that exploits the performance of existing strategies by combining them. The combination takes into account the relevance of the information provided by each strategy based on the intensity variability. This makes an important contribution. The combination of thresholding approaches, for segmenting the soil and the sky, makes the second contribution; finally the adjusting of the supervised fuzzy clustering approach for identifying sub-textures automatically, makes the third finding. The performance of the method allows to verify its viability for automatic tasks in agriculture based on image processin