HotGrid: Graduated Access to Grid-based Science Gateways

We describe the idea of a Science Gateway, an application-specific task wrapped as a web service, and some examples of these that are being implemented on the US TeraGrid cyberinfrastructure. We also describe HotGrid, a means of providing simple, immediate access to the Grid through one of these gateways, which we hope will broaden the use of the Grid, drawing in a wide community of users. The secondary purpose of HotGrid is to acclimate a science community to the concepts of certificate use. Our system provides these weakly authenticated users with immediate power to use the Grid resources for science, but without the dangerous power of running arbitrary code. We describe the implementation of these Science Gateways with the Clarens secure web server

Object Database Scalability for Scientific Workloads

We describe the PetaByte-scale computing challenges posed by the next generation of particle physics experiments, due to start operation in 2005. The computing models adopted by the experiments call for systems capable of handling sustained data acquisition rates of at least 100 MBytes/second into an Object Database, which will have to handle several PetaBytes of accumulated data per year. The systems will be used to schedule CPU intensive reconstruction and analysis tasks on the highly complex physics Object data which need then be served to clients located at universities and laboratories worldwide. We report on measurements with a prototype system that makes use of a 256 CPU HP Exemplar X Class machine running the Objectivity/DB database. Our results show excellent scalability for up to 240 simultaneous database clients, and aggregate I/O rates exceeding 150 Mbytes/second, indicating the viability of the computing models

The Clarens web services architecture

Clarens is a uniquely flexible web services infrastructure providing a unified access protocol to a diverse set of functions useful to the HEP community. It uses the standard HTTP protocol combined with application layer, certificate based authentication to provide single sign-on to individuals, organizations and hosts, with fine-grained access control to services, files and virtual organization (VO) management. This contribution describes the server functionality, while client applications are described in a subsequent talk.Comment: Talk from the 2003 Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP03), La Jolla, Ca, USA, March 2003, 6 pages, LaTeX, 4 figures, PSN MONT00

Distributed Heterogeneous Relational Data Warehouse In A Grid Environment

This paper examines how a "Distributed Heterogeneous Relational Data Warehouse" can be integrated in a Grid environment that will provide physicists with efficient access to large and small object collections drawn from databases at multiple sites. This paper investigates the requirements of Grid-enabling such a warehouse, and explores how these requirements may be met by extensions to existing Grid middleware. We present initial results obtained with a working prototype warehouse of this kind using both SQLServer and Oracle9i, where a Grid-enabled web-services interface makes it easier for web-applications to access the distributed contents of the databases securely. Based on the success of the prototype, we proposes a framework for using heterogeneous relational data warehouse through the web-service interface and create a single "Virtual Database System" for users. The ability to transparently access data in this way, as shown in prototype, is likely to be a very powerful facility for HENP and other grid users wishing to collate and analyze information distributed over Grid.Comment: 4 pages, 6 figure

Clarens Client and Server Applications

Several applications have been implemented with access via the Clarens web service infrastructure, including virtual organization management, JetMET physics data analysis using relational databases, and Storage Resource Broker (SRB) access. This functionality is accessible transparently from Python scripts, the Root analysis framework and from Java applications and browser applets.Comment: Talk from the 2003 Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP03), La Jolla, Ca, USA, March 2003, 4 pages, LaTeX, no figures, PSN TUCT00

Computational experiments with a three-dimensional model of the Cochlea

We present results from a series of compute-intensive simulation experiments employing a realistic and detailed three-dimensional model of the human cochlear macro-mechanics. Our model uses the immersed boundary method to compute the fluid-structure interactions within the cochlea. It is a three-dimensional model based on an accurate cochlear geometry obtained from physical measurements. It includes detailed descriptions of the elastic material components immersed in the fluid, and is based on the previously developed immersed boundary method for elastic shells. The basilar membrane is modeled by a fourth-order partial differential equation of shell theory. The results reproduce the basic well known characteristics of cochlear mechanics and constitute a successful initial step in model validation

The Clarens Web Service Framework for Distributed Scientific Analysis in Grid Projects

Large scientific collaborations are moving towards service oriented architecutres for implementation and deployment of globally distributed systems. Clarens is a high performance, easy to deploy Web Service framework that supports the construction of such globally distributed systems. This paper discusses some of the core functionality of Clarens that the authors believe is important for building distributed systems based on Web Services that support scientific analysis

Job Monitoring in an Interactive Grid Analysis Environment

The grid is emerging as a great computational resource but its dynamic behavior makes the Grid environment unpredictable. Systems and networks can fail, and the introduction of more users can result in resource starvation. Once a job has been submitted for execution on the grid, monitoring becomes essential for a user to see that the job is completed in an efficient way, and to detect any problems that occur while the job is running. In current environments once a user submits a job he loses direct control over the job and the system behaves like a batch system: the user submits the job and later gets a result back. The only information a user can obtain about a job is whether it is scheduled, running, cancelled or finished. Today users are becoming increasingly interested in such analysis grid environments in which they can check the progress of the job, obtain intermediate results, terminate the job based on the progress of job or intermediate results, steer the job to other nodes to achieve better performance and check the resources consumed by the job. In order to fulfill their requirements of interactivity a mechanism is needed that can provide the user with real time access to information about different attributes of a job. In this paper we present the design of a Job Monitoring Service, a web service that will provide interactive remote job monitoring by allowing users to access different attributes of a job once it has been submitted to the interactive Grid Analysis Environment

Community Seismic Network: A Dense Array to Sense Earthquake Strong Motion

The Community Seismic Network (CSN) is currently a 500‐element strong‐motion network located in the Los Angeles area of California (see Fig. 1). The sensors in the network are low‐cost microelectromechanical (MEM) accelerometers that are capable of recording on scale up to accelerations of ±2g. The primary product of the network is a set of measurements of ground shaking in the seconds following a major earthquake. An example of this is shown in Figure 2. The shaking information will be contributed to U.S. Geological Survey products such as ShakeMap (Wald et al., 1999) and ShakeCast (Wald et al., 2006), with the goal of providing first responders a proxy for damage that can guide efforts immediately following the event. The basic premise is the strong ground‐motion shaking varies on a subkilometer scale, which will require a dense network to meaningfully measure the shaking. Evidence for this comes from earthquakes recorded by dense oil company surveys in the Los Angeles area (Clayton et al., 2011)