The StratusLab cloud distribution: Use-cases and support for scientific applications

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Floros, E.

2012-04-01

The StratusLab project is integrating an open cloud software distribution that enables organizations to setup and provide their own private or public IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) computing clouds. StratusLab distribution capitalizes on popular infrastructure virtualization solutions like KVM, the OpenNebula virtual machine manager, Claudia service manager and SlipStream deployment platform, which are further enhanced and expanded with additional components developed within the project. The StratusLab distribution covers the core aspects of a cloud IaaS architecture, namely Computing (life-cycle management of virtual machines), Storage, Appliance management and Networking. The resulting software stack provides a packaged turn-key solution for deploying cloud computing services. The cloud computing infrastructures deployed using StratusLab can support a wide range of scientific and business use cases. Grid computing has been the primary use case pursued by the project and for this reason the initial priority has been the support for the deployment and operation of fully virtualized production-level grid sites; a goal that has already been achieved by operating such a site as part of EGI's (European Grid Initiative) pan-european grid infrastructure. In this area the project is currently working to provide non-trivial capabilities like elastic and autonomic management of grid site resources. Although grid computing has been the motivating paradigm, StratusLab's cloud distribution can support a wider range of use cases. Towards this direction, we have developed and currently provide support for setting up general purpose computing solutions like Hadoop, MPI and Torque clusters. For what concerns scientific applications the project is collaborating closely with the Bioinformatics community in order to prepare VM appliances and deploy optimized services for bioinformatics applications. In a similar manner additional scientific disciplines like Earth Science can take advantage of StratusLab cloud solutions. Interested users are welcomed to join StratusLab's user community by getting access to the reference cloud services deployed by the project and offered to the public.

Transportation Infrastructure Design and Construction \\0x16 Virtual Training Tools

DOT National Transportation Integrated Search

2003-09-01

This project will develop 3D interactive computer-training environments for a major element of transportation infrastructure : hot mix asphalt paving. These tools will include elements of hot mix design (including laboratory equipment) and constructi...

Dynamic Extension of a Virtualized Cluster by using Cloud Resources

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Oberst, Oliver; Hauth, Thomas; Kernert, David; Riedel, Stephan; Quast, Günter

2012-12-01

The specific requirements concerning the software environment within the HEP community constrain the choice of resource providers for the outsourcing of computing infrastructure. The use of virtualization in HPC clusters and in the context of cloud resources is therefore a subject of recent developments in scientific computing. The dynamic virtualization of worker nodes in common batch systems provided by ViBatch serves each user with a dynamically virtualized subset of worker nodes on a local cluster. Now it can be transparently extended by the use of common open source cloud interfaces like OpenNebula or Eucalyptus, launching a subset of the virtual worker nodes within the cloud. This paper demonstrates how a dynamically virtualized computing cluster is combined with cloud resources by attaching remotely started virtual worker nodes to the local batch system.

1001 Ways to run AutoDock Vina for virtual screening

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Jaghoori, Mohammad Mahdi; Bleijlevens, Boris; Olabarriaga, Silvia D.

2016-03-01

Large-scale computing technologies have enabled high-throughput virtual screening involving thousands to millions of drug candidates. It is not trivial, however, for biochemical scientists to evaluate the technical alternatives and their implications for running such large experiments. Besides experience with the molecular docking tool itself, the scientist needs to learn how to run it on high-performance computing (HPC) infrastructures, and understand the impact of the choices made. Here, we review such considerations for a specific tool, AutoDock Vina, and use experimental data to illustrate the following points: (1) an additional level of parallelization increases virtual screening throughput on a multi-core machine; (2) capturing of the random seed is not enough (though necessary) for reproducibility on heterogeneous distributed computing systems; (3) the overall time spent on the screening of a ligand library can be improved by analysis of factors affecting execution time per ligand, including number of active torsions, heavy atoms and exhaustiveness. We also illustrate differences among four common HPC infrastructures: grid, Hadoop, small cluster and multi-core (virtual machine on the cloud). Our analysis shows that these platforms are suitable for screening experiments of different sizes. These considerations can guide scientists when choosing the best computing platform and set-up for their future large virtual screening experiments.

1001 Ways to run AutoDock Vina for virtual screening.

PubMed

Jaghoori, Mohammad Mahdi; Bleijlevens, Boris; Olabarriaga, Silvia D

2016-03-01

Large-scale computing technologies have enabled high-throughput virtual screening involving thousands to millions of drug candidates. It is not trivial, however, for biochemical scientists to evaluate the technical alternatives and their implications for running such large experiments. Besides experience with the molecular docking tool itself, the scientist needs to learn how to run it on high-performance computing (HPC) infrastructures, and understand the impact of the choices made. Here, we review such considerations for a specific tool, AutoDock Vina, and use experimental data to illustrate the following points: (1) an additional level of parallelization increases virtual screening throughput on a multi-core machine; (2) capturing of the random seed is not enough (though necessary) for reproducibility on heterogeneous distributed computing systems; (3) the overall time spent on the screening of a ligand library can be improved by analysis of factors affecting execution time per ligand, including number of active torsions, heavy atoms and exhaustiveness. We also illustrate differences among four common HPC infrastructures: grid, Hadoop, small cluster and multi-core (virtual machine on the cloud). Our analysis shows that these platforms are suitable for screening experiments of different sizes. These considerations can guide scientists when choosing the best computing platform and set-up for their future large virtual screening experiments.

High-performance integrated virtual environment (HIVE): a robust infrastructure for next-generation sequence data analysis

PubMed Central

Simonyan, Vahan; Chumakov, Konstantin; Dingerdissen, Hayley; Faison, William; Goldweber, Scott; Golikov, Anton; Gulzar, Naila; Karagiannis, Konstantinos; Vinh Nguyen Lam, Phuc; Maudru, Thomas; Muravitskaja, Olesja; Osipova, Ekaterina; Pan, Yang; Pschenichnov, Alexey; Rostovtsev, Alexandre; Santana-Quintero, Luis; Smith, Krista; Thompson, Elaine E.; Tkachenko, Valery; Torcivia-Rodriguez, John; Wan, Quan; Wang, Jing; Wu, Tsung-Jung; Wilson, Carolyn; Mazumder, Raja

2016-01-01

The High-performance Integrated Virtual Environment (HIVE) is a distributed storage and compute environment designed primarily to handle next-generation sequencing (NGS) data. This multicomponent cloud infrastructure provides secure web access for authorized users to deposit, retrieve, annotate and compute on NGS data, and to analyse the outcomes using web interface visual environments appropriately built in collaboration with research and regulatory scientists and other end users. Unlike many massively parallel computing environments, HIVE uses a cloud control server which virtualizes services, not processes. It is both very robust and flexible due to the abstraction layer introduced between computational requests and operating system processes. The novel paradigm of moving computations to the data, instead of moving data to computational nodes, has proven to be significantly less taxing for both hardware and network infrastructure. The honeycomb data model developed for HIVE integrates metadata into an object-oriented model. Its distinction from other object-oriented databases is in the additional implementation of a unified application program interface to search, view and manipulate data of all types. This model simplifies the introduction of new data types, thereby minimizing the need for database restructuring and streamlining the development of new integrated information systems. The honeycomb model employs a highly secure hierarchical access control and permission system, allowing determination of data access privileges in a finely granular manner without flooding the security subsystem with a multiplicity of rules. HIVE infrastructure will allow engineers and scientists to perform NGS analysis in a manner that is both efficient and secure. HIVE is actively supported in public and private domains, and project collaborations are welcomed. Database URL: https://hive.biochemistry.gwu.edu PMID:26989153

High-performance integrated virtual environment (HIVE): a robust infrastructure for next-generation sequence data analysis.

PubMed

Simonyan, Vahan; Chumakov, Konstantin; Dingerdissen, Hayley; Faison, William; Goldweber, Scott; Golikov, Anton; Gulzar, Naila; Karagiannis, Konstantinos; Vinh Nguyen Lam, Phuc; Maudru, Thomas; Muravitskaja, Olesja; Osipova, Ekaterina; Pan, Yang; Pschenichnov, Alexey; Rostovtsev, Alexandre; Santana-Quintero, Luis; Smith, Krista; Thompson, Elaine E; Tkachenko, Valery; Torcivia-Rodriguez, John; Voskanian, Alin; Wan, Quan; Wang, Jing; Wu, Tsung-Jung; Wilson, Carolyn; Mazumder, Raja

2016-01-01

The High-performance Integrated Virtual Environment (HIVE) is a distributed storage and compute environment designed primarily to handle next-generation sequencing (NGS) data. This multicomponent cloud infrastructure provides secure web access for authorized users to deposit, retrieve, annotate and compute on NGS data, and to analyse the outcomes using web interface visual environments appropriately built in collaboration with research and regulatory scientists and other end users. Unlike many massively parallel computing environments, HIVE uses a cloud control server which virtualizes services, not processes. It is both very robust and flexible due to the abstraction layer introduced between computational requests and operating system processes. The novel paradigm of moving computations to the data, instead of moving data to computational nodes, has proven to be significantly less taxing for both hardware and network infrastructure.The honeycomb data model developed for HIVE integrates metadata into an object-oriented model. Its distinction from other object-oriented databases is in the additional implementation of a unified application program interface to search, view and manipulate data of all types. This model simplifies the introduction of new data types, thereby minimizing the need for database restructuring and streamlining the development of new integrated information systems. The honeycomb model employs a highly secure hierarchical access control and permission system, allowing determination of data access privileges in a finely granular manner without flooding the security subsystem with a multiplicity of rules. HIVE infrastructure will allow engineers and scientists to perform NGS analysis in a manner that is both efficient and secure. HIVE is actively supported in public and private domains, and project collaborations are welcomed. Database URL: https://hive.biochemistry.gwu.edu. © The Author(s) 2016. Published by Oxford University Press.

Design and implementation of a reliable and cost-effective cloud computing infrastructure: the INFN Napoli experience

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Capone, V.; Esposito, R.; Pardi, S.; Taurino, F.; Tortone, G.

2012-12-01

Over the last few years we have seen an increasing number of services and applications needed to manage and maintain cloud computing facilities. This is particularly true for computing in high energy physics, which often requires complex configurations and distributed infrastructures. In this scenario a cost effective rationalization and consolidation strategy is the key to success in terms of scalability and reliability. In this work we describe an IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) cloud computing system, with high availability and redundancy features, which is currently in production at INFN-Naples and ATLAS Tier-2 data centre. The main goal we intended to achieve was a simplified method to manage our computing resources and deliver reliable user services, reusing existing hardware without incurring heavy costs. A combined usage of virtualization and clustering technologies allowed us to consolidate our services on a small number of physical machines, reducing electric power costs. As a result of our efforts we developed a complete solution for data and computing centres that can be easily replicated using commodity hardware. Our architecture consists of 2 main subsystems: a clustered storage solution, built on top of disk servers running GlusterFS file system, and a virtual machines execution environment. GlusterFS is a network file system able to perform parallel writes on multiple disk servers, providing this way live replication of data. High availability is also achieved via a network configuration using redundant switches and multiple paths between hypervisor hosts and disk servers. We also developed a set of management scripts to easily perform basic system administration tasks such as automatic deployment of new virtual machines, adaptive scheduling of virtual machines on hypervisor hosts, live migration and automated restart in case of hypervisor failures.

Cloud Infrastructure & Applications - CloudIA

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Sulistio, Anthony; Reich, Christoph; Doelitzscher, Frank

The idea behind Cloud Computing is to deliver Infrastructure-as-a-Services and Software-as-a-Service over the Internet on an easy pay-per-use business model. To harness the potentials of Cloud Computing for e-Learning and research purposes, and to small- and medium-sized enterprises, the Hochschule Furtwangen University establishes a new project, called Cloud Infrastructure & Applications (CloudIA). The CloudIA project is a market-oriented cloud infrastructure that leverages different virtualization technologies, by supporting Service-Level Agreements for various service offerings. This paper describes the CloudIA project in details and mentions our early experiences in building a private cloud using an existing infrastructure.

Scaling the CERN OpenStack cloud

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Bell, T.; Bompastor, B.; Bukowiec, S.; Castro Leon, J.; Denis, M. K.; van Eldik, J.; Fermin Lobo, M.; Fernandez Alvarez, L.; Fernandez Rodriguez, D.; Marino, A.; Moreira, B.; Noel, B.; Oulevey, T.; Takase, W.; Wiebalck, A.; Zilli, S.

2015-12-01

CERN has been running a production OpenStack cloud since July 2013 to support physics computing and infrastructure services for the site. In the past year, CERN Cloud Infrastructure has seen a constant increase in nodes, virtual machines, users and projects. This paper will present what has been done in order to make the CERN cloud infrastructure scale out.

The Virtual Geophysics Laboratory (VGL): Scientific Workflows Operating Across Organizations and Across Infrastructures

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Cox, S. J.; Wyborn, L. A.; Fraser, R.; Rankine, T.; Woodcock, R.; Vote, J.; Evans, B.

2012-12-01

The Virtual Geophysics Laboratory (VGL) is web portal that provides geoscientists with an integrated online environment that: seamlessly accesses geophysical and geoscience data services from the AuScope national geoscience information infrastructure; loosely couples these data to a variety of gesocience software tools; and provides large scale processing facilities via cloud computing. VGL is a collaboration between CSIRO, Geoscience Australia, National Computational Infrastructure, Monash University, Australian National University and the University of Queensland. The VGL provides a distributed system whereby a user can enter an online virtual laboratory to seamlessly connect to OGC web services for geoscience data. The data is supplied in open standards formats using international standards like GeoSciML. A VGL user uses a web mapping interface to discover and filter the data sources using spatial and attribute filters to define a subset. Once the data is selected the user is not required to download the data. VGL collates the service query information for later in the processing workflow where it will be staged directly to the computing facilities. The combination of deferring data download and access to Cloud computing enables VGL users to access their data at higher resolutions and to undertake larger scale inversions, more complex models and simulations than their own local computing facilities might allow. Inside the Virtual Geophysics Laboratory, the user has access to a library of existing models, complete with exemplar workflows for specific scientific problems based on those models. For example, the user can load a geological model published by Geoscience Australia, apply a basic deformation workflow provided by a CSIRO scientist, and have it run in a scientific code from Monash. Finally the user can publish these results to share with a colleague or cite in a paper. This opens new opportunities for access and collaboration as all the resources (models, code, data, processing) are shared in the one virtual laboratory. VGL provides end users with access to an intuitive, user-centered interface that leverages cloud storage and cloud and cluster processing from both the research communities and commercial suppliers (e.g. Amazon). As the underlying data and information services are agnostic of the scientific domain, they can support many other data types. This fundamental characteristic results in a highly reusable virtual laboratory infrastructure that could also be used for example natural hazards, satellite processing, soil geochemistry, climate modeling, agriculture crop modeling.

Open source system OpenVPN in a function of Virtual Private Network

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Skendzic, A.; Kovacic, B.

2017-05-01

Using of Virtual Private Networks (VPN) can establish high security level in network communication. VPN technology enables high security networking using distributed or public network infrastructure. VPN uses different security and managing rules inside networks. It can be set up using different communication channels like Internet or separate ISP communication infrastructure. VPN private network makes security communication channel over public network between two endpoints (computers). OpenVPN is an open source software product under GNU General Public License (GPL) that can be used to establish VPN communication between two computers inside business local network over public communication infrastructure. It uses special security protocols and 256-bit Encryption and it is capable of traversing network address translators (NATs) and firewalls. It allows computers to authenticate each other using a pre-shared secret key, certificates or username and password. This work gives review of VPN technology with a special accent on OpenVPN. This paper will also give comparison and financial benefits of using open source VPN software in business environment.

Controlling Infrastructure Costs: Right-Sizing the Mission Control Facility

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Martin, Keith; Sen-Roy, Michael; Heiman, Jennifer

2009-01-01

Johnson Space Center's Mission Control Center is a space vehicle, space program agnostic facility. The current operational design is essentially identical to the original facility architecture that was developed and deployed in the mid-90's. In an effort to streamline the support costs of the mission critical facility, the Mission Operations Division (MOD) of Johnson Space Center (JSC) has sponsored an exploratory project to evaluate and inject current state-of-the-practice Information Technology (IT) tools, processes and technology into legacy operations. The general push in the IT industry has been trending towards a data-centric computer infrastructure for the past several years. Organizations facing challenges with facility operations costs are turning to creative solutions combining hardware consolidation, virtualization and remote access to meet and exceed performance, security, and availability requirements. The Operations Technology Facility (OTF) organization at the Johnson Space Center has been chartered to build and evaluate a parallel Mission Control infrastructure, replacing the existing, thick-client distributed computing model and network architecture with a data center model utilizing virtualization to provide the MCC Infrastructure as a Service. The OTF will design a replacement architecture for the Mission Control Facility, leveraging hardware consolidation through the use of blade servers, increasing utilization rates for compute platforms through virtualization while expanding connectivity options through the deployment of secure remote access. The architecture demonstrates the maturity of the technologies generally available in industry today and the ability to successfully abstract the tightly coupled relationship between thick-client software and legacy hardware into a hardware agnostic "Infrastructure as a Service" capability that can scale to meet future requirements of new space programs and spacecraft. This paper discusses the benefits and difficulties that a migration to cloud-based computing philosophies has uncovered when compared to the legacy Mission Control Center architecture. The team consists of system and software engineers with extensive experience with the MCC infrastructure and software currently used to support the International Space Station (ISS) and Space Shuttle program (SSP).

Desktop Virtualization: Applications and Considerations

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hodgman, Matthew R.

2013-01-01

As educational technology continues to rapidly become a vital part of a school district's infrastructure, desktop virtualization promises to provide cost-effective and education-enhancing solutions to school-based computer technology problems in school systems locally and abroad. This article outlines the history of and basic concepts behind…

AstroCloud, a Cyber-Infrastructure for Astronomy Research: Cloud Computing Environments

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Li, C.; Wang, J.; Cui, C.; He, B.; Fan, D.; Yang, Y.; Chen, J.; Zhang, H.; Yu, C.; Xiao, J.; Wang, C.; Cao, Z.; Fan, Y.; Hong, Z.; Li, S.; Mi, L.; Wan, W.; Wang, J.; Yin, S.

2015-09-01

AstroCloud is a cyber-Infrastructure for Astronomy Research initiated by Chinese Virtual Observatory (China-VO) under funding support from NDRC (National Development and Reform commission) and CAS (Chinese Academy of Sciences). Based on CloudStack, an open source software, we set up the cloud computing environment for AstroCloud Project. It consists of five distributed nodes across the mainland of China. Users can use and analysis data in this cloud computing environment. Based on GlusterFS, we built a scalable cloud storage system. Each user has a private space, which can be shared among different virtual machines and desktop systems. With this environments, astronomer can access to astronomical data collected by different telescopes and data centers easily, and data producers can archive their datasets safely.

iSERVO: Implementing the International Solid Earth Research Virtual Observatory by Integrating Computational Grid and Geographical Information Web Services

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Aktas, Mehmet; Aydin, Galip; Donnellan, Andrea; Fox, Geoffrey; Granat, Robert; Grant, Lisa; Lyzenga, Greg; McLeod, Dennis; Pallickara, Shrideep; Parker, Jay; Pierce, Marlon; Rundle, John; Sayar, Ahmet; Tullis, Terry

2006-12-01

We describe the goals and initial implementation of the International Solid Earth Virtual Observatory (iSERVO). This system is built using a Web Services approach to Grid computing infrastructure and is accessed via a component-based Web portal user interface. We describe our implementations of services used by this system, including Geographical Information System (GIS)-based data grid services for accessing remote data repositories and job management services for controlling multiple execution steps. iSERVO is an example of a larger trend to build globally scalable scientific computing infrastructures using the Service Oriented Architecture approach. Adoption of this approach raises a number of research challenges in millisecond-latency message systems suitable for internet-enabled scientific applications. We review our research in these areas.

Virtual Control Systems Environment (VCSE)

ScienceCinema

Atkins, Will

2018-02-14

Will Atkins, a Sandia National Laboratories computer engineer discusses cybersecurity research work for process control systems. Will explains his work on the Virtual Control Systems Environment project to develop a modeling and simulation framework of the U.S. electric grid in order to study and mitigate possible cyberattacks on infrastructure.

Efficient operating system level virtualization techniques for cloud resources

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Ansu, R.; Samiksha; Anju, S.; Singh, K. John

2017-11-01

Cloud computing is an advancing technology which provides the servcies of Infrastructure, Platform and Software. Virtualization and Computer utility are the keys of Cloud computing. The numbers of cloud users are increasing day by day. So it is the need of the hour to make resources available on demand to satisfy user requirements. The technique in which resources namely storage, processing power, memory and network or I/O are abstracted is known as Virtualization. For executing the operating systems various virtualization techniques are available. They are: Full System Virtualization and Para Virtualization. In Full Virtualization, the whole architecture of hardware is duplicated virtually. No modifications are required in Guest OS as the OS deals with the VM hypervisor directly. In Para Virtualization, modifications of OS is required to run in parallel with other OS. For the Guest OS to access the hardware, the host OS must provide a Virtual Machine Interface. OS virtualization has many advantages such as migrating applications transparently, consolidation of server, online maintenance of OS and providing security. This paper briefs both the virtualization techniques and discusses the issues in OS level virtualization.

Enterprise Cloud Architecture for Chinese Ministry of Railway

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Shan, Xumei; Liu, Hefeng

Enterprise like PRC Ministry of Railways (MOR), is facing various challenges ranging from highly distributed computing environment and low legacy system utilization, Cloud Computing is increasingly regarded as one workable solution to address this. This article describes full scale cloud solution with Intel Tashi as virtual machine infrastructure layer, Hadoop HDFS as computing platform, and self developed SaaS interface, gluing virtual machine and HDFS with Xen hypervisor. As a result, on demand computing task application and deployment have been tackled per MOR real working scenarios at the end of article.

Cloud Computing with iPlant Atmosphere.

PubMed

McKay, Sheldon J; Skidmore, Edwin J; LaRose, Christopher J; Mercer, Andre W; Noutsos, Christos

2013-10-15

Cloud Computing refers to distributed computing platforms that use virtualization software to provide easy access to physical computing infrastructure and data storage, typically administered through a Web interface. Cloud-based computing provides access to powerful servers, with specific software and virtual hardware configurations, while eliminating the initial capital cost of expensive computers and reducing the ongoing operating costs of system administration, maintenance contracts, power consumption, and cooling. This eliminates a significant barrier to entry into bioinformatics and high-performance computing for many researchers. This is especially true of free or modestly priced cloud computing services. The iPlant Collaborative offers a free cloud computing service, Atmosphere, which allows users to easily create and use instances on virtual servers preconfigured for their analytical needs. Atmosphere is a self-service, on-demand platform for scientific computing. This unit demonstrates how to set up, access and use cloud computing in Atmosphere. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Storing and using health data in a virtual private cloud.

PubMed

Regola, Nathan; Chawla, Nitesh V

2013-03-13

Electronic health records are being adopted at a rapid rate due to increased funding from the US federal government. Health data provide the opportunity to identify possible improvements in health care delivery by applying data mining and statistical methods to the data and will also enable a wide variety of new applications that will be meaningful to patients and medical professionals. Researchers are often granted access to health care data to assist in the data mining process, but HIPAA regulations mandate comprehensive safeguards to protect the data. Often universities (and presumably other research organizations) have an enterprise information technology infrastructure and a research infrastructure. Unfortunately, both of these infrastructures are generally not appropriate for sensitive research data such as HIPAA, as they require special accommodations on the part of the enterprise information technology (or increased security on the part of the research computing environment). Cloud computing, which is a concept that allows organizations to build complex infrastructures on leased resources, is rapidly evolving to the point that it is possible to build sophisticated network architectures with advanced security capabilities. We present a prototype infrastructure in Amazon's Virtual Private Cloud to allow researchers and practitioners to utilize the data in a HIPAA-compliant environment.

VERA 3.6 Release Notes

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Williamson, Richard L.; Kochunas, Brendan; Adams, Brian M.

The Virtual Environment for Reactor Applications components included in this distribution include selected computational tools and supporting infrastructure that solve neutronics, thermal-hydraulics, fuel performance, and coupled neutronics-thermal hydraulics problems. The infrastructure components provide a simplified common user input capability and provide for the physics integration with data transfer and coupled-physics iterative solution algorithms.

Quantitative Investigation of the Technologies That Support Cloud Computing

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hu, Wenjin

2014-01-01

Cloud computing is dramatically shaping modern IT infrastructure. It virtualizes computing resources, provides elastic scalability, serves as a pay-as-you-use utility, simplifies the IT administrators' daily tasks, enhances the mobility and collaboration of data, and increases user productivity. We focus on providing generalized black-box…

The Integration of CloudStack and OCCI/OpenNebula with DIRAC

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Méndez Muñoz, Víctor; Fernández Albor, Víctor; Graciani Diaz, Ricardo; Casajús Ramo, Adriàn; Fernández Pena, Tomás; Merino Arévalo, Gonzalo; José Saborido Silva, Juan

2012-12-01

The increasing availability of Cloud resources is arising as a realistic alternative to the Grid as a paradigm for enabling scientific communities to access large distributed computing resources. The DIRAC framework for distributed computing is an easy way to efficiently access to resources from both systems. This paper explains the integration of DIRAC with two open-source Cloud Managers: OpenNebula (taking advantage of the OCCI standard) and CloudStack. These are computing tools to manage the complexity and heterogeneity of distributed data center infrastructures, allowing to create virtual clusters on demand, including public, private and hybrid clouds. This approach has required to develop an extension to the previous DIRAC Virtual Machine engine, which was developed for Amazon EC2, allowing the connection with these new cloud managers. In the OpenNebula case, the development has been based on the CernVM Virtual Software Appliance with appropriate contextualization, while in the case of CloudStack, the infrastructure has been kept more general, which permits other Virtual Machine sources and operating systems being used. In both cases, CernVM File System has been used to facilitate software distribution to the computing nodes. With the resulting infrastructure, the cloud resources are transparent to the users through a friendly interface, like the DIRAC Web Portal. The main purpose of this integration is to get a system that can manage cloud and grid resources at the same time. This particular feature pushes DIRAC to a new conceptual denomination as interware, integrating different middleware. Users from different communities do not need to care about the installation of the standard software that is available at the nodes, nor the operating system of the host machine which is transparent to the user. This paper presents an analysis of the overhead of the virtual layer, doing some tests to compare the proposed approach with the existing Grid solution. License Notice: Published under licence in Journal of Physics: Conference Series by IOP Publishing Ltd.

Design and Evaluation of a Virtual Environment Infrastructure to Support Experiments in Social Behavior

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hmeljak, Dimitrij

2010-01-01

Virtual worlds provide useful platforms for social behavioral research, but impose stringent limitations on the rules of engagement, responsiveness, and data collection, along with other resource restrictions. The major challenge from a computer science standpoint in developing group behavior applications for such environments is accommodating the…

Implementation of Grid Tier 2 and Tier 3 facilities on a Distributed OpenStack Cloud

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Limosani, Antonio; Boland, Lucien; Coddington, Paul; Crosby, Sean; Huang, Joanna; Sevior, Martin; Wilson, Ross; Zhang, Shunde

2014-06-01

The Australian Government is making a AUD 100 million investment in Compute and Storage for the academic community. The Compute facilities are provided in the form of 30,000 CPU cores located at 8 nodes around Australia in a distributed virtualized Infrastructure as a Service facility based on OpenStack. The storage will eventually consist of over 100 petabytes located at 6 nodes. All will be linked via a 100 Gb/s network. This proceeding describes the development of a fully connected WLCG Tier-2 grid site as well as a general purpose Tier-3 computing cluster based on this architecture. The facility employs an extension to Torque to enable dynamic allocations of virtual machine instances. A base Scientific Linux virtual machine (VM) image is deployed in the OpenStack cloud and automatically configured as required using Puppet. Custom scripts are used to launch multiple VMs, integrate them into the dynamic Torque cluster and to mount remote file systems. We report on our experience in developing this nation-wide ATLAS and Belle II Tier 2 and Tier 3 computing infrastructure using the national Research Cloud and storage facilities.

An element search ant colony technique for solving virtual machine placement problem

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Srija, J.; Rani John, Rose; Kanaga, Grace Mary, Dr.

2017-09-01

The data centres in the cloud environment play a key role in providing infrastructure for ubiquitous computing, pervasive computing, mobile computing etc. This computing technique tries to utilize the available resources in order to provide services. Hence maintaining the resource utilization without wastage of power consumption has become a challenging task for the researchers. In this paper we propose the direct guidance ant colony system for effective mapping of virtual machines to the physical machine with maximal resource utilization and minimal power consumption. The proposed algorithm has been compared with the existing ant colony approach which is involved in solving virtual machine placement problem and thus the proposed algorithm proves to provide better result than the existing technique.

Design and Implement of Astronomical Cloud Computing Environment In China-VO

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Li, Changhua; Cui, Chenzhou; Mi, Linying; He, Boliang; Fan, Dongwei; Li, Shanshan; Yang, Sisi; Xu, Yunfei; Han, Jun; Chen, Junyi; Zhang, Hailong; Yu, Ce; Xiao, Jian; Wang, Chuanjun; Cao, Zihuang; Fan, Yufeng; Liu, Liang; Chen, Xiao; Song, Wenming; Du, Kangyu

2017-06-01

Astronomy cloud computing environment is a cyber-Infrastructure for Astronomy Research initiated by Chinese Virtual Observatory (China-VO) under funding support from NDRC (National Development and Reform commission) and CAS (Chinese Academy of Sciences). Based on virtualization technology, astronomy cloud computing environment was designed and implemented by China-VO team. It consists of five distributed nodes across the mainland of China. Astronomer can get compuitng and storage resource in this cloud computing environment. Through this environments, astronomer can easily search and analyze astronomical data collected by different telescopes and data centers , and avoid the large scale dataset transportation.

Exploring Infiniband Hardware Virtualization in OpenNebula towards Efficient High-Performance Computing

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Pais Pitta de Lacerda Ruivo, Tiago; Bernabeu Altayo, Gerard; Garzoglio, Gabriele

2014-11-11

has been widely accepted that software virtualization has a big negative impact on high-performance computing (HPC) application performance. This work explores the potential use of Infiniband hardware virtualization in an OpenNebula cloud towards the efficient support of MPI-based workloads. We have implemented, deployed, and tested an Infiniband network on the FermiCloud private Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud. To avoid software virtualization towards minimizing the virtualization overhead, we employed a technique called Single Root Input/Output Virtualization (SRIOV). Our solution spanned modifications to the Linux’s Hypervisor as well as the OpenNebula manager. We evaluated the performance of the hardware virtualization on up to 56more » virtual machines connected by up to 8 DDR Infiniband network links, with micro-benchmarks (latency and bandwidth) as well as w a MPI-intensive application (the HPL Linpack benchmark).« less

Human Pacman: A Mobile Augmented Reality Entertainment System Based on Physical, Social, and Ubiquitous Computing

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Cheok, Adrian David

This chapter details the Human Pacman system to illuminate entertainment computing which ventures to embed the natural physical world seamlessly with a fantasy virtual playground by capitalizing on infrastructure provided by mobile computing, wireless LAN, and ubiquitous computing. With Human Pacman, we have a physical role-playing computer fantasy together with real human-social and mobile-gaming that emphasizes on collaboration and competition between players in a wide outdoor physical area that allows natural wide-area human-physical movements. Pacmen and Ghosts are now real human players in the real world experiencing mixed computer graphics fantasy-reality provided by using the wearable computers on them. Virtual cookies and actual tangible physical objects are incorporated into the game play to provide novel experiences of seamless transitions between the real and virtual worlds. This is an example of a new form of gaming that anchors on physicality, mobility, social interaction, and ubiquitous computing.

Scientific Services on the Cloud

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Chapman, David; Joshi, Karuna P.; Yesha, Yelena; Halem, Milt; Yesha, Yaacov; Nguyen, Phuong

Scientific Computing was one of the first every applications for parallel and distributed computation. To this date, scientific applications remain some of the most compute intensive, and have inspired creation of petaflop compute infrastructure such as the Oak Ridge Jaguar and Los Alamos RoadRunner. Large dedicated hardware infrastructure has become both a blessing and a curse to the scientific community. Scientists are interested in cloud computing for much the same reason as businesses and other professionals. The hardware is provided, maintained, and administrated by a third party. Software abstraction and virtualization provide reliability, and fault tolerance. Graduated fees allow for multi-scale prototyping and execution. Cloud computing resources are only a few clicks away, and by far the easiest high performance distributed platform to gain access to. There may still be dedicated infrastructure for ultra-scale science, but the cloud can easily play a major part of the scientific computing initiative.

A national-scale authentication infrastructure.

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Butler, R.; Engert, D.; Foster, I.

2000-12-01

Today, individuals and institutions in science and industry are increasingly forming virtual organizations to pool resources and tackle a common goal. Participants in virtual organizations commonly need to share resources such as data archives, computer cycles, and networks - resources usually available only with restrictions based on the requested resource's nature and the user's identity. Thus, any sharing mechanism must have the ability to authenticate the user's identity and determine if the user is authorized to request the resource. Virtual organizations tend to be fluid, however, so authentication mechanisms must be flexible and lightweight, allowing administrators to quickly establish andmore » change resource-sharing arrangements. However, because virtual organizations complement rather than replace existing institutions, sharing mechanisms cannot change local policies and must allow individual institutions to maintain control over their own resources. Our group has created and deployed an authentication and authorization infrastructure that meets these requirements: the Grid Security Infrastructure. GSI offers secure single sign-ons and preserves site control over access policies and local security. It provides its own versions of common applications, such as FTP and remote login, and a programming interface for creating secure applications.« less

The High-Performance Computing and Communications program, the national information infrastructure and health care.

PubMed Central

Lindberg, D A; Humphreys, B L

1995-01-01

The High-Performance Computing and Communications (HPCC) program is a multiagency federal effort to advance the state of computing and communications and to provide the technologic platform on which the National Information Infrastructure (NII) can be built. The HPCC program supports the development of high-speed computers, high-speed telecommunications, related software and algorithms, education and training, and information infrastructure technology and applications. The vision of the NII is to extend access to high-performance computing and communications to virtually every U.S. citizen so that the technology can be used to improve the civil infrastructure, lifelong learning, energy management, health care, etc. Development of the NII will require resolution of complex economic and social issues, including information privacy. Health-related applications supported under the HPCC program and NII initiatives include connection of health care institutions to the Internet; enhanced access to gene sequence data; the "Visible Human" Project; and test-bed projects in telemedicine, electronic patient records, shared informatics tool development, and image systems. PMID:7614116

Phenomenology tools on cloud infrastructures using OpenStack

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Campos, I.; Fernández-del-Castillo, E.; Heinemeyer, S.; Lopez-Garcia, A.; Pahlen, F.; Borges, G.

2013-04-01

We present a new environment for computations in particle physics phenomenology employing recent developments in cloud computing. On this environment users can create and manage "virtual" machines on which the phenomenology codes/tools can be deployed easily in an automated way. We analyze the performance of this environment based on "virtual" machines versus the utilization of physical hardware. In this way we provide a qualitative result for the influence of the host operating system on the performance of a representative set of applications for phenomenology calculations.

Storing and Using Health Data in a Virtual Private Cloud

PubMed Central

Regola, Nathan

2013-01-01

Electronic health records are being adopted at a rapid rate due to increased funding from the US federal government. Health data provide the opportunity to identify possible improvements in health care delivery by applying data mining and statistical methods to the data and will also enable a wide variety of new applications that will be meaningful to patients and medical professionals. Researchers are often granted access to health care data to assist in the data mining process, but HIPAA regulations mandate comprehensive safeguards to protect the data. Often universities (and presumably other research organizations) have an enterprise information technology infrastructure and a research infrastructure. Unfortunately, both of these infrastructures are generally not appropriate for sensitive research data such as HIPAA, as they require special accommodations on the part of the enterprise information technology (or increased security on the part of the research computing environment). Cloud computing, which is a concept that allows organizations to build complex infrastructures on leased resources, is rapidly evolving to the point that it is possible to build sophisticated network architectures with advanced security capabilities. We present a prototype infrastructure in Amazon’s Virtual Private Cloud to allow researchers and practitioners to utilize the data in a HIPAA-compliant environment. PMID:23485880

Physicists Get INSPIREd: INSPIRE Project and Grid Applications

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Klem, Jukka; Iwaszkiewicz, Jan

2011-12-01

INSPIRE is the new high-energy physics scientific information system developed by CERN, DESY, Fermilab and SLAC. INSPIRE combines the curated and trusted contents of SPIRES database with Invenio digital library technology. INSPIRE contains the entire HEP literature with about one million records and in addition to becoming the reference HEP scientific information platform, it aims to provide new kinds of data mining services and metrics to assess the impact of articles and authors. Grid and cloud computing provide new opportunities to offer better services in areas that require large CPU and storage resources including document Optical Character Recognition (OCR) processing, full-text indexing of articles and improved metrics. D4Science-II is a European project that develops and operates an e-Infrastructure supporting Virtual Research Environments (VREs). It develops an enabling technology (gCube) which implements a mechanism for facilitating the interoperation of its e-Infrastructure with other autonomously running data e-Infrastructures. As a result, this creates the core of an e-Infrastructure ecosystem. INSPIRE is one of the e-Infrastructures participating in D4Science-II project. In the context of the D4Science-II project, the INSPIRE e-Infrastructure makes available some of its resources and services to other members of the resulting ecosystem. Moreover, it benefits from the ecosystem via a dedicated Virtual Organization giving access to an array of resources ranging from computing and storage resources of grid infrastructures to data and services.

Virtualized Networks and Virtualized Optical Line Terminal (vOLT)

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Ma, Jonathan; Israel, Stephen

2017-03-01

The success of the Internet and the proliferation of the Internet of Things (IoT) devices is forcing telecommunications carriers to re-architecture a central office as a datacenter (CORD) so as to bring the datacenter economics and cloud agility to a central office (CO). The Open Network Operating System (ONOS) is the first open-source software-defined network (SDN) operating system which is capable of managing and controlling network, computing, and storage resources to support CORD infrastructure and network virtualization. The virtualized Optical Line Termination (vOLT) is one of the key components in such virtualized networks.

Virtual Facility at Fermilab: Infrastructure and Services Expand to Public Clouds

DOE PAGES

Timm, Steve; Garzoglio, Gabriele; Cooper, Glenn; ...

2016-02-18

In preparation for its new Virtual Facility Project, Fermilab has launched a program of work to determine the requirements for running a computation facility on-site, in public clouds, or a combination of both. This program builds on the work we have done to successfully run experimental workflows of 1000-VM scale both on an on-site private cloud and on Amazon AWS. To do this at scale we deployed dynamically launched and discovered caching services on the cloud. We are now testing the deployment of more complicated services on Amazon AWS using native load balancing and auto scaling features they provide. Themore » Virtual Facility Project will design and develop a facility including infrastructure and services that can live on the site of Fermilab, off-site, or a combination of both. We expect to need this capacity to meet the peak computing requirements in the future. The Virtual Facility is intended to provision resources on the public cloud on behalf of the facility as a whole instead of having each experiment or Virtual Organization do it on their own. We will describe the policy aspects of a distributed Virtual Facility, the requirements, and plans to make a detailed comparison of the relative cost of the public and private clouds. Furthermore, this talk will present the details of the technical mechanisms we have developed to date, and the plans currently taking shape for a Virtual Facility at Fermilab.« less

Virtual Facility at Fermilab: Infrastructure and Services Expand to Public Clouds

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Timm, Steve; Garzoglio, Gabriele; Cooper, Glenn

In preparation for its new Virtual Facility Project, Fermilab has launched a program of work to determine the requirements for running a computation facility on-site, in public clouds, or a combination of both. This program builds on the work we have done to successfully run experimental workflows of 1000-VM scale both on an on-site private cloud and on Amazon AWS. To do this at scale we deployed dynamically launched and discovered caching services on the cloud. We are now testing the deployment of more complicated services on Amazon AWS using native load balancing and auto scaling features they provide. Themore » Virtual Facility Project will design and develop a facility including infrastructure and services that can live on the site of Fermilab, off-site, or a combination of both. We expect to need this capacity to meet the peak computing requirements in the future. The Virtual Facility is intended to provision resources on the public cloud on behalf of the facility as a whole instead of having each experiment or Virtual Organization do it on their own. We will describe the policy aspects of a distributed Virtual Facility, the requirements, and plans to make a detailed comparison of the relative cost of the public and private clouds. Furthermore, this talk will present the details of the technical mechanisms we have developed to date, and the plans currently taking shape for a Virtual Facility at Fermilab.« less

AstroCloud, a Cyber-Infrastructure for Astronomy Research: Overview

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Cui, C.; Yu, C.; Xiao, J.; He, B.; Li, C.; Fan, D.; Wang, C.; Hong, Z.; Li, S.; Mi, L.; Wan, W.; Cao, Z.; Wang, J.; Yin, S.; Fan, Y.; Wang, J.

2015-09-01

AstroCloud is a cyber-Infrastructure for Astronomy Research initiated by Chinese Virtual Observatory (China-VO) under funding support from NDRC (National Development and Reform commission) and CAS (Chinese Academy of Sciences). Tasks such as proposal submission, proposal peer-review, data archiving, data quality control, data release and open access, Cloud based data processing and analyzing, will be all supported on the platform. It will act as a full lifecycle management system for astronomical data and telescopes. Achievements from international Virtual Observatories and Cloud Computing are adopted heavily. In this paper, backgrounds of the project, key features of the system, and latest progresses are introduced.

Building a Generic Virtual Research Environment Framework for Multiple Earth and Space Science Domains and a Diversity of Users.

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Wyborn, L. A.; Fraser, R.; Evans, B. J. K.; Friedrich, C.; Klump, J. F.; Lescinsky, D. T.

2017-12-01

Virtual Research Environments (VREs) are now part of academic infrastructures. Online research workflows can be orchestrated whereby data can be accessed from multiple external repositories with processing taking place on public or private clouds, and centralised supercomputers using a mixture of user codes, and well-used community software and libraries. VREs enable distributed members of research teams to actively work together to share data, models, tools, software, workflows, best practices, infrastructures, etc. These environments and their components are increasingly able to support the needs of undergraduate teaching. External to the research sector, they can also be reused by citizen scientists, and be repurposed for industry users to help accelerate the diffusion and hence enable the translation of research innovations. The Virtual Geophysics Laboratory (VGL) in Australia was started in 2012, built using a collaboration between CSIRO, the National Computational Infrastructure (NCI) and Geoscience Australia, with support funding from the Australian Government Department of Education. VGL comprises three main modules that provide an interface to enable users to first select their required data; to choose a tool to process that data; and then access compute infrastructure for execution. VGL was initially built to enable a specific set of researchers in government agencies access to specific data sets and a limited number of tools. Over the years it has evolved into a multi-purpose Earth science platform with access to an increased variety of data (e.g., Natural Hazards, Geochemistry), a broader range of software packages, and an increasing diversity of compute infrastructures. This expansion has been possible because of the approach to loosely couple data, tools and compute resources via interfaces that are built on international standards and accessed as network-enabled services wherever possible. Built originally for researchers that were not fussy about general usability, increasing emphasis on User Interfaces (UIs) and stability will lead to increased uptake in the education and industry sectors. Simultaneously, improvements are being added to facilitate access to data and tools by experienced researchers who want direct access to both data and flexible workflows.

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Garzoglio, Gabriele

The Fermilab Grid and Cloud Computing Department and the KISTI Global Science experimental Data hub Center propose a joint project. The goals are to enable scientific workflows of stakeholders to run on multiple cloud resources by use of (a) Virtual Infrastructure Automation and Provisioning, (b) Interoperability and Federat ion of Cloud Resources , and (c) High-Throughput Fabric Virtualization. This is a matching fund project in which Fermilab and KISTI will contribute equal resources .

Virtual Labs (Science Gateways) as platforms for Free and Open Source Science

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Lescinsky, David; Car, Nicholas; Fraser, Ryan; Friedrich, Carsten; Kemp, Carina; Squire, Geoffrey

2016-04-01

The Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) movement promotes community engagement in software development, as well as provides access to a range of sophisticated technologies that would be prohibitively expensive if obtained commercially. However, as geoinformatics and eResearch tools and services become more dispersed, it becomes more complicated to identify and interface between the many required components. Virtual Laboratories (VLs, also known as Science Gateways) simplify the management and coordination of these components by providing a platform linking many, if not all, of the steps in particular scientific processes. These enable scientists to focus on their science, rather than the underlying supporting technologies. We describe a modular, open source, VL infrastructure that can be reconfigured to create VLs for a wide range of disciplines. Development of this infrastructure has been led by CSIRO in collaboration with Geoscience Australia and the National Computational Infrastructure (NCI) with support from the National eResearch Collaboration Tools and Resources (NeCTAR) and the Australian National Data Service (ANDS). Initially, the infrastructure was developed to support the Virtual Geophysical Laboratory (VGL), and has subsequently been repurposed to create the Virtual Hazards Impact and Risk Laboratory (VHIRL) and the reconfigured Australian National Virtual Geophysics Laboratory (ANVGL). During each step of development, new capabilities and services have been added and/or enhanced. We plan on continuing to follow this model using a shared, community code base. The VL platform facilitates transparent and reproducible science by providing access to both the data and methodologies used during scientific investigations. This is further enhanced by the ability to set up and run investigations using computational resources accessed through the VL. Data is accessed using registries pointing to catalogues within public data repositories (notably including the NCI National Environmental Research Data Interoperability Platform), or by uploading data directly from user supplied addresses or files. Similarly, scientific software is accessed through registries pointing to software repositories (e.g., GitHub). Runs are configured by using or modifying default templates designed by subject matter experts. After the appropriate computational resources are identified by the user, Virtual Machines (VMs) are spun up and jobs are submitted to service providers (currently the NeCTAR public cloud or Amazon Web Services). Following completion of the jobs the results can be reviewed and downloaded if desired. By providing a unified platform for science, the VL infrastructure enables sophisticated provenance capture and management. The source of input data (including both collection and queries), user information, software information (version and configuration details) and output information are all captured and managed as a VL resource which can be linked to output data sets. This provenance resource provides a mechanism for publication and citation for Free and Open Source Science.

Information security system based on virtual-optics imaging methodology and public key infrastructure

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Peng, Xiang; Zhang, Peng; Cai, Lilong

In this paper, we present a virtual-optical based information security system model with the aid of public-key-infrastructure (PKI) techniques. The proposed model employs a hybrid architecture in which our previously published encryption algorithm based on virtual-optics imaging methodology (VOIM) can be used to encipher and decipher data while an asymmetric algorithm, for example RSA, is applied for enciphering and deciphering the session key(s). For an asymmetric system, given an encryption key, it is computationally infeasible to determine the decryption key and vice versa. The whole information security model is run under the framework of PKI, which is on basis of public-key cryptography and digital signatures. This PKI-based VOIM security approach has additional features like confidentiality, authentication, and integrity for the purpose of data encryption under the environment of network.

Dynamic Collaboration Infrastructure for Hydrologic Science

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Tarboton, D. G.; Idaszak, R.; Castillo, C.; Yi, H.; Jiang, F.; Jones, N.; Goodall, J. L.

2016-12-01

Data and modeling infrastructure is becoming increasingly accessible to water scientists. HydroShare is a collaborative environment that currently offers water scientists the ability to access modeling and data infrastructure in support of data intensive modeling and analysis. It supports the sharing of and collaboration around "resources" which are social objects defined to include both data and models in a structured standardized format. Users collaborate around these objects via comments, ratings, and groups. HydroShare also supports web services and cloud based computation for the execution of hydrologic models and analysis and visualization of hydrologic data. However, the quantity and variety of data and modeling infrastructure available that can be accessed from environments like HydroShare is increasing. Storage infrastructure can range from one's local PC to campus or organizational storage to storage in the cloud. Modeling or computing infrastructure can range from one's desktop to departmental clusters to national HPC resources to grid and cloud computing resources. How does one orchestrate this vast number of data and computing infrastructure without needing to correspondingly learn each new system? A common limitation across these systems is the lack of efficient integration between data transport mechanisms and the corresponding high-level services to support large distributed data and compute operations. A scientist running a hydrology model from their desktop may require processing a large collection of files across the aforementioned storage and compute resources and various national databases. To address these community challenges a proof-of-concept prototype was created integrating HydroShare with RADII (Resource Aware Data-centric collaboration Infrastructure) to provide software infrastructure to enable the comprehensive and rapid dynamic deployment of what we refer to as "collaborative infrastructure." In this presentation we discuss the results of this proof-of-concept prototype which enabled HydroShare users to readily instantiate virtual infrastructure marshaling arbitrary combinations, varieties, and quantities of distributed data and computing infrastructure in addressing big problems in hydrology.

Data Intensive Scientific Workflows on a Federated Cloud: CRADA Final Report

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Garzoglio, Gabriele

The Fermilab Scientific Computing Division and the KISTI Global Science Experimental Data Hub Center have built a prototypical large-scale infrastructure to handle scientific workflows of stakeholders to run on multiple cloud resources. The demonstrations have been in the areas of (a) Data-Intensive Scientific Workflows on Federated Clouds, (b) Interoperability and Federation of Cloud Resources, and (c) Virtual Infrastructure Automation to enable On-Demand Services.

A Computational framework for telemedicine.

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Foster, I.; von Laszewski, G.; Thiruvathukal, G. K.

1998-07-01

Emerging telemedicine applications require the ability to exploit diverse and geographically distributed resources. Highspeed networks are used to integrate advanced visualization devices, sophisticated instruments, large databases, archival storage devices, PCs, workstations, and supercomputers. This form of telemedical environment is similar to networked virtual supercomputers, also known as metacomputers. Metacomputers are already being used in many scientific application areas. In this article, we analyze requirements necessary for a telemedical computing infrastructure and compare them with requirements found in a typical metacomputing environment. We will show that metacomputing environments can be used to enable a more powerful and unified computational infrastructure formore » telemedicine. The Globus metacomputing toolkit can provide the necessary low level mechanisms to enable a large scale telemedical infrastructure. The Globus toolkit components are designed in a modular fashion and can be extended to support the specific requirements for telemedicine.« less

CFCC: A Covert Flows Confinement Mechanism for Virtual Machine Coalitions

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Cheng, Ge; Jin, Hai; Zou, Deqing; Shi, Lei; Ohoussou, Alex K.

Normally, virtualization technology is adopted to construct the infrastructure of cloud computing environment. Resources are managed and organized dynamically through virtual machine (VM) coalitions in accordance with the requirements of applications. Enforcing mandatory access control (MAC) on the VM coalitions will greatly improve the security of VM-based cloud computing. However, the existing MAC models lack the mechanism to confine the covert flows and are hard to eliminate the convert channels. In this paper, we propose a covert flows confinement mechanism for virtual machine coalitions (CFCC), which introduces dynamic conflicts of interest based on the activity history of VMs, each of which is attached with a label. The proposed mechanism can be used to confine the covert flows between VMs in different coalitions. We implement a prototype system, evaluate its performance, and show that our mechanism is practical.

CloVR: a virtual machine for automated and portable sequence analysis from the desktop using cloud computing.

PubMed

Angiuoli, Samuel V; Matalka, Malcolm; Gussman, Aaron; Galens, Kevin; Vangala, Mahesh; Riley, David R; Arze, Cesar; White, James R; White, Owen; Fricke, W Florian

2011-08-30

Next-generation sequencing technologies have decentralized sequence acquisition, increasing the demand for new bioinformatics tools that are easy to use, portable across multiple platforms, and scalable for high-throughput applications. Cloud computing platforms provide on-demand access to computing infrastructure over the Internet and can be used in combination with custom built virtual machines to distribute pre-packaged with pre-configured software. We describe the Cloud Virtual Resource, CloVR, a new desktop application for push-button automated sequence analysis that can utilize cloud computing resources. CloVR is implemented as a single portable virtual machine (VM) that provides several automated analysis pipelines for microbial genomics, including 16S, whole genome and metagenome sequence analysis. The CloVR VM runs on a personal computer, utilizes local computer resources and requires minimal installation, addressing key challenges in deploying bioinformatics workflows. In addition CloVR supports use of remote cloud computing resources to improve performance for large-scale sequence processing. In a case study, we demonstrate the use of CloVR to automatically process next-generation sequencing data on multiple cloud computing platforms. The CloVR VM and associated architecture lowers the barrier of entry for utilizing complex analysis protocols on both local single- and multi-core computers and cloud systems for high throughput data processing.

A practical approach to virtualization in HEP

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Buncic, P.; Aguado Sánchez, C.; Blomer, J.; Harutyunyan, A.; Mudrinic, M.

2011-01-01

In the attempt to solve the problem of processing data coming from LHC experiments at CERN at a rate of 15PB per year, for almost a decade the High Enery Physics (HEP) community has focused its efforts on the development of the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid. This generated large interest and expectations promising to revolutionize computing. Meanwhile, having initially taken part in the Grid standardization process, industry has moved in a different direction and started promoting the Cloud Computing paradigm which aims to solve problems on a similar scale and in equally seamless way as it was expected in the idealized Grid approach. A key enabling technology behind Cloud computing is server virtualization. In early 2008, an R&D project was established in the PH-SFT group at CERN to investigate how virtualization technology could be used to improve and simplify the daily interaction of physicists with experiment software frameworks and the Grid infrastructure. In this article we shall first briefly compare Grid and Cloud computing paradigms and then summarize the results of the R&D activity pointing out where and how virtualization technology could be effectively used in our field in order to maximize practical benefits whilst avoiding potential pitfalls.

NGScloud: RNA-seq analysis of non-model species using cloud computing.

PubMed

Mora-Márquez, Fernando; Vázquez-Poletti, José Luis; López de Heredia, Unai

2018-05-03

RNA-seq analysis usually requires large computing infrastructures. NGScloud is a bioinformatic system developed to analyze RNA-seq data using the cloud computing services of Amazon that permit the access to ad hoc computing infrastructure scaled according to the complexity of the experiment, so its costs and times can be optimized. The application provides a user-friendly front-end to operate Amazon's hardware resources, and to control a workflow of RNA-seq analysis oriented to non-model species, incorporating the cluster concept, which allows parallel runs of common RNA-seq analysis programs in several virtual machines for faster analysis. NGScloud is freely available at https://github.com/GGFHF/NGScloud/. A manual detailing installation and how-to-use instructions is available with the distribution. unai.lopezdeheredia@upm.es.

Interoperable PKI Data Distribution in Computational Grids

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Pala, Massimiliano; Cholia, Shreyas; Rea, Scott A.

One of the most successful working examples of virtual organizations, computational grids need authentication mechanisms that inter-operate across domain boundaries. Public Key Infrastructures(PKIs) provide sufficient flexibility to allow resource managers to securely grant access to their systems in such distributed environments. However, as PKIs grow and services are added to enhance both security and usability, users and applications must struggle to discover available resources-particularly when the Certification Authority (CA) is alien to the relying party. This article presents how to overcome these limitations of the current grid authentication model by integrating the PKI Resource Query Protocol (PRQP) into the Gridmore » Security Infrastructure (GSI).« less

Impact of configuration management system of computer center on support of scientific projects throughout their lifecycle

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Bogdanov, A. V.; Iuzhanin, N. V.; Zolotarev, V. I.; Ezhakova, T. R.

2017-12-01

In this article the problem of scientific projects support throughout their lifecycle in the computer center is considered in every aspect of support. Configuration Management system plays a connecting role in processes related to the provision and support of services of a computer center. In view of strong integration of IT infrastructure components with the use of virtualization, control of infrastructure becomes even more critical to the support of research projects, which means higher requirements for the Configuration Management system. For every aspect of research projects support, the influence of the Configuration Management system is being reviewed and development of the corresponding elements of the system is being described in the present paper.

Parallel, distributed and GPU computing technologies in single-particle electron microscopy

PubMed Central

Schmeisser, Martin; Heisen, Burkhard C.; Luettich, Mario; Busche, Boris; Hauer, Florian; Koske, Tobias; Knauber, Karl-Heinz; Stark, Holger

2009-01-01

Most known methods for the determination of the structure of macromolecular complexes are limited or at least restricted at some point by their computational demands. Recent developments in information technology such as multicore, parallel and GPU processing can be used to overcome these limitations. In particular, graphics processing units (GPUs), which were originally developed for rendering real-time effects in computer games, are now ubiquitous and provide unprecedented computational power for scientific applications. Each parallel-processing paradigm alone can improve overall performance; the increased computational performance obtained by combining all paradigms, unleashing the full power of today’s technology, makes certain applications feasible that were previously virtually impossible. In this article, state-of-the-art paradigms are introduced, the tools and infrastructure needed to apply these paradigms are presented and a state-of-the-art infrastructure and solution strategy for moving scientific applications to the next generation of computer hardware is outlined. PMID:19564686

Parallel, distributed and GPU computing technologies in single-particle electron microscopy.

PubMed

Schmeisser, Martin; Heisen, Burkhard C; Luettich, Mario; Busche, Boris; Hauer, Florian; Koske, Tobias; Knauber, Karl-Heinz; Stark, Holger

2009-07-01

Most known methods for the determination of the structure of macromolecular complexes are limited or at least restricted at some point by their computational demands. Recent developments in information technology such as multicore, parallel and GPU processing can be used to overcome these limitations. In particular, graphics processing units (GPUs), which were originally developed for rendering real-time effects in computer games, are now ubiquitous and provide unprecedented computational power for scientific applications. Each parallel-processing paradigm alone can improve overall performance; the increased computational performance obtained by combining all paradigms, unleashing the full power of today's technology, makes certain applications feasible that were previously virtually impossible. In this article, state-of-the-art paradigms are introduced, the tools and infrastructure needed to apply these paradigms are presented and a state-of-the-art infrastructure and solution strategy for moving scientific applications to the next generation of computer hardware is outlined.

CloVR: A virtual machine for automated and portable sequence analysis from the desktop using cloud computing

PubMed Central

2011-01-01

Background Next-generation sequencing technologies have decentralized sequence acquisition, increasing the demand for new bioinformatics tools that are easy to use, portable across multiple platforms, and scalable for high-throughput applications. Cloud computing platforms provide on-demand access to computing infrastructure over the Internet and can be used in combination with custom built virtual machines to distribute pre-packaged with pre-configured software. Results We describe the Cloud Virtual Resource, CloVR, a new desktop application for push-button automated sequence analysis that can utilize cloud computing resources. CloVR is implemented as a single portable virtual machine (VM) that provides several automated analysis pipelines for microbial genomics, including 16S, whole genome and metagenome sequence analysis. The CloVR VM runs on a personal computer, utilizes local computer resources and requires minimal installation, addressing key challenges in deploying bioinformatics workflows. In addition CloVR supports use of remote cloud computing resources to improve performance for large-scale sequence processing. In a case study, we demonstrate the use of CloVR to automatically process next-generation sequencing data on multiple cloud computing platforms. Conclusion The CloVR VM and associated architecture lowers the barrier of entry for utilizing complex analysis protocols on both local single- and multi-core computers and cloud systems for high throughput data processing. PMID:21878105

Virtual Network Embedding via Monte Carlo Tree Search.

PubMed

Haeri, Soroush; Trajkovic, Ljiljana

2018-02-01

Network virtualization helps overcome shortcomings of the current Internet architecture. The virtualized network architecture enables coexistence of multiple virtual networks (VNs) on an existing physical infrastructure. VN embedding (VNE) problem, which deals with the embedding of VN components onto a physical network, is known to be -hard. In this paper, we propose two VNE algorithms: MaVEn-M and MaVEn-S. MaVEn-M employs the multicommodity flow algorithm for virtual link mapping while MaVEn-S uses the shortest-path algorithm. They formalize the virtual node mapping problem by using the Markov decision process (MDP) framework and devise action policies (node mappings) for the proposed MDP using the Monte Carlo tree search algorithm. Service providers may adjust the execution time of the MaVEn algorithms based on the traffic load of VN requests. The objective of the algorithms is to maximize the profit of infrastructure providers. We develop a discrete event VNE simulator to implement and evaluate performance of MaVEn-M, MaVEn-S, and several recently proposed VNE algorithms. We introduce profitability as a new performance metric that captures both acceptance and revenue to cost ratios. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithms find more profitable solutions than the existing algorithms. Given additional computation time, they further improve embedding solutions.

Web-Based Integrated Research Environment for Aerodynamic Analyses and Design

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Ahn, Jae Wan; Kim, Jin-Ho; Kim, Chongam; Cho, Jung-Hyun; Hur, Cinyoung; Kim, Yoonhee; Kang, Sang-Hyun; Kim, Byungsoo; Moon, Jong Bae; Cho, Kum Won

e-AIRS[1,2], an abbreviation of ‘e-Science Aerospace Integrated Research System,' is a virtual organization designed to support aerodynamic flow analyses in aerospace engineering using the e-Science environment. As the first step toward a virtual aerospace engineering organization, e-AIRS intends to give a full support of aerodynamic research process. Currently, e-AIRS can handle both the computational and experimental aerodynamic research on the e-Science infrastructure. In detail, users can conduct a full CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) research process, request wind tunnel experiment, perform comparative analysis between computational prediction and experimental measurement, and finally, collaborate with other researchers using the web portal. The present paper describes those services and the internal architecture of the e-AIRS system.

Cloud BioLinux: pre-configured and on-demand bioinformatics computing for the genomics community.

PubMed

Krampis, Konstantinos; Booth, Tim; Chapman, Brad; Tiwari, Bela; Bicak, Mesude; Field, Dawn; Nelson, Karen E

2012-03-19

A steep drop in the cost of next-generation sequencing during recent years has made the technology affordable to the majority of researchers, but downstream bioinformatic analysis still poses a resource bottleneck for smaller laboratories and institutes that do not have access to substantial computational resources. Sequencing instruments are typically bundled with only the minimal processing and storage capacity required for data capture during sequencing runs. Given the scale of sequence datasets, scientific value cannot be obtained from acquiring a sequencer unless it is accompanied by an equal investment in informatics infrastructure. Cloud BioLinux is a publicly accessible Virtual Machine (VM) that enables scientists to quickly provision on-demand infrastructures for high-performance bioinformatics computing using cloud platforms. Users have instant access to a range of pre-configured command line and graphical software applications, including a full-featured desktop interface, documentation and over 135 bioinformatics packages for applications including sequence alignment, clustering, assembly, display, editing, and phylogeny. Each tool's functionality is fully described in the documentation directly accessible from the graphical interface of the VM. Besides the Amazon EC2 cloud, we have started instances of Cloud BioLinux on a private Eucalyptus cloud installed at the J. Craig Venter Institute, and demonstrated access to the bioinformatic tools interface through a remote connection to EC2 instances from a local desktop computer. Documentation for using Cloud BioLinux on EC2 is available from our project website, while a Eucalyptus cloud image and VirtualBox Appliance is also publicly available for download and use by researchers with access to private clouds. Cloud BioLinux provides a platform for developing bioinformatics infrastructures on the cloud. An automated and configurable process builds Virtual Machines, allowing the development of highly customized versions from a shared code base. This shared community toolkit enables application specific analysis platforms on the cloud by minimizing the effort required to prepare and maintain them.

Cloud BioLinux: pre-configured and on-demand bioinformatics computing for the genomics community

PubMed Central

2012-01-01

Background A steep drop in the cost of next-generation sequencing during recent years has made the technology affordable to the majority of researchers, but downstream bioinformatic analysis still poses a resource bottleneck for smaller laboratories and institutes that do not have access to substantial computational resources. Sequencing instruments are typically bundled with only the minimal processing and storage capacity required for data capture during sequencing runs. Given the scale of sequence datasets, scientific value cannot be obtained from acquiring a sequencer unless it is accompanied by an equal investment in informatics infrastructure. Results Cloud BioLinux is a publicly accessible Virtual Machine (VM) that enables scientists to quickly provision on-demand infrastructures for high-performance bioinformatics computing using cloud platforms. Users have instant access to a range of pre-configured command line and graphical software applications, including a full-featured desktop interface, documentation and over 135 bioinformatics packages for applications including sequence alignment, clustering, assembly, display, editing, and phylogeny. Each tool's functionality is fully described in the documentation directly accessible from the graphical interface of the VM. Besides the Amazon EC2 cloud, we have started instances of Cloud BioLinux on a private Eucalyptus cloud installed at the J. Craig Venter Institute, and demonstrated access to the bioinformatic tools interface through a remote connection to EC2 instances from a local desktop computer. Documentation for using Cloud BioLinux on EC2 is available from our project website, while a Eucalyptus cloud image and VirtualBox Appliance is also publicly available for download and use by researchers with access to private clouds. Conclusions Cloud BioLinux provides a platform for developing bioinformatics infrastructures on the cloud. An automated and configurable process builds Virtual Machines, allowing the development of highly customized versions from a shared code base. This shared community toolkit enables application specific analysis platforms on the cloud by minimizing the effort required to prepare and maintain them. PMID:22429538

Geospatial-enabled Data Exploration and Computation through Data Infrastructure Building Blocks

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Song, C. X.; Biehl, L. L.; Merwade, V.; Villoria, N.

2015-12-01

Geospatial data are present everywhere today with the proliferation of location-aware computing devices and sensors. This is especially true in the scientific community where large amounts of data are driving research and education activities in many domains. Collaboration over geospatial data, for example, in modeling, data analysis and visualization, must still overcome the barriers of specialized software and expertise among other challenges. The GABBs project aims at enabling broader access to geospatial data exploration and computation by developing spatial data infrastructure building blocks that leverage capabilities of end-to-end application service and virtualized computing framework in HUBzero. Funded by NSF Data Infrastructure Building Blocks (DIBBS) initiative, GABBs provides a geospatial data architecture that integrates spatial data management, mapping and visualization and will make it available as open source. The outcome of the project will enable users to rapidly create tools and share geospatial data and tools on the web for interactive exploration of data without requiring significant software development skills, GIS expertise or IT administrative privileges. This presentation will describe the development of geospatial data infrastructure building blocks and the scientific use cases that help drive the software development, as well as seek feedback from the user communities.

Chaos Breeds Life: Finding Opportunities for Library Advancement during a Period of Collection Schizophrenia.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Neal, James G.

1999-01-01

Examines the changes that are affecting academic library collection development. Highlights include computer technology; digital information; networking; virtual reality; hypertext; fair use and copyrights; technological infrastructure; digital libraries; information policy; academic and scholarly publishing; and experiences at the Johns Hopkins…

International Symposium on Grids and Clouds (ISGC) 2016

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

The International Symposium on Grids and Clouds (ISGC) 2016 will be held at Academia Sinica in Taipei, Taiwan from 13-18 March 2016, with co-located events and workshops. The conference is hosted by the Academia Sinica Grid Computing Centre (ASGC). The theme of ISGC 2016 focuses on“Ubiquitous e-infrastructures and Applications”. Contemporary research is impossible without a strong IT component - researchers rely on the existence of stable and widely available e-infrastructures and their higher level functions and properties. As a result of these expectations, e-Infrastructures are becoming ubiquitous, providing an environment that supports large scale collaborations that deal with global challenges as well as smaller and temporal research communities focusing on particular scientific problems. To support those diversified communities and their needs, the e-Infrastructures themselves are becoming more layered and multifaceted, supporting larger groups of applications. Following the call for the last year conference, ISGC 2016 continues its aim to bring together users and application developers with those responsible for the development and operation of multi-purpose ubiquitous e-Infrastructures. Topics of discussion include Physics (including HEP) and Engineering Applications, Biomedicine & Life Sciences Applications, Earth & Environmental Sciences & Biodiversity Applications, Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (HASS) Applications, Virtual Research Environment (including Middleware, tools, services, workflow, etc.), Data Management, Big Data, Networking & Security, Infrastructure & Operations, Infrastructure Clouds and Virtualisation, Interoperability, Business Models & Sustainability, Highly Distributed Computing Systems, and High Performance & Technical Computing (HPTC), etc.

Multi-Dimensional Optimization for Cloud Based Multi-Tier Applications

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Jung, Gueyoung

2010-01-01

Emerging trends toward cloud computing and virtualization have been opening new avenues to meet enormous demands of space, resource utilization, and energy efficiency in modern data centers. By being allowed to host many multi-tier applications in consolidated environments, cloud infrastructure providers enable resources to be shared among these…

Computational Infrastructure for Engine Structural Performance Simulation

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Chamis, Christos C.

1997-01-01

Select computer codes developed over the years to simulate specific aspects of engine structures are described. These codes include blade impact integrated multidisciplinary analysis and optimization, progressive structural fracture, quantification of uncertainties for structural reliability and risk, benefits estimation of new technology insertion and hierarchical simulation of engine structures made from metal matrix and ceramic matrix composites. Collectively these codes constitute a unique infrastructure readiness to credibly evaluate new and future engine structural concepts throughout the development cycle from initial concept, to design and fabrication, to service performance and maintenance and repairs, and to retirement for cause and even to possible recycling. Stated differently, they provide 'virtual' concurrent engineering for engine structures total-life-cycle-cost.

EVER-EST: a virtual research environment for Earth Sciences

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Marelli, Fulvio; Albani, Mirko; Glaves, Helen

2016-04-01

There is an increasing requirement for researchers to work collaboratively using common resources whilst being geographically dispersed. By creating a virtual research environment (VRE) using a service oriented architecture (SOA) tailored to the needs of Earth Science (ES) communities, the EVEREST project will provide a range of both generic and domain specific data management services to support a dynamic approach to collaborative research. EVER-EST will provide the means to overcome existing barriers to sharing of Earth Science data and information allowing research teams to discover, access, share and process heterogeneous data, algorithms, results and experiences within and across their communities, including those domains beyond Earth Science. Researchers will be able to seamlessly manage both the data involved in their computationally intensive disciplines and the scientific methods applied in their observations and modelling, which lead to the specific results that need to be attributable, validated and shared both within the community and more widely e.g. in the form of scholarly communications. Central to the EVEREST approach is the concept of the Research Object (RO) , which provides a semantically rich mechanism to aggregate related resources about a scientific investigation so that they can be shared together using a single unique identifier. Although several e-laboratories are incorporating the research object concept in their infrastructure, the EVER-EST VRE will be the first infrastructure to leverage the concept of Research Objects and their application in observational rather than experimental disciplines. Development of the EVEREST VRE will leverage the results of several previous projects which have produced state-of-the-art technologies for scientific data management and curation as well those which have developed models, techniques and tools for the preservation of scientific methods and their implementation in computational forms such as scientific workflows. The EVER-EST data processing infrastructure will be based on a Cloud Computing approach, in which new applications can be integrated using "virtual machines" that have their own specifications (disk size, processor speed, operating system etc.) and run on shared private (physical deployment over local hardware) or commercial Cloud infrastructures. The EVER-EST e-infrastructure will be validated by four virtual research communities (VRC) covering different multidisciplinary Earth Science domains including: ocean monitoring, natural hazards, land monitoring and risk management (volcanoes and seismicity). Each VRC will use the virtual research environment according to its own specific requirements for data, software, best practice and community engagement. This user-centric approach will allow an assessment to be made of the capability for the proposed solution to satisfy the heterogeneous needs of a variety of Earth Science communities for more effective collaboration, and higher efficiency and creativity in research. EVER-EST is funded by the European Commission's H2020 for three years starting in October 2015. The project is led by the European Space Agency (ESA), involves some of the major European Earth Science data providers/users including NERC, DLR, INGV, CNR and SatCEN.

Network Computing Infrastructure to Share Tools and Data in Global Nuclear Energy Partnership

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Kim, Guehee; Suzuki, Yoshio; Teshima, Naoya

CCSE/JAEA (Center for Computational Science and e-Systems/Japan Atomic Energy Agency) integrated a prototype system of a network computing infrastructure for sharing tools and data to support the U.S. and Japan collaboration in GNEP (Global Nuclear Energy Partnership). We focused on three technical issues to apply our information process infrastructure, which are accessibility, security, and usability. In designing the prototype system, we integrated and improved both network and Web technologies. For the accessibility issue, we adopted SSL-VPN (Security Socket Layer-Virtual Private Network) technology for the access beyond firewalls. For the security issue, we developed an authentication gateway based on the PKI (Public Key Infrastructure) authentication mechanism to strengthen the security. Also, we set fine access control policy to shared tools and data and used shared key based encryption method to protect tools and data against leakage to third parties. For the usability issue, we chose Web browsers as user interface and developed Web application to provide functions to support sharing tools and data. By using WebDAV (Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning) function, users can manipulate shared tools and data through the Windows-like folder environment. We implemented the prototype system in Grid infrastructure for atomic energy research: AEGIS (Atomic Energy Grid Infrastructure) developed by CCSE/JAEA. The prototype system was applied for the trial use in the first period of GNEP.

Software Engineering Infrastructure in a Large Virtual Campus

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Cristobal, Jesus; Merino, Jorge; Navarro, Antonio; Peralta, Miguel; Roldan, Yolanda; Silveira, Rosa Maria

2011-01-01

Purpose: The design, construction and deployment of a large virtual campus are a complex issue. Present virtual campuses are made of several software applications that complement e-learning platforms. In order to develop and maintain such virtual campuses, a complex software engineering infrastructure is needed. This paper aims to analyse the…

WISDOM-II: screening against multiple targets implicated in malaria using computational grid infrastructures.

PubMed

Kasam, Vinod; Salzemann, Jean; Botha, Marli; Dacosta, Ana; Degliesposti, Gianluca; Isea, Raul; Kim, Doman; Maass, Astrid; Kenyon, Colin; Rastelli, Giulio; Hofmann-Apitius, Martin; Breton, Vincent

2009-05-01

Despite continuous efforts of the international community to reduce the impact of malaria on developing countries, no significant progress has been made in the recent years and the discovery of new drugs is more than ever needed. Out of the many proteins involved in the metabolic activities of the Plasmodium parasite, some are promising targets to carry out rational drug discovery. Recent years have witnessed the emergence of grids, which are highly distributed computing infrastructures particularly well fitted for embarrassingly parallel computations like docking. In 2005, a first attempt at using grids for large-scale virtual screening focused on plasmepsins and ended up in the identification of previously unknown scaffolds, which were confirmed in vitro to be active plasmepsin inhibitors. Following this success, a second deployment took place in the fall of 2006 focussing on one well known target, dihydrofolate reductase (DHFR), and on a new promising one, glutathione-S-transferase. In silico drug design, especially vHTS is a widely and well-accepted technology in lead identification and lead optimization. This approach, therefore builds, upon the progress made in computational chemistry to achieve more accurate in silico docking and in information technology to design and operate large scale grid infrastructures. On the computational side, a sustained infrastructure has been developed: docking at large scale, using different strategies in result analysis, storing of the results on the fly into MySQL databases and application of molecular dynamics refinement are MM-PBSA and MM-GBSA rescoring. The modeling results obtained are very promising. Based on the modeling results, In vitro results are underway for all the targets against which screening is performed. The current paper describes the rational drug discovery activity at large scale, especially molecular docking using FlexX software on computational grids in finding hits against three different targets (PfGST, PfDHFR, PvDHFR (wild type and mutant forms) implicated in malaria. Grid-enabled virtual screening approach is proposed to produce focus compound libraries for other biological targets relevant to fight the infectious diseases of the developing world.

GISpark: A Geospatial Distributed Computing Platform for Spatiotemporal Big Data

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Wang, S.; Zhong, E.; Wang, E.; Zhong, Y.; Cai, W.; Li, S.; Gao, S.

2016-12-01

Geospatial data are growing exponentially because of the proliferation of cost effective and ubiquitous positioning technologies such as global remote-sensing satellites and location-based devices. Analyzing large amounts of geospatial data can provide great value for both industrial and scientific applications. Data- and compute- intensive characteristics inherent in geospatial big data increasingly pose great challenges to technologies of data storing, computing and analyzing. Such challenges require a scalable and efficient architecture that can store, query, analyze, and visualize large-scale spatiotemporal data. Therefore, we developed GISpark - a geospatial distributed computing platform for processing large-scale vector, raster and stream data. GISpark is constructed based on the latest virtualized computing infrastructures and distributed computing architecture. OpenStack and Docker are used to build multi-user hosting cloud computing infrastructure for GISpark. The virtual storage systems such as HDFS, Ceph, MongoDB are combined and adopted for spatiotemporal data storage management. Spark-based algorithm framework is developed for efficient parallel computing. Within this framework, SuperMap GIScript and various open-source GIS libraries can be integrated into GISpark. GISpark can also integrated with scientific computing environment (e.g., Anaconda), interactive computing web applications (e.g., Jupyter notebook), and machine learning tools (e.g., TensorFlow/Orange). The associated geospatial facilities of GISpark in conjunction with the scientific computing environment, exploratory spatial data analysis tools, temporal data management and analysis systems make up a powerful geospatial computing tool. GISpark not only provides spatiotemporal big data processing capacity in the geospatial field, but also provides spatiotemporal computational model and advanced geospatial visualization tools that deals with other domains related with spatial property. We tested the performance of the platform based on taxi trajectory analysis. Results suggested that GISpark achieves excellent run time performance in spatiotemporal big data applications.

High-Performance Integrated Virtual Environment (HIVE) Tools and Applications for Big Data Analysis.

PubMed

Simonyan, Vahan; Mazumder, Raja

2014-09-30

The High-performance Integrated Virtual Environment (HIVE) is a high-throughput cloud-based infrastructure developed for the storage and analysis of genomic and associated biological data. HIVE consists of a web-accessible interface for authorized users to deposit, retrieve, share, annotate, compute and visualize Next-generation Sequencing (NGS) data in a scalable and highly efficient fashion. The platform contains a distributed storage library and a distributed computational powerhouse linked seamlessly. Resources available through the interface include algorithms, tools and applications developed exclusively for the HIVE platform, as well as commonly used external tools adapted to operate within the parallel architecture of the system. HIVE is composed of a flexible infrastructure, which allows for simple implementation of new algorithms and tools. Currently, available HIVE tools include sequence alignment and nucleotide variation profiling tools, metagenomic analyzers, phylogenetic tree-building tools using NGS data, clone discovery algorithms, and recombination analysis algorithms. In addition to tools, HIVE also provides knowledgebases that can be used in conjunction with the tools for NGS sequence and metadata analysis.

High-Performance Integrated Virtual Environment (HIVE) Tools and Applications for Big Data Analysis

PubMed Central

Simonyan, Vahan; Mazumder, Raja

2014-01-01

The High-performance Integrated Virtual Environment (HIVE) is a high-throughput cloud-based infrastructure developed for the storage and analysis of genomic and associated biological data. HIVE consists of a web-accessible interface for authorized users to deposit, retrieve, share, annotate, compute and visualize Next-generation Sequencing (NGS) data in a scalable and highly efficient fashion. The platform contains a distributed storage library and a distributed computational powerhouse linked seamlessly. Resources available through the interface include algorithms, tools and applications developed exclusively for the HIVE platform, as well as commonly used external tools adapted to operate within the parallel architecture of the system. HIVE is composed of a flexible infrastructure, which allows for simple implementation of new algorithms and tools. Currently, available HIVE tools include sequence alignment and nucleotide variation profiling tools, metagenomic analyzers, phylogenetic tree-building tools using NGS data, clone discovery algorithms, and recombination analysis algorithms. In addition to tools, HIVE also provides knowledgebases that can be used in conjunction with the tools for NGS sequence and metadata analysis. PMID:25271953

The Virtual Desktop: Options and Challenges in Selecting a Secure Desktop Infrastructure Based on Virtualization

DTIC Science & Technology

2011-10-01

Fortunately, some products offer centralized management and deployment tools for local desktop implementation . Figure 5 illustrates the... implementation of a secure desktop infrastructure based on virtualization. It includes an overview of desktop virtualization, including an in-depth...environment in the data centre, whereas LHVD places it on the endpoint itself. Desktop virtualization implementation considerations and potential

e-Infrastructures for e-Sciences 2013 A CHAIN-REDS Workshop organised under the aegis of the European Commission

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

The CHAIN-REDS Project is organising a workshop on "e-Infrastructures for e-Sciences" focusing on Cloud Computing and Data Repositories under the aegis of the European Commission and in co-location with the International Conference on e-Science 2013 (IEEE2013) that will be held in Beijing, P.R. of China on October 17-22, 2013. The core objective of the CHAIN-REDS project is to promote, coordinate and support the effort of a critical mass of non-European e-Infrastructures for Research and Education to collaborate with Europe addressing interoperability and interoperation of Grids and other Distributed Computing Infrastructures (DCI). From this perspective, CHAIN-REDS will optimise the interoperation of European infrastructures with those present in 6 other regions of the world, both from a development and use point of view, and catering to different communities. Overall, CHAIN-REDS will provide input for future strategies and decision-making regarding collaboration with other regions on e-Infrastructure deployment and availability of related data; it will raise the visibility of e-Infrastructures towards intercontinental audiences, covering most of the world and will provide support to establish globally connected and interoperable infrastructures, in particular between the EU and the developing regions. Organised by IHEP, INFN and Sigma Orionis with the support of all project partners, this workshop will aim at: - Presenting the state of the art of Cloud computing in Europe and in China and discussing the opportunities offered by having interoperable and federated e-Infrastructures; - Exploring the existing initiatives of Data Infrastructures in Europe and China, and highlighting the Data Repositories of interest for the Virtual Research Communities in several domains such as Health, Agriculture, Climate, etc.

e-Infrastructures for Astronomy: An Integrated View

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Pasian, F.; Longo, G.

2010-12-01

As for other disciplines, the capability of performing “Big Science” in astrophysics requires the availability of large facilities. In the field of ICT, computational resources (e.g. HPC) are important, but are far from being enough for the community: as a matter of fact, the whole set of e-infrastructures (network, computing nodes, data repositories, applications) need to work in an interoperable way. This implies the development of common (or at least compatible) user interfaces to computing resources, transparent access to observations and numerical simulations through the Virtual Observatory, integrated data processing pipelines, data mining and semantic web applications. Achieving this interoperability goal is a must to build a real “Knowledge Infrastructure” in the astrophysical domain. Also, the emergence of new professional profiles (e.g. the “astro-informatician”) is necessary to allow defining and implementing properly this conceptual schema.

Low Cost, Scalable Proteomics Data Analysis Using Amazon's Cloud Computing Services and Open Source Search Algorithms

PubMed Central

Halligan, Brian D.; Geiger, Joey F.; Vallejos, Andrew K.; Greene, Andrew S.; Twigger, Simon N.

2009-01-01

One of the major difficulties for many laboratories setting up proteomics programs has been obtaining and maintaining the computational infrastructure required for the analysis of the large flow of proteomics data. We describe a system that combines distributed cloud computing and open source software to allow laboratories to set up scalable virtual proteomics analysis clusters without the investment in computational hardware or software licensing fees. Additionally, the pricing structure of distributed computing providers, such as Amazon Web Services, allows laboratories or even individuals to have large-scale computational resources at their disposal at a very low cost per run. We provide detailed step by step instructions on how to implement the virtual proteomics analysis clusters as well as a list of current available preconfigured Amazon machine images containing the OMSSA and X!Tandem search algorithms and sequence databases on the Medical College of Wisconsin Proteomics Center website (http://proteomics.mcw.edu/vipdac). PMID:19358578

Low cost, scalable proteomics data analysis using Amazon's cloud computing services and open source search algorithms.

PubMed

Halligan, Brian D; Geiger, Joey F; Vallejos, Andrew K; Greene, Andrew S; Twigger, Simon N

2009-06-01

One of the major difficulties for many laboratories setting up proteomics programs has been obtaining and maintaining the computational infrastructure required for the analysis of the large flow of proteomics data. We describe a system that combines distributed cloud computing and open source software to allow laboratories to set up scalable virtual proteomics analysis clusters without the investment in computational hardware or software licensing fees. Additionally, the pricing structure of distributed computing providers, such as Amazon Web Services, allows laboratories or even individuals to have large-scale computational resources at their disposal at a very low cost per run. We provide detailed step-by-step instructions on how to implement the virtual proteomics analysis clusters as well as a list of current available preconfigured Amazon machine images containing the OMSSA and X!Tandem search algorithms and sequence databases on the Medical College of Wisconsin Proteomics Center Web site ( http://proteomics.mcw.edu/vipdac ).

Implementation Issues of Virtual Desktop Infrastructure and Its Case Study for a Physician's Round at Seoul National University Bundang Hospital.

PubMed

Yoo, Sooyoung; Kim, Seok; Kim, Taegi; Kim, Jon Soo; Baek, Rong-Min; Suh, Chang Suk; Chung, Chin Youb; Hwang, Hee

2012-12-01

The cloud computing-based virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) allows access to computing environments with no limitations in terms of time or place such that it can permit the rapid establishment of a mobile hospital environment. The objective of this study was to investigate the empirical issues to be considered when establishing a virtual mobile environment using VDI technology in a hospital setting and to examine the utility of the technology with an Apple iPad during a physician's rounds as a case study. Empirical implementation issues were derived from a 910-bed tertiary national university hospital that recently launched a VDI system. During the physicians' rounds, we surveyed patient satisfaction levels with the VDI-based mobile consultation service with the iPad and the relationship between these levels of satisfaction and hospital revisits, hospital recommendations, and the hospital brand image. Thirty-five inpatients (including their next-of-kin) and seven physicians participated in the survey. Implementation issues pertaining to the VDI system arose with regard to the highly availability system architecture, wireless network infrastructure, and screen resolution of the system. Other issues were related to privacy and security, mobile device management, and user education. When the system was used in rounds, patients and their next-of-kin expressed high satisfaction levels, and a positive relationship was noted as regards patients' decisions to revisit the hospital and whether the use of the VDI system improved the brand image of the hospital. Mobile hospital environments have the potential to benefit both physicians and patients. The issues related to the implementation of VDI system discussed here should be examined in advance for its successful adoption and implementation.

Implementation Issues of Virtual Desktop Infrastructure and Its Case Study for a Physician's Round at Seoul National University Bundang Hospital

PubMed Central

Yoo, Sooyoung; Kim, Seok; Kim, Taegi; Kim, Jon Soo; Baek, Rong-Min; Suh, Chang Suk; Chung, Chin Youb

2012-01-01

Objectives The cloud computing-based virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) allows access to computing environments with no limitations in terms of time or place such that it can permit the rapid establishment of a mobile hospital environment. The objective of this study was to investigate the empirical issues to be considered when establishing a virtual mobile environment using VDI technology in a hospital setting and to examine the utility of the technology with an Apple iPad during a physician's rounds as a case study. Methods Empirical implementation issues were derived from a 910-bed tertiary national university hospital that recently launched a VDI system. During the physicians' rounds, we surveyed patient satisfaction levels with the VDI-based mobile consultation service with the iPad and the relationship between these levels of satisfaction and hospital revisits, hospital recommendations, and the hospital brand image. Thirty-five inpatients (including their next-of-kin) and seven physicians participated in the survey. Results Implementation issues pertaining to the VDI system arose with regard to the highly availability system architecture, wireless network infrastructure, and screen resolution of the system. Other issues were related to privacy and security, mobile device management, and user education. When the system was used in rounds, patients and their next-of-kin expressed high satisfaction levels, and a positive relationship was noted as regards patients' decisions to revisit the hospital and whether the use of the VDI system improved the brand image of the hospital. Conclusions Mobile hospital environments have the potential to benefit both physicians and patients. The issues related to the implementation of VDI system discussed here should be examined in advance for its successful adoption and implementation. PMID:23346476

Integration of Cloud resources in the LHCb Distributed Computing

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Úbeda García, Mario; Méndez Muñoz, Víctor; Stagni, Federico; Cabarrou, Baptiste; Rauschmayr, Nathalie; Charpentier, Philippe; Closier, Joel

2014-06-01

This contribution describes how Cloud resources have been integrated in the LHCb Distributed Computing. LHCb is using its specific Dirac extension (LHCbDirac) as an interware for its Distributed Computing. So far, it was seamlessly integrating Grid resources and Computer clusters. The cloud extension of DIRAC (VMDIRAC) allows the integration of Cloud computing infrastructures. It is able to interact with multiple types of infrastructures in commercial and institutional clouds, supported by multiple interfaces (Amazon EC2, OpenNebula, OpenStack and CloudStack) - instantiates, monitors and manages Virtual Machines running on this aggregation of Cloud resources. Moreover, specifications for institutional Cloud resources proposed by Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG), mainly by the High Energy Physics Unix Information Exchange (HEPiX) group, have been taken into account. Several initiatives and computing resource providers in the eScience environment have already deployed IaaS in production during 2013. Keeping this on mind, pros and cons of a cloud based infrasctructure have been studied in contrast with the current setup. As a result, this work addresses four different use cases which represent a major improvement on several levels of our infrastructure. We describe the solution implemented by LHCb for the contextualisation of the VMs based on the idea of Cloud Site. We report on operational experience of using in production several institutional Cloud resources that are thus becoming integral part of the LHCb Distributed Computing resources. Furthermore, we describe as well the gradual migration of our Service Infrastructure towards a fully distributed architecture following the Service as a Service (SaaS) model.

Resilient workflows for computational mechanics platforms

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Nguyên, Toàn; Trifan, Laurentiu; Désidéri, Jean-Antoine

2010-06-01

Workflow management systems have recently been the focus of much interest and many research and deployment for scientific applications worldwide [26, 27]. Their ability to abstract the applications by wrapping application codes have also stressed the usefulness of such systems for multidiscipline applications [23, 24]. When complex applications need to provide seamless interfaces hiding the technicalities of the computing infrastructures, their high-level modeling, monitoring and execution functionalities help giving production teams seamless and effective facilities [25, 31, 33]. Software integration infrastructures based on programming paradigms such as Python, Mathlab and Scilab have also provided evidence of the usefulness of such approaches for the tight coupling of multidisciplne application codes [22, 24]. Also high-performance computing based on multi-core multi-cluster infrastructures open new opportunities for more accurate, more extensive and effective robust multi-discipline simulations for the decades to come [28]. This supports the goal of full flight dynamics simulation for 3D aircraft models within the next decade, opening the way to virtual flight-tests and certification of aircraft in the future [23, 24, 29].

The Computing and Data Grid Approach: Infrastructure for Distributed Science Applications

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Johnston, William E.

2002-01-01

With the advent of Grids - infrastructure for using and managing widely distributed computing and data resources in the science environment - there is now an opportunity to provide a standard, large-scale, computing, data, instrument, and collaboration environment for science that spans many different projects and provides the required infrastructure and services in a relatively uniform and supportable way. Grid technology has evolved over the past several years to provide the services and infrastructure needed for building 'virtual' systems and organizations. We argue that Grid technology provides an excellent basis for the creation of the integrated environments that can combine the resources needed to support the large- scale science projects located at multiple laboratories and universities. We present some science case studies that indicate that a paradigm shift in the process of science will come about as a result of Grids providing transparent and secure access to advanced and integrated information and technologies infrastructure: powerful computing systems, large-scale data archives, scientific instruments, and collaboration tools. These changes will be in the form of services that can be integrated with the user's work environment, and that enable uniform and highly capable access to these computers, data, and instruments, regardless of the location or exact nature of these resources. These services will integrate transient-use resources like computing systems, scientific instruments, and data caches (e.g., as they are needed to perform a simulation or analyze data from a single experiment); persistent-use resources. such as databases, data catalogues, and archives, and; collaborators, whose involvement will continue for the lifetime of a project or longer. While we largely address large-scale science in this paper, Grids, particularly when combined with Web Services, will address a broad spectrum of science scenarios. both large and small scale.

LEMON - LHC Era Monitoring for Large-Scale Infrastructures

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Marian, Babik; Ivan, Fedorko; Nicholas, Hook; Hector, Lansdale Thomas; Daniel, Lenkes; Miroslav, Siket; Denis, Waldron

2011-12-01

At the present time computer centres are facing a massive rise in virtualization and cloud computing as these solutions bring advantages to service providers and consolidate the computer centre resources. However, as a result the monitoring complexity is increasing. Computer centre management requires not only to monitor servers, network equipment and associated software but also to collect additional environment and facilities data (e.g. temperature, power consumption, cooling efficiency, etc.) to have also a good overview of the infrastructure performance. The LHC Era Monitoring (Lemon) system is addressing these requirements for a very large scale infrastructure. The Lemon agent that collects data on every client and forwards the samples to the central measurement repository provides a flexible interface that allows rapid development of new sensors. The system allows also to report on behalf of remote devices such as switches and power supplies. Online and historical data can be visualized via a web-based interface or retrieved via command-line tools. The Lemon Alarm System component can be used for notifying the operator about error situations. In this article, an overview of the Lemon monitoring is provided together with a description of the CERN LEMON production instance. No direct comparison is made with other monitoring tool.

Utility Computing: Reality and Beyond

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Ivanov, Ivan I.

Utility Computing is not a new concept. It involves organizing and providing a wide range of computing-related services as public utilities. Much like water, gas, electricity and telecommunications, the concept of computing as public utility was announced in 1955. Utility Computing remained a concept for near 50 years. Now some models and forms of Utility Computing are emerging such as storage and server virtualization, grid computing, and automated provisioning. Recent trends in Utility Computing as a complex technology involve business procedures that could profoundly transform the nature of companies' IT services, organizational IT strategies and technology infrastructure, and business models. In the ultimate Utility Computing models, organizations will be able to acquire as much IT services as they need, whenever and wherever they need them. Based on networked businesses and new secure online applications, Utility Computing would facilitate "agility-integration" of IT resources and services within and between virtual companies. With the application of Utility Computing there could be concealment of the complexity of IT, reduction of operational expenses, and converting of IT costs to variable `on-demand' services. How far should technology, business and society go to adopt Utility Computing forms, modes and models?

The development, deployment, and impact of the virtual observatory, Part II

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Hanisch, R. J.

2015-06-01

This is the second special issue of Astronomy and Computing devoted to the Virtual Observatory, and we again see a combination of papers covering various aspects of the VO, from infrastructure to applications to programmatics. The critical role of data models is described by Louys, and the method by which applications communicate amongst each other through the Simple Applications Messaging Protocol (SAMP) is described by Taylor et al. Demleitner et al. explain the client interfaces to the VO registry, that is, how applications developers can query the registry for information about VO-compliant data collections and services.1

Charliecloud

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Priedhorsky, Reid; Randles, Tim

Charliecloud is a set of scripts to let users run a virtual cluster of virtual machines (VMs) on a desktop or supercomputer. Key functions include: 1. Creating (typically by installing an operating system from vendor media) and updating VM images; 2. Running a single VM; 3. Running multiple VMs in a virtual cluster. The virtual machines can talk to one another over the network and (in some cases) the outside world. This is accomplished by calling external programs such as QEMU and the Virtual Distributed Ethernet (VDE) suite. The goal is to let users have a virtual cluster containing nodesmore » where they have privileged access, while isolating that privilege within the virtual cluster so it cannot affect the physical compute resources. Host configuration enforces security; this is not included in Charliecloud, though security guidelines are included in its documentation and Charliecloud is designed to facilitate such configuration. Charliecloud manages passing information from host computers into and out of the virtual machines, such as parameters of the virtual cluster, input data specified by the user, output data from virtual compute jobs, VM console display, and network connections (e.g., SSH or X11). Parameters for the virtual cluster (number of VMs, RAM and disk per VM, etc.) are specified by the user or gathered from the environment (e.g., SLURM environment variables). Example job scripts are included. These include computation examples (such as a "hello world" MPI job) as well as performance tests. They also include a security test script to verify that the virtual cluster is appropriately sandboxed. Tests include: 1. Pinging hosts inside and outside the virtual cluster to explore connectivity; 2. Port scans (again inside and outside) to see what services are available; 3. Sniffing tests to see what traffic is visible to running VMs; 4. IP address spoofing to test network functionality in this case; 5. File access tests to make sure host access permissions are enforced. This test script is not a comprehensive scanner and does not test for specific vulnerabilities. Importantly, no information about physical hosts or network topology is included in this script (or any of Charliecloud); while part of a sensible test, such information is specified by the user when the test is run. That is, one cannot learn anything about the LANL network or computing infrastructure by examining Charliecloud code.« less

A Security Monitoring Framework For Virtualization Based HEP Infrastructures

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Gomez Ramirez, A.; Martinez Pedreira, M.; Grigoras, C.; Betev, L.; Lara, C.; Kebschull, U.; ALICE Collaboration

2017-10-01

High Energy Physics (HEP) distributed computing infrastructures require automatic tools to monitor, analyze and react to potential security incidents. These tools should collect and inspect data such as resource consumption, logs and sequence of system calls for detecting anomalies that indicate the presence of a malicious agent. They should also be able to perform automated reactions to attacks without administrator intervention. We describe a novel framework that accomplishes these requirements, with a proof of concept implementation for the ALICE experiment at CERN. We show how we achieve a fully virtualized environment that improves the security by isolating services and Jobs without a significant performance impact. We also describe a collected dataset for Machine Learning based Intrusion Prevention and Detection Systems on Grid computing. This dataset is composed of resource consumption measurements (such as CPU, RAM and network traffic), logfiles from operating system services, and system call data collected from production Jobs running in an ALICE Grid test site and a big set of malware samples. This malware set was collected from security research sites. Based on this dataset, we will proceed to develop Machine Learning algorithms able to detect malicious Jobs.

Virtualization for the LHCb Online system

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Bonaccorsi, Enrico; Brarda, Loic; Moine, Gary; Neufeld, Niko

2011-12-01

Virtualization has long been advertised by the IT-industry as a way to cut down cost, optimise resource usage and manage the complexity in large data-centers. The great number and the huge heterogeneity of hardware, both industrial and custom-made, has up to now led to reluctance in the adoption of virtualization in the IT infrastructure of large experiment installations. Our experience in the LHCb experiment has shown that virtualization improves the availability and the manageability of the whole system. We have done an evaluation of available hypervisors / virtualization solutions and find that the Microsoft HV technology provides a high level of maturity and flexibility for our purpose. We present the results of these comparison tests, describing in detail, the architecture of our virtualization infrastructure with a special emphasis on the security for services visible to the outside world. Security is achieved by a sophisticated combination of VLANs, firewalls and virtual routing - the cost and benefits of this solution are analysed. We have adapted our cluster management tools, notably Quattor, for the needs of virtual machines and this allows us to migrate smoothly services on physical machines to the virtualized infrastructure. The procedures for migration will also be described. In the final part of the document we describe our recent R&D activities aiming to replacing the SAN-backend for the virtualization by a cheaper iSCSI solution - this will allow to move all servers and related services to the virtualized infrastructure, excepting the ones doing hardware control via non-commodity PCI plugin cards.

Cloud Computing for Mission Design and Operations

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Arrieta, Juan; Attiyah, Amy; Beswick, Robert; Gerasimantos, Dimitrios

2012-01-01

The space mission design and operations community already recognizes the value of cloud computing and virtualization. However, natural and valid concerns, like security, privacy, up-time, and vendor lock-in, have prevented a more widespread and expedited adoption into official workflows. In the interest of alleviating these concerns, we propose a series of guidelines for internally deploying a resource-oriented hub of data and algorithms. These guidelines provide a roadmap for implementing an architecture inspired in the cloud computing model: associative, elastic, semantical, interconnected, and adaptive. The architecture can be summarized as exposing data and algorithms as resource-oriented Web services, coordinated via messaging, and running on virtual machines; it is simple, and based on widely adopted standards, protocols, and tools. The architecture may help reduce common sources of complexity intrinsic to data-driven, collaborative interactions and, most importantly, it may provide the means for teams and agencies to evaluate the cloud computing model in their specific context, with minimal infrastructure changes, and before committing to a specific cloud services provider.

The Cloud Area Padovana: from pilot to production

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Andreetto, P.; Costa, F.; Crescente, A.; Dorigo, A.; Fantinel, S.; Fanzago, F.; Sgaravatto, M.; Traldi, S.; Verlato, M.; Zangrando, L.

2017-10-01

The Cloud Area Padovana has been running for almost two years. This is an OpenStack-based scientific cloud, spread across two different sites: the INFN Padova Unit and the INFN Legnaro National Labs. The hardware resources have been scaled horizontally and vertically, by upgrading some hypervisors and by adding new ones: currently it provides about 1100 cores. Some in-house developments were also integrated in the OpenStack dashboard, such as a tool for user and project registrations with direct support for the INFN-AAI Identity Provider as a new option for the user authentication. In collaboration with the EU-funded Indigo DataCloud project, the integration with Docker-based containers has been experimented with and will be available in production soon. This computing facility now satisfies the computational and storage demands of more than 70 users affiliated with about 20 research projects. We present here the architecture of this Cloud infrastructure, the tools and procedures used to operate it. We also focus on the lessons learnt in these two years, describing the problems that were found and the corrective actions that had to be applied. We also discuss about the chosen strategy for upgrades, which combines the need to promptly integrate the OpenStack new developments, the demand to reduce the downtimes of the infrastructure, and the need to limit the effort requested for such updates. We also discuss how this Cloud infrastructure is being used. In particular we focus on two big physics experiments which are intensively exploiting this computing facility: CMS and SPES. CMS deployed on the cloud a complex computational infrastructure, composed of several user interfaces for job submission in the Grid environment/local batch queues or for interactive processes; this is fully integrated with the local Tier-2 facility. To avoid a static allocation of the resources, an elastic cluster, based on cernVM, has been configured: it allows to automatically create and delete virtual machines according to the user needs. SPES, using a client-server system called TraceWin, exploits INFN’s virtual resources performing a very large number of simulations on about a thousand nodes elastically managed.

Virtual Astronomy: The Legacy of the Virtual Astronomical Observatory

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Hanisch, Robert J.; Berriman, G. B.; Lazio, J.; Szalay, A. S.; Fabbiano, G.; Plante, R. L.; McGlynn, T. A.; Evans, J.; Emery Bunn, S.; Claro, M.; VAO Project Team

2014-01-01

Over the past ten years, the Virtual Astronomical Observatory (VAO, http://usvao.org) and its predecessor, the National Virtual Observatory (NVO), have developed and operated a software infrastructure consisting of standards and protocols for data and science software applications. The Virtual Observatory (VO) makes it possible to develop robust software for the discovery, access, and analysis of astronomical data. Every major publicly funded research organization in the US and worldwide has deployed at least some components of the VO infrastructure; tens of thousands of VO-enabled queries for data are invoked daily against catalog, image, and spectral data collections; and groups within the community have developed tools and applications building upon the VO infrastructure. Further, NVO and VAO have helped ensure access to data internationally by co-founding the International Virtual Observatory Alliance (IVOA, http://ivoa.net). The products of the VAO are being archived in a publicly accessible repository. Several science tools developed by the VAO will continue to be supported by the organizations that developed them: the Iris spectral energy distribution package (SAO), the Data Discovery Tool (STScI/MAST, HEASARC), and the scalable cross-comparison service (IPAC). The final year of VAO is focused on development of the data access protocol for data cubes, creation of Python language bindings to VO services, and deployment of a cloud-like data storage service that links to VO data discovery tools (SciDrive). We encourage the community to make use of these tools and services, to extend and improve them, and to carry on with the vision for virtual astronomy: astronomical research enabled by easy access to distributed data and computational resources. Funding for VAO development and operations has been provided jointly by NSF and NASA since May 2010. NSF funding will end in September 2014, though with the possibility of competitive solicitations for VO-based tool development. NASA intends to maintain core VO services such as the resource registry (the index of VO-accessible data collections), monitoring services, and a website as part of the remit of HEASARC, IPAC (IRSA, NED), and MAST.

Virtual rehabilitation--benefits and challenges.

PubMed

Burdea, G C

2003-01-01

To discuss the advantages and disadvantages of rehabilitation applications of virtual reality. VR can be used as an enhancement to conventional therapy for patients with conditions ranging from musculoskeletal problems, to stroke-induced paralysis, to cognitive deficits. This approach is called "VR-augmented rehabilitation." Alternately, VR can replace conventional interventions altogether, in which case the rehabilitation is "VR-based." If the intervention is done at a distance, then it is called "telerehabilitation." Simulation exercises for post-stroke patients have been developed using a "teacher object" approach or a video game approach. Simulations for musculo-skeletal patients use virtual replicas of rehabilitation devices (such as rubber ball, power putty, peg board). Phobia-inducing virtual environments are prescribed for patients with cognitive deficits. VR-augmented rehabilitation has been shown effective for stroke patients in the chronic phase of the disease. VR-based rehabilitation has been improving patients with fear of flying, Vietnam syndrome, fear of heights, and chronic stroke patients. Telerehabilitation interventions using VR have improved musculo-skeletal and post-stroke patients, however less data is available at this time. Virtual reality presents significant advantages when applied to rehabilitation of patients with varied conditions. These advantages include patient motivation, adaptability and variability based on patient baseline, transparent data storage, online remote data access, economy of scale, reduced medical costs. Challenges in VR use for rehabilitation relate to lack of computer skills on the part of therapists, lack of support infrastructure, expensive equipment (initially), inadequate communication infrastructure (for telerehabilitation in rural areas), and patient safety concerns.

Predictive Anomaly Management for Resilient Virtualized Computing Infrastructures

DTIC Science & Technology

2015-05-27

PREC: Practical Root Exploit Containment for Android Devices, ACM Conference on Data and Application Security and Privacy (CODASPY) . 03-MAR-14...05-OCT-11, . : , Hiep Nguyen, Yongmin Tan, Xiaohui Gu. Propagation-aware Anomaly Localization for Cloud Hosted Distributed Applications , ACM...Workshop on Managing Large-Scale Systems via the Analysis of System Logs and the Application of Machine Learning Techniques (SLAML) in conjunction with SOSP

Cloud Computing and Virtual Desktop Infrastructures in Afloat Environments

DTIC Science & Technology

2012-06-01

Institute of Standards and Technology NPS Naval Postgraduate School OCONUS Outside of the Continental United States ONE- NET OCONUS Navy Enterprise... framework of technology that allows all interested systems, inside and outside of an organization, to expose and access well-defined services, and...was established to manage the Navy’s three largest enterprise networks; the OCONUS Navy Enterprise 22 Network (ONE- NET ), the Navy-Marine Corps

Signal and image processing algorithm performance in a virtual and elastic computing environment

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Bennett, Kelly W.; Robertson, James

2013-05-01

The U.S. Army Research Laboratory (ARL) supports the development of classification, detection, tracking, and localization algorithms using multiple sensing modalities including acoustic, seismic, E-field, magnetic field, PIR, and visual and IR imaging. Multimodal sensors collect large amounts of data in support of algorithm development. The resulting large amount of data, and their associated high-performance computing needs, increases and challenges existing computing infrastructures. Purchasing computer power as a commodity using a Cloud service offers low-cost, pay-as-you-go pricing models, scalability, and elasticity that may provide solutions to develop and optimize algorithms without having to procure additional hardware and resources. This paper provides a detailed look at using a commercial cloud service provider, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), to develop and deploy simple signal and image processing algorithms in a cloud and run the algorithms on a large set of data archived in the ARL Multimodal Signatures Database (MMSDB). Analytical results will provide performance comparisons with existing infrastructure. A discussion on using cloud computing with government data will discuss best security practices that exist within cloud services, such as AWS.

The Human Physiome: how standards, software and innovative service infrastructures are providing the building blocks to make it achievable

PubMed Central

2016-01-01

Reconstructing and understanding the Human Physiome virtually is a complex mathematical problem, and a highly demanding computational challenge. Mathematical models spanning from the molecular level through to whole populations of individuals must be integrated, then personalized. This requires interoperability with multiple disparate and geographically separated data sources, and myriad computational software tools. Extracting and producing knowledge from such sources, even when the databases and software are readily available, is a challenging task. Despite the difficulties, researchers must frequently perform these tasks so that available knowledge can be continually integrated into the common framework required to realize the Human Physiome. Software and infrastructures that support the communities that generate these, together with their underlying standards to format, describe and interlink the corresponding data and computer models, are pivotal to the Human Physiome being realized. They provide the foundations for integrating, exchanging and re-using data and models efficiently, and correctly, while also supporting the dissemination of growing knowledge in these forms. In this paper, we explore the standards, software tooling, repositories and infrastructures that support this work, and detail what makes them vital to realizing the Human Physiome. PMID:27051515

The Human Physiome: how standards, software and innovative service infrastructures are providing the building blocks to make it achievable.

PubMed

Nickerson, David; Atalag, Koray; de Bono, Bernard; Geiger, Jörg; Goble, Carole; Hollmann, Susanne; Lonien, Joachim; Müller, Wolfgang; Regierer, Babette; Stanford, Natalie J; Golebiewski, Martin; Hunter, Peter

2016-04-06

Reconstructing and understanding the Human Physiome virtually is a complex mathematical problem, and a highly demanding computational challenge. Mathematical models spanning from the molecular level through to whole populations of individuals must be integrated, then personalized. This requires interoperability with multiple disparate and geographically separated data sources, and myriad computational software tools. Extracting and producing knowledge from such sources, even when the databases and software are readily available, is a challenging task. Despite the difficulties, researchers must frequently perform these tasks so that available knowledge can be continually integrated into the common framework required to realize the Human Physiome. Software and infrastructures that support the communities that generate these, together with their underlying standards to format, describe and interlink the corresponding data and computer models, are pivotal to the Human Physiome being realized. They provide the foundations for integrating, exchanging and re-using data and models efficiently, and correctly, while also supporting the dissemination of growing knowledge in these forms. In this paper, we explore the standards, software tooling, repositories and infrastructures that support this work, and detail what makes them vital to realizing the Human Physiome.

The International Symposium on Grids and Clouds

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

The International Symposium on Grids and Clouds (ISGC) 2012 will be held at Academia Sinica in Taipei from 26 February to 2 March 2012, with co-located events and workshops. The conference is hosted by the Academia Sinica Grid Computing Centre (ASGC). 2012 is the decennium anniversary of the ISGC which over the last decade has tracked the convergence, collaboration and innovation of individual researchers across the Asia Pacific region to a coherent community. With the continuous support and dedication from the delegates, ISGC has provided the primary international distributed computing platform where distinguished researchers and collaboration partners from around the world share their knowledge and experiences. The last decade has seen the wide-scale emergence of e-Infrastructure as a critical asset for the modern e-Scientist. The emergence of large-scale research infrastructures and instruments that has produced a torrent of electronic data is forcing a generational change in the scientific process and the mechanisms used to analyse the resulting data deluge. No longer can the processing of these vast amounts of data and production of relevant scientific results be undertaken by a single scientist. Virtual Research Communities that span organisations around the world, through an integrated digital infrastructure that connects the trust and administrative domains of multiple resource providers, have become critical in supporting these analyses. Topics covered in ISGC 2012 include: High Energy Physics, Biomedicine & Life Sciences, Earth Science, Environmental Changes and Natural Disaster Mitigation, Humanities & Social Sciences, Operations & Management, Middleware & Interoperability, Security and Networking, Infrastructure Clouds & Virtualisation, Business Models & Sustainability, Data Management, Distributed Volunteer & Desktop Grid Computing, High Throughput Computing, and High Performance, Manycore & GPU Computing.

Education Potential of the National Virtual Observatory

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Christian, Carol

2006-12-01

Research in astronomy is blossoming with the availability of sophisticated instrumentation and tools aimed at breakthroughs in our understanding of the physical universe. Researchers can take advantage of the astronomical infrastructure, the National Virtual Observatory (NVO), for their investigations. . As well, data and tools available to the public are increasing through the distributed resources of observatories, academic institutions, computing facilities and educational organizations. Because Astronomy holds the public interest through engaging content and striking a cord with fundamental questions of human interest, it is a perfect context for science and technical education. Through partnerships we are cultivating, the NVO can be tuned for educational purposes.

Applied virtual reality at the Research Triangle Institute

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Montoya, R. Jorge

1994-01-01

Virtual Reality (VR) is a way for humans to use computers in visualizing, manipulating and interacting with large geometric data bases. This paper describes a VR infrastructure and its application to marketing, modeling, architectural walk through, and training problems. VR integration techniques used in these applications are based on a uniform approach which promotes portability and reusability of developed modules. For each problem, a 3D object data base is created using data captured by hand or electronically. The object's realism is enhanced through either procedural or photo textures. The virtual environment is created and populated with the data base using software tools which also support interactions with and immersivity in the environment. These capabilities are augmented by other sensory channels such as voice recognition, 3D sound, and tracking. Four applications are presented: a virtual furniture showroom, virtual reality models of the North Carolina Global TransPark, a walk through the Dresden Fraunenkirche, and the maintenance training simulator for the National Guard.

Evolving Storage and Cyber Infrastructure at the NASA Center for Climate Simulation

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Salmon, Ellen; Duffy, Daniel; Spear, Carrie; Sinno, Scott; Vaughan, Garrison; Bowen, Michael

2018-01-01

This talk will describe recent developments at the NASA Center for Climate Simulation, which is funded by NASAs Science Mission Directorate, and supports the specialized data storage and computational needs of weather, ocean, and climate researchers, as well as astrophysicists, heliophysicists, and planetary scientists. To meet requirements for higher-resolution, higher-fidelity simulations, the NCCS augments its High Performance Computing (HPC) and storage retrieval environment. As the petabytes of model and observational data grow, the NCCS is broadening data services offerings and deploying and expanding virtualization resources for high performance analytics.

Framework for Deploying a Virtualized Computing Environment for Collaborative and Secure Data Analytics

PubMed Central

Meyer, Adrian; Green, Laura; Faulk, Ciearro; Galla, Stephen; Meyer, Anne-Marie

2016-01-01

Introduction: Large amounts of health data generated by a wide range of health care applications across a variety of systems have the potential to offer valuable insight into populations and health care systems, but robust and secure computing and analytic systems are required to leverage this information. Framework: We discuss our experiences deploying a Secure Data Analysis Platform (SeDAP), and provide a framework to plan, build and deploy a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) to enable innovation, collaboration and operate within academic funding structures. It outlines 6 core components: Security, Ease of Access, Performance, Cost, Tools, and Training. Conclusion: A platform like SeDAP is not simply successful through technical excellence and performance. It’s adoption is dependent on a collaborative environment where researchers and users plan and evaluate the requirements of all aspects. PMID:27683665

Lightweight scheduling of elastic analysis containers in a competitive cloud environment: a Docked Analysis Facility for ALICE

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Berzano, D.; Blomer, J.; Buncic, P.; Charalampidis, I.; Ganis, G.; Meusel, R.

2015-12-01

During the last years, several Grid computing centres chose virtualization as a better way to manage diverse use cases with self-consistent environments on the same bare infrastructure. The maturity of control interfaces (such as OpenNebula and OpenStack) opened the possibility to easily change the amount of resources assigned to each use case by simply turning on and off virtual machines. Some of those private clouds use, in production, copies of the Virtual Analysis Facility, a fully virtualized and self-contained batch analysis cluster capable of expanding and shrinking automatically upon need: however, resources starvation occurs frequently as expansion has to compete with other virtual machines running long-living batch jobs. Such batch nodes cannot relinquish their resources in a timely fashion: the more jobs they run, the longer it takes to drain them and shut off, and making one-job virtual machines introduces a non-negligible virtualization overhead. By improving several components of the Virtual Analysis Facility we have realized an experimental “Docked” Analysis Facility for ALICE, which leverages containers instead of virtual machines for providing performance and security isolation. We will present the techniques we have used to address practical problems, such as software provisioning through CVMFS, as well as our considerations on the maturity of containers for High Performance Computing. As the abstraction layer is thinner, our Docked Analysis Facilities may feature a more fine-grained sizing, down to single-job node containers: we will show how this approach will positively impact automatic cluster resizing by deploying lightweight pilot containers instead of replacing central queue polls.

WeaVR: a self-contained and wearable immersive virtual environment simulation system.

PubMed

Hodgson, Eric; Bachmann, Eric R; Vincent, David; Zmuda, Michael; Waller, David; Calusdian, James

2015-03-01

We describe WeaVR, a computer simulation system that takes virtual reality technology beyond specialized laboratories and research sites and makes it available in any open space, such as a gymnasium or a public park. Novel hardware and software systems enable HMD-based immersive virtual reality simulations to be conducted in any arbitrary location, with no external infrastructure and little-to-no setup or site preparation. The ability of the WeaVR system to provide realistic motion-tracked navigation for users, to improve the study of large-scale navigation, and to generate usable behavioral data is shown in three demonstrations. First, participants navigated through a full-scale virtual grocery store while physically situated in an open grass field. Trajectory data are presented for both normal tracking and for tracking during the use of redirected walking that constrained users to a predefined area. Second, users followed a straight path within a virtual world for distances of up to 2 km while walking naturally and being redirected to stay within the field, demonstrating the ability of the system to study large-scale navigation by simulating virtual worlds that are potentially unlimited in extent. Finally, the portability and pedagogical implications of this system were demonstrated by taking it to a regional high school for live use by a computer science class on their own school campus.

NASA's Participation in the National Computational Grid

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Feiereisen, William J.; Zornetzer, Steve F. (Technical Monitor)

1998-01-01

Over the last several years it has become evident that the character of NASA's supercomputing needs has changed. One of the major missions of the agency is to support the design and manufacture of aero- and space-vehicles with technologies that will significantly reduce their cost. It is becoming clear that improvements in the process of aerospace design and manufacturing will require a high performance information infrastructure that allows geographically dispersed teams to draw upon resources that are broader than traditional supercomputing. A computational grid draws together our information resources into one system. We can foresee the time when a Grid will allow engineers and scientists to use the tools of supercomputers, databases and on line experimental devices in a virtual environment to collaborate with distant colleagues. The concept of a computational grid has been spoken of for many years, but several events in recent times are conspiring to allow us to actually build one. In late 1997 the National Science Foundation initiated the Partnerships for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (PACI) which is built around the idea of distributed high performance computing. The Alliance lead, by the National Computational Science Alliance (NCSA), and the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (NPACI), lead by the San Diego Supercomputing Center, have been instrumental in drawing together the "Grid Community" to identify the technology bottlenecks and propose a research agenda to address them. During the same period NASA has begun to reformulate parts of two major high performance computing research programs to concentrate on distributed high performance computing and has banded together with the PACI centers to address the research agenda in common.

Models and algorithm of optimization launch and deployment of virtual network functions in the virtual data center

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Bolodurina, I. P.; Parfenov, D. I.

2017-10-01

The goal of our investigation is optimization of network work in virtual data center. The advantage of modern infrastructure virtualization lies in the possibility to use software-defined networks. However, the existing optimization of algorithmic solutions does not take into account specific features working with multiple classes of virtual network functions. The current paper describes models characterizing the basic structures of object of virtual data center. They including: a level distribution model of software-defined infrastructure virtual data center, a generalized model of a virtual network function, a neural network model of the identification of virtual network functions. We also developed an efficient algorithm for the optimization technology of containerization of virtual network functions in virtual data center. We propose an efficient algorithm for placing virtual network functions. In our investigation we also generalize the well renowned heuristic and deterministic algorithms of Karmakar-Karp.

Virtual Interactive Musculoskeletal System (VIMS) in orthopaedic research, education and clinical patient care.

PubMed

Chao, Edmund Y S; Armiger, Robert S; Yoshida, Hiroaki; Lim, Jonathan; Haraguchi, Naoki

2007-03-08

The ability to combine physiology and engineering analyses with computer sciences has opened the door to the possibility of creating the "Virtual Human" reality. This paper presents a broad foundation for a full-featured biomechanical simulator for the human musculoskeletal system physiology. This simulation technology unites the expertise in biomechanical analysis and graphic modeling to investigate joint and connective tissue mechanics at the structural level and to visualize the results in both static and animated forms together with the model. Adaptable anatomical models including prosthetic implants and fracture fixation devices and a robust computational infrastructure for static, kinematic, kinetic, and stress analyses under varying boundary and loading conditions are incorporated on a common platform, the VIMS (Virtual Interactive Musculoskeletal System). Within this software system, a manageable database containing long bone dimensions, connective tissue material properties and a library of skeletal joint system functional activities and loading conditions are also available and they can easily be modified, updated and expanded. Application software is also available to allow end-users to perform biomechanical analyses interactively. Examples using these models and the computational algorithms in a virtual laboratory environment are used to demonstrate the utility of these unique database and simulation technology. This integrated system, model library and database will impact on orthopaedic education, basic research, device development and application, and clinical patient care related to musculoskeletal joint system reconstruction, trauma management, and rehabilitation.

Virtual interactive musculoskeletal system (VIMS) in orthopaedic research, education and clinical patient care

PubMed Central

Chao, Edmund YS; Armiger, Robert S; Yoshida, Hiroaki; Lim, Jonathan; Haraguchi, Naoki

2007-01-01

The ability to combine physiology and engineering analyses with computer sciences has opened the door to the possibility of creating the "Virtual Human" reality. This paper presents a broad foundation for a full-featured biomechanical simulator for the human musculoskeletal system physiology. This simulation technology unites the expertise in biomechanical analysis and graphic modeling to investigate joint and connective tissue mechanics at the structural level and to visualize the results in both static and animated forms together with the model. Adaptable anatomical models including prosthetic implants and fracture fixation devices and a robust computational infrastructure for static, kinematic, kinetic, and stress analyses under varying boundary and loading conditions are incorporated on a common platform, the VIMS (Virtual Interactive Musculoskeletal System). Within this software system, a manageable database containing long bone dimensions, connective tissue material properties and a library of skeletal joint system functional activities and loading conditions are also available and they can easily be modified, updated and expanded. Application software is also available to allow end-users to perform biomechanical analyses interactively. Examples using these models and the computational algorithms in a virtual laboratory environment are used to demonstrate the utility of these unique database and simulation technology. This integrated system, model library and database will impact on orthopaedic education, basic research, device development and application, and clinical patient care related to musculoskeletal joint system reconstruction, trauma management, and rehabilitation. PMID:17343764

Interactive analysis of geographically distributed population imaging data collections over light-path data networks

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

van Lew, Baldur; Botha, Charl P.; Milles, Julien R.; Vrooman, Henri A.; van de Giessen, Martijn; Lelieveldt, Boudewijn P. F.

2015-03-01

The cohort size required in epidemiological imaging genetics studies often mandates the pooling of data from multiple hospitals. Patient data, however, is subject to strict privacy protection regimes, and physical data storage may be legally restricted to a hospital network. To enable biomarker discovery, fast data access and interactive data exploration must be combined with high-performance computing resources, while respecting privacy regulations. We present a system using fast and inherently secure light-paths to access distributed data, thereby obviating the need for a central data repository. A secure private cloud computing framework facilitates interactive, computationally intensive exploration of this geographically distributed, privacy sensitive data. As a proof of concept, MRI brain imaging data hosted at two remote sites were processed in response to a user command at a third site. The system was able to automatically start virtual machines, run a selected processing pipeline and write results to a user accessible database, while keeping data locally stored in the hospitals. Individual tasks took approximately 50% longer compared to a locally hosted blade server but the cloud infrastructure reduced the total elapsed time by a factor of 40 using 70 virtual machines in the cloud. We demonstrated that the combination light-path and private cloud is a viable means of building an analysis infrastructure for secure data analysis. The system requires further work in the areas of error handling, load balancing and secure support of multiple users.

Educational Infrastructure Using Virtualization Technologies: Experience at Kaunas University of Technology

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Miseviciene, Regina; Ambraziene, Danute; Tuminauskas, Raimundas; Pažereckas, Nerijus

2012-01-01

Many factors influence education nowadays. Educational institutions are faced with budget cuttings, outdated IT, data security management and the willingness to integrate remote learning at home. Virtualization technologies provide innovative solutions to the problems. The paper presents an original educational infrastructure using virtualization…

RoboCup-Rescue: an international cooperative research project of robotics and AI for the disaster mitigation problem

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Tadokoro, Satoshi; Kitano, Hiroaki; Takahashi, Tomoichi; Noda, Itsuki; Matsubara, Hitoshi; Shinjoh, Atsushi; Koto, Tetsuo; Takeuchi, Ikuo; Takahashi, Hironao; Matsuno, Fumitoshi; Hatayama, Mitsunori; Nobe, Jun; Shimada, Susumu

2000-07-01

This paper introduces the RoboCup-Rescue Simulation Project, a contribution to the disaster mitigation, search and rescue problem. A comprehensive urban disaster simulator is constructed on distributed computers. Heterogeneous intelligent agents such as fire fighters, victims and volunteers conduct search and rescue activities in this virtual disaster world. A real world interface integrates various sensor systems and controllers of infrastructures in the real cities with the real world. Real-time simulation is synchronized with actual disasters, computing complex relationship between various damage factors and agent behaviors. A mission-critical man-machine interface provides portability and robustness of disaster mitigation centers, and augmented-reality interfaces for rescue in real disasters. It also provides a virtual- reality training function for the public. This diverse spectrum of RoboCup-Rescue contributes to the creation of the safer social system.

Maintaining Traceability in an Evolving Distributed Computing Environment

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Collier, I.; Wartel, R.

2015-12-01

The management of risk is fundamental to the operation of any distributed computing infrastructure. Identifying the cause of incidents is essential to prevent them from re-occurring. In addition, it is a goal to contain the impact of an incident while keeping services operational. For response to incidents to be acceptable this needs to be commensurate with the scale of the problem. The minimum level of traceability for distributed computing infrastructure usage is to be able to identify the source of all actions (executables, file transfers, pilot jobs, portal jobs, etc.) and the individual who initiated them. In addition, sufficiently fine-grained controls, such as blocking the originating user and monitoring to detect abnormal behaviour, are necessary for keeping services operational. It is essential to be able to understand the cause and to fix any problems before re-enabling access for the user. The aim is to be able to answer the basic questions who, what, where, and when concerning any incident. This requires retaining all relevant information, including timestamps and the digital identity of the user, sufficient to identify, for each service instance, and for every security event including at least the following: connect, authenticate, authorize (including identity changes) and disconnect. In traditional grid infrastructures (WLCG, EGI, OSG etc.) best practices and procedures for gathering and maintaining the information required to maintain traceability are well established. In particular, sites collect and store information required to ensure traceability of events at their sites. With the increased use of virtualisation and private and public clouds for HEP workloads established procedures, which are unable to see 'inside' running virtual machines no longer capture all the information required. Maintaining traceability will at least involve a shift of responsibility from sites to Virtual Organisations (VOs) bringing with it new requirements for their logging infrastructures. VOs indeed need to fulfil a new operational role and become fully active participants in the incident response process. We present an analysis of the changing requirements to maintain traceability for virtualised and cloud based workflows with particular reference to the work of the WLCG Traceability Working Group.

Optimizing Virtual Network Functions Placement in Virtual Data Center Infrastructure Using Machine Learning

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Bolodurina, I. P.; Parfenov, D. I.

2018-01-01

We have elaborated a neural network model of virtual network flow identification based on the statistical properties of flows circulating in the network of the data center and characteristics that describe the content of packets transmitted through network objects. This enabled us to establish the optimal set of attributes to identify virtual network functions. We have established an algorithm for optimizing the placement of virtual data functions using the data obtained in our research. Our approach uses a hybrid method of visualization using virtual machines and containers, which enables to reduce the infrastructure load and the response time in the network of the virtual data center. The algorithmic solution is based on neural networks, which enables to scale it at any number of the network function copies.

FermiGrid—experience and future plans

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Chadwick, K.; Berman, E.; Canal, P.; Hesselroth, T.; Garzoglio, G.; Levshina, T.; Sergeev, V.; Sfiligoi, I.; Sharma, N.; Timm, S.; Yocum, D. R.

2008-07-01

Fermilab supports a scientific program that includes experiments and scientists located across the globe. In order to better serve this community, Fermilab has placed its production computer resources in a Campus Grid infrastructure called 'FermiGrid'. The FermiGrid infrastructure allows the large experiments at Fermilab to have priority access to their own resources, enables sharing of these resources in an opportunistic fashion, and movement of work (jobs, data) between the Campus Grid and National Grids such as Open Science Grid (OSG) and the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid Collaboration (WLCG). FermiGrid resources support multiple Virtual Organizations (VOs), including VOs from the OSG, EGEE, and the WLCG. Fermilab also makes leading contributions to the Open Science Grid in the areas of accounting, batch computing, grid security, job management, resource selection, site infrastructure, storage management, and VO services. Through the FermiGrid interfaces, authenticated and authorized VOs and individuals may access our core grid services, the 10,000+ Fermilab resident CPUs, near-petabyte (including CMS) online disk pools and the multi-petabyte Fermilab Mass Storage System. These core grid services include a site wide Globus gatekeeper, VO management services for several VOs, Fermilab site authorization services, grid user mapping services, as well as job accounting and monitoring, resource selection and data movement services. Access to these services is via standard and well-supported grid interfaces. We will report on the user experience of using the FermiGrid campus infrastructure interfaced to a national cyberinfrastructure - the successes and the problems.

FermiGrid - experience and future plans

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Chadwick, K.; Berman, E.; Canal, P.

2007-09-01

Fermilab supports a scientific program that includes experiments and scientists located across the globe. In order to better serve this community, Fermilab has placed its production computer resources in a Campus Grid infrastructure called 'FermiGrid'. The FermiGrid infrastructure allows the large experiments at Fermilab to have priority access to their own resources, enables sharing of these resources in an opportunistic fashion, and movement of work (jobs, data) between the Campus Grid and National Grids such as Open Science Grid and the WLCG. FermiGrid resources support multiple Virtual Organizations (VOs), including VOs from the Open Science Grid (OSG), EGEE and themore » Worldwide LHC Computing Grid Collaboration (WLCG). Fermilab also makes leading contributions to the Open Science Grid in the areas of accounting, batch computing, grid security, job management, resource selection, site infrastructure, storage management, and VO services. Through the FermiGrid interfaces, authenticated and authorized VOs and individuals may access our core grid services, the 10,000+ Fermilab resident CPUs, near-petabyte (including CMS) online disk pools and the multi-petabyte Fermilab Mass Storage System. These core grid services include a site wide Globus gatekeeper, VO management services for several VOs, Fermilab site authorization services, grid user mapping services, as well as job accounting and monitoring, resource selection and data movement services. Access to these services is via standard and well-supported grid interfaces. We will report on the user experience of using the FermiGrid campus infrastructure interfaced to a national cyberinfrastructure--the successes and the problems.« less

Multiplexing Low and High QoS Workloads in Virtual Environments

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Verboven, Sam; Vanmechelen, Kurt; Broeckhove, Jan

Virtualization technology has introduced new ways for managing IT infrastructure. The flexible deployment of applications through self-contained virtual machine images has removed the barriers for multiplexing, suspending and migrating applications with their entire execution environment, allowing for a more efficient use of the infrastructure. These developments have given rise to an important challenge regarding the optimal scheduling of virtual machine workloads. In this paper, we specifically address the VM scheduling problem in which workloads that require guaranteed levels of CPU performance are mixed with workloads that do not require such guarantees. We introduce a framework to analyze this scheduling problem and evaluate to what extent such mixed service delivery is beneficial for a provider of virtualized IT infrastructure. Traditionally providers offer IT resources under a guaranteed and fixed performance profile, which can lead to underutilization. The findings of our simulation study show that through proper tuning of a limited set of parameters, the proposed scheduling algorithm allows for a significant increase in utilization without sacrificing on performance dependability.

Cloud Computing for radiologists.

PubMed

Kharat, Amit T; Safvi, Amjad; Thind, Ss; Singh, Amarjit

2012-07-01

Cloud computing is a concept wherein a computer grid is created using the Internet with the sole purpose of utilizing shared resources such as computer software, hardware, on a pay-per-use model. Using Cloud computing, radiology users can efficiently manage multimodality imaging units by using the latest software and hardware without paying huge upfront costs. Cloud computing systems usually work on public, private, hybrid, or community models. Using the various components of a Cloud, such as applications, client, infrastructure, storage, services, and processing power, Cloud computing can help imaging units rapidly scale and descale operations and avoid huge spending on maintenance of costly applications and storage. Cloud computing allows flexibility in imaging. It sets free radiology from the confines of a hospital and creates a virtual mobile office. The downsides to Cloud computing involve security and privacy issues which need to be addressed to ensure the success of Cloud computing in the future.

Cloud Computing for radiologists

PubMed Central

Kharat, Amit T; Safvi, Amjad; Thind, SS; Singh, Amarjit

2012-01-01

Cloud computing is a concept wherein a computer grid is created using the Internet with the sole purpose of utilizing shared resources such as computer software, hardware, on a pay-per-use model. Using Cloud computing, radiology users can efficiently manage multimodality imaging units by using the latest software and hardware without paying huge upfront costs. Cloud computing systems usually work on public, private, hybrid, or community models. Using the various components of a Cloud, such as applications, client, infrastructure, storage, services, and processing power, Cloud computing can help imaging units rapidly scale and descale operations and avoid huge spending on maintenance of costly applications and storage. Cloud computing allows flexibility in imaging. It sets free radiology from the confines of a hospital and creates a virtual mobile office. The downsides to Cloud computing involve security and privacy issues which need to be addressed to ensure the success of Cloud computing in the future. PMID:23599560

"Pack[superscript2]": VM Resource Scheduling for Fine-Grained Application SLAs in Highly Consolidated Environment

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Sukwong, Orathai

2013-01-01

Virtualization enables the ability to consolidate multiple servers on a single physical machine, increasing the infrastructure utilization. Maximizing the ratio of server virtual machines (VMs) to physical machines, namely the consolidation ratio, becomes an important goal toward infrastructure cost saving in a cloud. However, the consolidation…

Design, Results, Evolution and Status of the ATLAS Simulation at Point1 Project

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Ballestrero, S.; Batraneanu, S. M.; Brasolin, F.; Contescu, C.; Fazio, D.; Di Girolamo, A.; Lee, C. J.; Pozo Astigarraga, M. E.; Scannicchio, D. A.; Sedov, A.; Twomey, M. S.; Wang, F.; Zaytsev, A.

2015-12-01

During the LHC Long Shutdown 1 (LSI) period, that started in 2013, the Simulation at Point1 (Sim@P1) project takes advantage, in an opportunistic way, of the TDAQ (Trigger and Data Acquisition) HLT (High-Level Trigger) farm of the ATLAS experiment. This farm provides more than 1300 compute nodes, which are particularly suited for running event generation and Monte Carlo production jobs that are mostly CPU and not I/O bound. It is capable of running up to 2700 Virtual Machines (VMs) each with 8 CPU cores, for a total of up to 22000 parallel jobs. This contribution gives a review of the design, the results, and the evolution of the Sim@P1 project, operating a large scale OpenStack based virtualized platform deployed on top of the ATLAS TDAQ HLT farm computing resources. During LS1, Sim@P1 was one of the most productive ATLAS sites: it delivered more than 33 million CPU-hours and it generated more than 1.1 billion Monte Carlo events. The design aspects are presented: the virtualization platform exploited by Sim@P1 avoids interferences with TDAQ operations and it guarantees the security and the usability of the ATLAS private network. The cloud mechanism allows the separation of the needed support on both infrastructural (hardware, virtualization layer) and logical (Grid site support) levels. This paper focuses on the operational aspects of such a large system during the upcoming LHC Run 2 period: simple, reliable, and efficient tools are needed to quickly switch from Sim@P1 to TDAQ mode and back, to exploit the resources when they are not used for the data acquisition, even for short periods. The evolution of the central OpenStack infrastructure is described, as it was upgraded from Folsom to the Icehouse release, including the scalability issues addressed.

Network testbed creation and validation

DOEpatents

Thai, Tan Q.; Urias, Vincent; Van Leeuwen, Brian P.; Watts, Kristopher K.; Sweeney, Andrew John

2017-03-21

Embodiments of network testbed creation and validation processes are described herein. A "network testbed" is a replicated environment used to validate a target network or an aspect of its design. Embodiments describe a network testbed that comprises virtual testbed nodes executed via a plurality of physical infrastructure nodes. The virtual testbed nodes utilize these hardware resources as a network "fabric," thereby enabling rapid configuration and reconfiguration of the virtual testbed nodes without requiring reconfiguration of the physical infrastructure nodes. Thus, in contrast to prior art solutions which require a tester manually build an emulated environment of physically connected network devices, embodiments receive or derive a target network description and build out a replica of this description using virtual testbed nodes executed via the physical infrastructure nodes. This process allows for the creation of very large (e.g., tens of thousands of network elements) and/or very topologically complex test networks.

Network testbed creation and validation

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Thai, Tan Q.; Urias, Vincent; Van Leeuwen, Brian P.

Embodiments of network testbed creation and validation processes are described herein. A "network testbed" is a replicated environment used to validate a target network or an aspect of its design. Embodiments describe a network testbed that comprises virtual testbed nodes executed via a plurality of physical infrastructure nodes. The virtual testbed nodes utilize these hardware resources as a network "fabric," thereby enabling rapid configuration and reconfiguration of the virtual testbed nodes without requiring reconfiguration of the physical infrastructure nodes. Thus, in contrast to prior art solutions which require a tester manually build an emulated environment of physically connected network devices,more » embodiments receive or derive a target network description and build out a replica of this description using virtual testbed nodes executed via the physical infrastructure nodes. This process allows for the creation of very large (e.g., tens of thousands of network elements) and/or very topologically complex test networks.« less

A National Virtual Specimen Database for Early Cancer Detection

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Crichton, Daniel; Kincaid, Heather; Kelly, Sean; Thornquist, Mark; Johnsey, Donald; Winget, Marcy

2003-01-01

Access to biospecimens is essential for enabling cancer biomarker discovery. The National Cancer Institute's (NCI) Early Detection Research Network (EDRN) comprises and integrates a large number of laboratories into a network in order to establish a collaborative scientific environment to discover and validate disease markers. The diversity of both the institutions and the collaborative focus has created the need for establishing cross-disciplinary teams focused on integrating expertise in biomedical research, computational and biostatistics, and computer science. Given the collaborative design of the network, the EDRN needed an informatics infrastructure. The Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, the National Cancer Institute,and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) teamed up to build an informatics infrastructure creating a collaborative, science-driven research environment despite the geographic and morphology differences of the information systems that existed within the diverse network. EDRN investigators identified the need to share biospecimen data captured across the country managed in disparate databases. As a result, the informatics team initiated an effort to create a virtual tissue database whereby scientists could search and locate details about specimens located at collaborating laboratories. Each database, however, was locally implemented and integrated into collection processes and methods unique to each institution. This meant that efforts to integrate databases needed to be done in a manner that did not require redesign or re-implementation of existing system

Use of Emerging Grid Computing Technologies for the Analysis of LIGO Data

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Koranda, Scott

2004-03-01

The LIGO Scientific Collaboration (LSC) today faces the challenge of enabling analysis of terabytes of LIGO data by hundreds of scientists from institutions all around the world. To meet this challenge the LSC is developing tools, infrastructure, applications, and expertise leveraging Grid Computing technologies available today, and making available to LSC scientists compute resources at sites across the United States and Europe. We use digital credentials for strong and secure authentication and authorization to compute resources and data. Building on top of products from the Globus project for high-speed data transfer and information discovery we have created the Lightweight Data Replicator (LDR) to securely and robustly replicate data to resource sites. We have deployed at our computing sites the Virtual Data Toolkit (VDT) Server and Client packages, developed in collaboration with our partners in the GriPhyN and iVDGL projects, providing uniform access to distributed resources for users and their applications. Taken together these Grid Computing technologies and infrastructure have formed the LSC DataGrid--a coherent and uniform environment across two continents for the analysis of gravitational-wave detector data. Much work, however, remains in order to scale current analyses and recent lessons learned need to be integrated into the next generation of Grid middleware.

WC WAVE - Integrating Diverse Hydrological-Modeling Data and Services Into an Interoperable Geospatial Infrastructure

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Hudspeth, W. B.; Baros, S.; Barrett, H.; Savickas, J.; Erickson, J.

2015-12-01

WC WAVE (Western Consortium for Watershed Analysis, Visualization and Exploration) is a collaborative research project between the states of Idaho, Nevada, and New Mexico that is funded under the National Science Foundation's Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR). The goal of the project is to understand and document the effects of climate change on interactions between precipitation, vegetation growth, soil moisture and other landscape properties. These interactions are modeled within a framework we refer to as a virtual watershed (VW), a computer infrastructure that simulates watershed dynamics by linking scientific modeling, visualization, and data management components into a coherent whole. Developed and hosted at the Earth Data Analysis Center, University of New Mexico, the virtual watershed has a number of core functions which include: a) streamlined access to data required for model initialization and boundary conditions; b) the development of analytic scenarios through interactive visualization of available data and the storage of model configuration options; c) coupling of hydrological models through the rapid assimilation of model outputs into the data management system for access and use by sequent models. The WC-WAVE virtual watershed accomplishes these functions by provision of large-scale vector and raster data discovery, subsetting, and delivery via Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and REST web service standards. Central to the virtual watershed is the design and use of an innovative array of metadata elements that permits the stepwise coupling of diverse hydrological models (e.g. ISNOBAL, PRMS, CASiMiR) and input data to rapidly assess variation in outcomes under different climatic conditions. We present details on the architecture and functionality of the virtual watershed, results from three western U.S. watersheds, and discuss the realized benefits to watershed science of employing this integrated solution.

Volunteer Clouds and Citizen Cyberscience for LHC Physics

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Aguado Sanchez, Carlos; Blomer, Jakob; Buncic, Predrag; Chen, Gang; Ellis, John; Garcia Quintas, David; Harutyunyan, Artem; Grey, Francois; Lombrana Gonzalez, Daniel; Marquina, Miguel; Mato, Pere; Rantala, Jarno; Schulz, Holger; Segal, Ben; Sharma, Archana; Skands, Peter; Weir, David; Wu, Jie; Wu, Wenjing; Yadav, Rohit

2011-12-01

Computing for the LHC, and for HEP more generally, is traditionally viewed as requiring specialized infrastructure and software environments, and therefore not compatible with the recent trend in "volunteer computing", where volunteers supply free processing time on ordinary PCs and laptops via standard Internet connections. In this paper, we demonstrate that with the use of virtual machine technology, at least some standard LHC computing tasks can be tackled with volunteer computing resources. Specifically, by presenting volunteer computing resources to HEP scientists as a "volunteer cloud", essentially identical to a Grid or dedicated cluster from a job submission perspective, LHC simulations can be processed effectively. This article outlines both the technical steps required for such a solution and the implications for LHC computing as well as for LHC public outreach and for participation by scientists from developing regions in LHC research.

Cloud-based opportunities in scientific computing: insights from processing Suomi National Polar-Orbiting Partnership (S-NPP) Direct Broadcast data

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Evans, J. D.; Hao, W.; Chettri, S.

2013-12-01

The cloud is proving to be a uniquely promising platform for scientific computing. Our experience with processing satellite data using Amazon Web Services highlights several opportunities for enhanced performance, flexibility, and cost effectiveness in the cloud relative to traditional computing -- for example: - Direct readout from a polar-orbiting satellite such as the Suomi National Polar-Orbiting Partnership (S-NPP) requires bursts of processing a few times a day, separated by quiet periods when the satellite is out of receiving range. In the cloud, by starting and stopping virtual machines in minutes, we can marshal significant computing resources quickly when needed, but not pay for them when not needed. To take advantage of this capability, we are automating a data-driven approach to the management of cloud computing resources, in which new data availability triggers the creation of new virtual machines (of variable size and processing power) which last only until the processing workflow is complete. - 'Spot instances' are virtual machines that run as long as one's asking price is higher than the provider's variable spot price. Spot instances can greatly reduce the cost of computing -- for software systems that are engineered to withstand unpredictable interruptions in service (as occurs when a spot price exceeds the asking price). We are implementing an approach to workflow management that allows data processing workflows to resume with minimal delays after temporary spot price spikes. This will allow systems to take full advantage of variably-priced 'utility computing.' - Thanks to virtual machine images, we can easily launch multiple, identical machines differentiated only by 'user data' containing individualized instructions (e.g., to fetch particular datasets or to perform certain workflows or algorithms) This is particularly useful when (as is the case with S-NPP data) we need to launch many very similar machines to process an unpredictable number of data files concurrently. Our experience shows the viability and flexibility of this approach to workflow management for scientific data processing. - Finally, cloud computing is a promising platform for distributed volunteer ('interstitial') computing, via mechanisms such as the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) popularized with the SETI@Home project and others such as ClimatePrediction.net and NASA's Climate@Home. Interstitial computing faces significant challenges as commodity computing shifts from (always on) desktop computers towards smartphones and tablets (untethered and running on scarce battery power); but cloud computing offers significant slack capacity. This capacity includes virtual machines with unused RAM or underused CPUs; virtual storage volumes allocated (& paid for) but not full; and virtual machines that are paid up for the current hour but whose work is complete. We are devising ways to facilitate the reuse of these resources (i.e., cloud-based interstitial computing) for satellite data processing and related analyses. We will present our findings and research directions on these and related topics.

Working with Planetary-Scale Data in the Cloud

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Flasher, J.

2017-12-01

When data is shared on AWS, it can be analyzed using AWS on-demand computing resources quickly and efficiently. Users can work with any amount of data without needing to download it or store their own copies. When heavy data like imagery, genomics data, or volumes of sensor data are available in AWS's cloud, the time required to copy the data to a virtual server for analysis is virtually eliminated. AWS's global infrastructure allows data providers to make their data available worldwide and ensure quick access to critical data from anywhere. In this session, we will share lessons learned from our experience supporting a global community of entrepreneurs, students and researchers by making petabytes of data freely available for anyone to use in the cloud.

Virtual Geophysics Laboratory: Exploiting the Cloud and Empowering Geophysicsts

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Fraser, Ryan; Vote, Josh; Goh, Richard; Cox, Simon

2013-04-01

Over the last five decades geoscientists from Australian state and federal agencies have collected and assembled around 3 Petabytes of geoscience data sets under public funding. As a consequence of technological progress, data is now being acquired at exponential rates and in higher resolution than ever before. Effective use of these big data sets challenges the storage and computational infrastructure of most organizations. The Virtual Geophysics Laboratory (VGL) is a scientific workflow portal addresses some of the resulting issues by providing Australian geophysicists with access to a Web 2.0 or Rich Internet Application (RIA) based integrated environment that exploits eResearch tools and Cloud computing technology, and promotes collaboration between the user community. VGL simplifies and automates large portions of what were previously manually intensive scientific workflow processes, allowing scientists to focus on the natural science problems, rather than computer science and IT. A number of geophysical processing codes are incorporated to support multiple workflows. For example a gravity inversion can be performed by combining the Escript/Finley codes (from the University of Queensland) with the gravity data registered in VGL. Likewise, tectonic processes can also be modeled by combining the Underworld code (from Monash University) with one of the various 3D models available to VGL. Cloud services provide scalable and cost effective compute resources. VGL is built on top of mature standards-compliant information services, many deployed using the Spatial Information Services Stack (SISS), which provides direct access to geophysical data. A large number of data sets from Geoscience Australia assist users in data discovery. GeoNetwork provides a metadata catalog to store workflow results for future use, discovery and provenance tracking. VGL has been developed in collaboration with the research community using incremental software development practices and open source tools. While developed to provide the geophysics research community with a sustainable platform and scalable infrastructure; VGL has also developed a number of concepts, patterns and generic components of which have been reused for cases beyond geophysics, including natural hazards, satellite processing and other areas requiring spatial data discovery and processing. Future plans for VGL include a number of improvements in both functional and non-functional areas in response to its user community needs and advancement in information technologies. In particular, research is underway in the following areas (a) distributed and parallel workflow processing in the cloud, (b) seamless integration with various cloud providers, and (c) integration with virtual laboratories representing other science domains. Acknowledgements: VGL was developed by CSIRO in collaboration with Geoscience Australia, National Computational Infrastructure, Australia National University, Monash University and University of Queensland, and has been supported by the Australian Government's Education Investment Funds through NeCTAR.

Doing Your Science While You're in Orbit

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Green, Mark L.; Miller, Stephen D.; Vazhkudai, Sudharshan S.; Trater, James R.

2010-11-01

Large-scale neutron facilities such as the Spallation Neutron Source (SNS) located at Oak Ridge National Laboratory need easy-to-use access to Department of Energy Leadership Computing Facilities and experiment repository data. The Orbiter thick- and thin-client and its supporting Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) based services (available at https://orbiter.sns.gov) consist of standards-based components that are reusable and extensible for accessing high performance computing, data and computational grid infrastructure, and cluster-based resources easily from a user configurable interface. The primary Orbiter system goals consist of (1) developing infrastructure for the creation and automation of virtual instrumentation experiment optimization, (2) developing user interfaces for thin- and thick-client access, (3) provide a prototype incorporating major instrument simulation packages, and (4) facilitate neutron science community access and collaboration. The secure Orbiter SOA authentication and authorization is achieved through the developed Virtual File System (VFS) services, which use Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) for data repository file access, thin-and thick-client functionality and application access, and computational job workflow management. The VFS Relational Database Management System (RDMS) consists of approximately 45 database tables describing 498 user accounts with 495 groups over 432,000 directories with 904,077 repository files. Over 59 million NeXus file metadata records are associated to the 12,800 unique NeXus file field/class names generated from the 52,824 repository NeXus files. Services that enable (a) summary dashboards of data repository status with Quality of Service (QoS) metrics, (b) data repository NeXus file field/class name full text search capabilities within a Google like interface, (c) fully functional RBAC browser for the read-only data repository and shared areas, (d) user/group defined and shared metadata for data repository files, (e) user, group, repository, and web 2.0 based global positioning with additional service capabilities are currently available. The SNS based Orbiter SOA integration progress with the Distributed Data Analysis for Neutron Scattering Experiments (DANSE) software development project is summarized with an emphasis on DANSE Central Services and the Virtual Neutron Facility (VNF). Additionally, the DANSE utilization of the Orbiter SOA authentication, authorization, and data transfer services best practice implementations are presented.

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Aderholdt, Ferrol; Caldwell, Blake A.; Hicks, Susan Elaine

High performance computing environments are often used for a wide variety of workloads ranging from simulation, data transformation and analysis, and complex workflows to name just a few. These systems may process data at various security levels but in so doing are often enclaved at the highest security posture. This approach places significant restrictions on the users of the system even when processing data at a lower security level and exposes data at higher levels of confidentiality to a much broader population than otherwise necessary. The traditional approach of isolation, while effective in establishing security enclaves poses significant challenges formore » the use of shared infrastructure in HPC environments. This report details current state-of-the-art in reconfigurable network enclaving through Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and their applicability to secure enclaves in HPC environments. SDN and NFV methods are based on a solid foundation of system wide virtualization. The purpose of which is very straight forward, the system administrator can deploy networks that are more amenable to customer needs, and at the same time achieve increased scalability making it easier to increase overall capacity as needed without negatively affecting functionality. The network administration of both the server system and the virtual sub-systems is simplified allowing control of the infrastructure through well-defined APIs (Application Programming Interface). While SDN and NFV technologies offer significant promise in meeting these goals, they also provide the ability to address a significant component of the multi-tenant challenge in HPC environments, namely resource isolation. Traditional HPC systems are built upon scalable high-performance networking technologies designed to meet specific application requirements. Dynamic isolation of resources within these environments has remained difficult to achieve. SDN and NFV methodology provide us with relevant concepts and available open standards based APIs that isolate compute and storage resources within an otherwise common networking infrastructure. Additionally, the integration of the networking APIs within larger system frameworks such as OpenStack provide the tools necessary to establish isolated enclaves dynamically allowing the benefits of HPC while providing a controlled security structure surrounding these systems.« less

Calibration of radio-astronomical data on the cloud. LOFAR, the pathway to SKA

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Sabater, J.; Sánchez-Expósito, S.; Garrido, J.; Ruiz, J. E.; Best, P. N.; Verdes-Montenegro, L.

2015-05-01

The radio interferometer LOFAR (LOw Frequency ARray) is fully operational now. This Square Kilometre Array (SKA) pathfinder allows the observation of the sky at frequencies between 10 and 240 MHz, a relatively unexplored region of the spectrum. LOFAR is a software defined telescope: the data is mainly processed using specialized software running in common computing facilities. That means that the capabilities of the telescope are virtually defined by software and mainly limited by the available computing power. However, the quantity of data produced can quickly reach huge volumes (several Petabytes per day). After the correlation and pre-processing of the data in a dedicated cluster, the final dataset is handled to the user (typically several Terabytes). The calibration of these data requires a powerful computing facility in which the specific state of the art software under heavy continuous development can be easily installed and updated. That makes this case a perfect candidate for a cloud infrastructure which adds the advantages of an on demand, flexible solution. We present our approach to the calibration of LOFAR data using Ibercloud, the cloud infrastructure provided by Ibergrid. With the calibration work-flow adapted to the cloud, we can explore calibration strategies for the SKA and show how private or commercial cloud infrastructures (Ibercloud, Amazon EC2, Google Compute Engine, etc.) can help to solve the problems with big datasets that will be prevalent in the future of astronomy.

Mitigating Communication Delays in Remotely Connected Hardware-in-the-loop Experiments

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Cale, James; Johnson, Brian; Dall'Anese, Emiliano

Here, this paper introduces a potential approach for mitigating the effects of communication delays between multiple, closed-loop hardware-in-the-loop experiments which are virtually connected, yet physically separated. The method consists of an analytical method for the compensation of communication delays, along with the supporting computational and communication infrastructure. The control design leverages tools for the design of observers for the compensation of measurement errors in systems with time-varying delays. The proposed methodology is validated through computer simulation and hardware experimentation connecting hardware-in-the-loop experiments conducted between laboratories separated by a distance of over 100 km.

Mitigating Communication Delays in Remotely Connected Hardware-in-the-loop Experiments

DOE PAGES

Cale, James; Johnson, Brian; Dall'Anese, Emiliano; ...

2018-03-30

Here, this paper introduces a potential approach for mitigating the effects of communication delays between multiple, closed-loop hardware-in-the-loop experiments which are virtually connected, yet physically separated. The method consists of an analytical method for the compensation of communication delays, along with the supporting computational and communication infrastructure. The control design leverages tools for the design of observers for the compensation of measurement errors in systems with time-varying delays. The proposed methodology is validated through computer simulation and hardware experimentation connecting hardware-in-the-loop experiments conducted between laboratories separated by a distance of over 100 km.

Distributed Monitoring Infrastructure for Worldwide LHC Computing Grid

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Andrade, P.; Babik, M.; Bhatt, K.; Chand, P.; Collados, D.; Duggal, V.; Fuente, P.; Hayashi, S.; Imamagic, E.; Joshi, P.; Kalmady, R.; Karnani, U.; Kumar, V.; Lapka, W.; Quick, R.; Tarragon, J.; Teige, S.; Triantafyllidis, C.

2012-12-01

The journey of a monitoring probe from its development phase to the moment its execution result is presented in an availability report is a complex process. It goes through multiple phases such as development, testing, integration, release, deployment, execution, data aggregation, computation, and reporting. Further, it involves people with different roles (developers, site managers, VO[1] managers, service managers, management), from different middleware providers (ARC[2], dCache[3], gLite[4], UNICORE[5] and VDT[6]), consortiums (WLCG[7], EMI[11], EGI[15], OSG[13]), and operational teams (GOC[16], OMB[8], OTAG[9], CSIRT[10]). The seamless harmonization of these distributed actors is in daily use for monitoring of the WLCG infrastructure. In this paper we describe the monitoring of the WLCG infrastructure from the operational perspective. We explain the complexity of the journey of a monitoring probe from its execution on a grid node to the visualization on the MyWLCG[27] portal where it is exposed to other clients. This monitoring workflow profits from the interoperability established between the SAM[19] and RSV[20] frameworks. We show how these two distributed structures are capable of uniting technologies and hiding the complexity around them, making them easy to be used by the community. Finally, the different supported deployment strategies, tailored not only for monitoring the entire infrastructure but also for monitoring sites and virtual organizations, are presented and the associated operational benefits highlighted.

Application of the dynamically allocated virtual clustering management system to emulated tactical network experimentation

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Marcus, Kelvin

2014-06-01

The U.S Army Research Laboratory (ARL) has built a "Network Science Research Lab" to support research that aims to improve their ability to analyze, predict, design, and govern complex systems that interweave the social/cognitive, information, and communication network genres. Researchers at ARL and the Network Science Collaborative Technology Alliance (NS-CTA), a collaborative research alliance funded by ARL, conducted experimentation to determine if automated network monitoring tools and task-aware agents deployed within an emulated tactical wireless network could potentially increase the retrieval of relevant data from heterogeneous distributed information nodes. ARL and NS-CTA required the capability to perform this experimentation over clusters of heterogeneous nodes with emulated wireless tactical networks where each node could contain different operating systems, application sets, and physical hardware attributes. Researchers utilized the Dynamically Allocated Virtual Clustering Management System (DAVC) to address each of the infrastructure support requirements necessary in conducting their experimentation. The DAVC is an experimentation infrastructure that provides the means to dynamically create, deploy, and manage virtual clusters of heterogeneous nodes within a cloud computing environment based upon resource utilization such as CPU load, available RAM and hard disk space. The DAVC uses 802.1Q Virtual LANs (VLANs) to prevent experimentation crosstalk and to allow for complex private networks. Clusters created by the DAVC system can be utilized for software development, experimentation, and integration with existing hardware and software. The goal of this paper is to explore how ARL and the NS-CTA leveraged the DAVC to create, deploy and manage multiple experimentation clusters to support their experimentation goals.

Software Defined Networking challenges and future direction: A case study of implementing SDN features on OpenStack private cloud

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Shamugam, Veeramani; Murray, I.; Leong, J. A.; Sidhu, Amandeep S.

2016-03-01

Cloud computing provides services on demand instantly, such as access to network infrastructure consisting of computing hardware, operating systems, network storage, database and applications. Network usage and demands are growing at a very fast rate and to meet the current requirements, there is a need for automatic infrastructure scaling. Traditional networks are difficult to automate because of the distributed nature of their decision making process for switching or routing which are collocated on the same device. Managing complex environments using traditional networks is time-consuming and expensive, especially in the case of generating virtual machines, migration and network configuration. To mitigate the challenges, network operations require efficient, flexible, agile and scalable software defined networks (SDN). This paper discuss various issues in SDN and suggests how to mitigate the network management related issues. A private cloud prototype test bed was setup to implement the SDN on the OpenStack platform to test and evaluate the various network performances provided by the various configurations.

Data Mining as a Service (DMaaS)

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Tejedor, E.; Piparo, D.; Mascetti, L.; Moscicki, J.; Lamanna, M.; Mato, P.

2016-10-01

Data Mining as a Service (DMaaS) is a software and computing infrastructure that allows interactive mining of scientific data in the cloud. It allows users to run advanced data analyses by leveraging the widely adopted Jupyter notebook interface. Furthermore, the system makes it easier to share results and scientific code, access scientific software, produce tutorials and demonstrations as well as preserve the analyses of scientists. This paper describes how a first pilot of the DMaaS service is being deployed at CERN, starting from the notebook interface that has been fully integrated with the ROOT analysis framework, in order to provide all the tools for scientists to run their analyses. Additionally, we characterise the service backend, which combines a set of IT services such as user authentication, virtual computing infrastructure, mass storage, file synchronisation, development portals or batch systems. The added value acquired by the combination of the aforementioned categories of services is discussed, focusing on the opportunities offered by the CERNBox synchronisation service and its massive storage backend, EOS.

Service-Oriented Architecture for NVO and TeraGrid Computing

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Jacob, Joseph; Miller, Craig; Williams, Roy; Steenberg, Conrad; Graham, Matthew

2008-01-01

The National Virtual Observatory (NVO) Extensible Secure Scalable Service Infrastructure (NESSSI) is a Web service architecture and software framework that enables Web-based astronomical data publishing and processing on grid computers such as the National Science Foundation's TeraGrid. Characteristics of this architecture include the following: (1) Services are created, managed, and upgraded by their developers, who are trusted users of computing platforms on which the services are deployed. (2) Service jobs can be initiated by means of Java or Python client programs run on a command line or with Web portals. (3) Access is granted within a graduated security scheme in which the size of a job that can be initiated depends on the level of authentication of the user.

The Virtual Watershed Observatory: Cyberinfrastructure for Model-Data Integration and Access

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Duffy, C.; Leonard, L. N.; Giles, L.; Bhatt, G.; Yu, X.

2011-12-01

The Virtual Watershed Observatory (VWO) is a concept where scientists, water managers, educators and the general public can create a virtual observatory from integrated hydrologic model results, national databases and historical or real-time observations via web services. In this paper, we propose a prototype for automated and virtualized web services software using national data products for climate reanalysis, soils, geology, terrain and land cover. The VWO has the broad purpose of making accessible water resource simulations, real-time data assimilation, calibration and archival at the scale of HUC 12 watersheds (Hydrologic Unit Code) anywhere in the continental US. Our prototype for model-data integration focuses on creating tools for fast data storage from selected national databases, as well as the computational resources necessary for a dynamic, distributed watershed simulation. The paper will describe cyberinfrastructure tools and workflow that attempts to resolve the problem of model-data accessibility and scalability such that individuals, research teams, managers and educators can create a WVO in a desired context. Examples are given for the NSF-funded Shale Hills Critical Zone Observatory and the European Critical Zone Observatories within the SoilTrEC project. In the future implementation of WVO services will benefit from the development of a cloud cyber infrastructure as the prototype evolves to data and model intensive computation for continental scale water resource predictions.

Life science research and drug discovery at the turn of the 21st century: the experience of SwissBioGrid.

PubMed

den Besten, Matthijs; Thomas, Arthur J; Schroeder, Ralph

2009-04-22

It is often said that the life sciences are transforming into an information science. As laboratory experiments are starting to yield ever increasing amounts of data and the capacity to deal with those data is catching up, an increasing share of scientific activity is seen to be taking place outside the laboratories, sifting through the data and modelling "in silico" the processes observed "in vitro." The transformation of the life sciences and similar developments in other disciplines have inspired a variety of initiatives around the world to create technical infrastructure to support the new scientific practices that are emerging. The e-Science programme in the United Kingdom and the NSF Office for Cyberinfrastructure are examples of these. In Switzerland there have been no such national initiatives. Yet, this has not prevented scientists from exploring the development of similar types of computing infrastructures. In 2004, a group of researchers in Switzerland established a project, SwissBioGrid, to explore whether Grid computing technologies could be successfully deployed within the life sciences. This paper presents their experiences as a case study of how the life sciences are currently operating as an information science and presents the lessons learned about how existing institutional and technical arrangements facilitate or impede this operation. SwissBioGrid gave rise to two pilot projects: one for proteomics data analysis and the other for high-throughput molecular docking ("virtual screening") to find new drugs for neglected diseases (specifically, for dengue fever). The proteomics project was an example of a data management problem, applying many different analysis algorithms to Terabyte-sized datasets from mass spectrometry, involving comparisons with many different reference databases; the virtual screening project was more a purely computational problem, modelling the interactions of millions of small molecules with a limited number of protein targets on the coat of the dengue virus. Both present interesting lessons about how scientific practices are changing when they tackle the problems of large-scale data analysis and data management by means of creating a novel technical infrastructure. In the experience of SwissBioGrid, data intensive discovery has a lot to gain from close collaboration with industry and harnessing distributed computing power. Yet the diversity in life science research implies only a limited role for generic infrastructure; and the transience of support means that researchers need to integrate their efforts with others if they want to sustain the benefits of their success, which are otherwise lost.

A case analysis of INFOMED: the Cuban national health care telecommunications network and portal.

PubMed

Séror, Ann C

2006-01-27

The Internet and telecommunications technologies contribute to national health care system infrastructures and extend global health care services markets. The Cuban national health care system offers a model to show how a national information portal can contribute to system integration, including research, education, and service delivery as well as international trade in products and services. The objectives of this paper are (1) to present the context of the Cuban national health care system since the revolution in 1959, (2) to identify virtual institutional infrastructures of the system associated with the Cuban National Health Care Telecommunications Network and Portal (INFOMED), and (3) to show how they contribute to Cuban trade in international health care service markets. Qualitative case research methods were used to identify the integrated virtual infrastructure of INFOMED and to show how it reflects socialist ideology. Virtual institutional infrastructures include electronic medical and information services and the structure of national networks linking such services. Analysis of INFOMED infrastructures shows integration of health care information, research, and education as well as the interface between Cuban national information networks and the global Internet. System control mechanisms include horizontal integration and coordination through virtual institutions linked through INFOMED, and vertical control through the Ministry of Public Health and the government hierarchy. Telecommunications technology serves as a foundation for a dual market structure differentiating domestic services from international trade. INFOMED is a model of interest for integrating health care information, research, education, and services. The virtual infrastructures linked through INFOMED support the diffusion of Cuban health care products and services in global markets. Transferability of this model is contingent upon ideology and interpretation of values such as individual intellectual property and confidentiality of individual health information. Future research should focus on examination of these issues and their consequences for global markets in health care.

A Case Analysis of INFOMED: The Cuban National Health Care Telecommunications Network and Portal

PubMed Central

2006-01-01

Background The Internet and telecommunications technologies contribute to national health care system infrastructures and extend global health care services markets. The Cuban national health care system offers a model to show how a national information portal can contribute to system integration, including research, education, and service delivery as well as international trade in products and services. Objective The objectives of this paper are (1) to present the context of the Cuban national health care system since the revolution in 1959, (2) to identify virtual institutional infrastructures of the system associated with the Cuban National Health Care Telecommunications Network and Portal (INFOMED), and (3) to show how they contribute to Cuban trade in international health care service markets. Methods Qualitative case research methods were used to identify the integrated virtual infrastructure of INFOMED and to show how it reflects socialist ideology. Virtual institutional infrastructures include electronic medical and information services and the structure of national networks linking such services. Results Analysis of INFOMED infrastructures shows integration of health care information, research, and education as well as the interface between Cuban national information networks and the global Internet. System control mechanisms include horizontal integration and coordination through virtual institutions linked through INFOMED, and vertical control through the Ministry of Public Health and the government hierarchy. Telecommunications technology serves as a foundation for a dual market structure differentiating domestic services from international trade. Conclusions INFOMED is a model of interest for integrating health care information, research, education, and services. The virtual infrastructures linked through INFOMED support the diffusion of Cuban health care products and services in global markets. Transferability of this model is contingent upon ideology and interpretation of values such as individual intellectual property and confidentiality of individual health information. Future research should focus on examination of these issues and their consequences for global markets in health care. PMID:16585025

In Silico Simulation of a Clinical Trial Concerning Tumour Response to Radiotherapy

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Dionysiou, Dimitra D.; Stamatakos, Georgios S.; Athanaileas, Theodoras E.; Merrychtas, Andreas; Kaklamani, Dimitra; Varvarigou, Theodora; Uzunoglu, Nikolaos

2008-11-01

The aim of this paper is to demonstrate how multilevel tumour growth and response to therapeutic treatment models can be used in order to simulate clinical trials, with the long-term intention of both better designing clinical studies and understanding their outcome based on basic biological science. For this purpose, an already developed computer simulation model of glioblastoma multiforme response to radiotherapy has been used and a clinical study concerning glioblastoma multiforme response to radiotherapy has been simulated. In order to facilitate the simulation of such virtual trials, a toolkit enabling the user-friendly execution of the simulations on grid infrastructures has been designed and developed. The results of the conducted virtual trial are in agreement with the outcome of the real clinical study.

Enabling Smart Manufacturing Research and Development using a Product Lifecycle Test Bed.

PubMed

Helu, Moneer; Hedberg, Thomas

2015-01-01

Smart manufacturing technologies require a cyber-physical infrastructure to collect and analyze data and information across the manufacturing enterprise. This paper describes a concept for a product lifecycle test bed built on a cyber-physical infrastructure that enables smart manufacturing research and development. The test bed consists of a Computer-Aided Technologies (CAx) Lab and a Manufacturing Lab that interface through the product model creating a "digital thread" of information across the product lifecycle. The proposed structure and architecture of the test bed is presented, which highlights the challenges and requirements of implementing a cyber-physical infrastructure for manufacturing. The novel integration of systems across the product lifecycle also helps identify the technologies and standards needed to enable interoperability between design, fabrication, and inspection. Potential research opportunities enabled by the test bed are also discussed, such as providing publicly accessible CAx and manufacturing reference data, virtual factory data, and a representative industrial environment for creating, prototyping, and validating smart manufacturing technologies.

Enabling Smart Manufacturing Research and Development using a Product Lifecycle Test Bed

PubMed Central

Helu, Moneer; Hedberg, Thomas

2017-01-01

Smart manufacturing technologies require a cyber-physical infrastructure to collect and analyze data and information across the manufacturing enterprise. This paper describes a concept for a product lifecycle test bed built on a cyber-physical infrastructure that enables smart manufacturing research and development. The test bed consists of a Computer-Aided Technologies (CAx) Lab and a Manufacturing Lab that interface through the product model creating a “digital thread” of information across the product lifecycle. The proposed structure and architecture of the test bed is presented, which highlights the challenges and requirements of implementing a cyber-physical infrastructure for manufacturing. The novel integration of systems across the product lifecycle also helps identify the technologies and standards needed to enable interoperability between design, fabrication, and inspection. Potential research opportunities enabled by the test bed are also discussed, such as providing publicly accessible CAx and manufacturing reference data, virtual factory data, and a representative industrial environment for creating, prototyping, and validating smart manufacturing technologies. PMID:28664167

77 FR 72673 - Critical Infrastructure Protection and Resilience Month, 2012

Federal Register 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014

2012-12-05

.... Cyber incidents can have devastating consequences on both physical and virtual infrastructure, which is... work within existing authorities to fortify our country against cyber risks, comprehensive legislation remains essential to improving infrastructure security, enhancing cyber information sharing between...

The EuroPhysiome, STEP and a roadmap for the virtual physiological human.

PubMed

Fenner, J W; Brook, B; Clapworthy, G; Coveney, P V; Feipel, V; Gregersen, H; Hose, D R; Kohl, P; Lawford, P; McCormack, K M; Pinney, D; Thomas, S R; Van Sint Jan, S; Waters, S; Viceconti, M

2008-09-13

Biomedical science and its allied disciplines are entering a new era in which computational methods and technologies are poised to play a prevalent role in supporting collaborative investigation of the human body. Within Europe, this has its focus in the virtual physiological human (VPH), which is an evolving entity that has emerged from the EuroPhysiome initiative and the strategy for the EuroPhysiome (STEP) consortium. The VPH is intended to be a solution to common infrastructure needs for physiome projects across the globe, providing a unifying architecture that facilitates integration and prediction, ultimately creating a framework capable of describing Homo sapiens in silico. The routine reliance of the biomedical industry, biomedical research and clinical practice on information technology (IT) highlights the importance of a tailor-made and robust IT infrastructure, but numerous challenges need to be addressed if the VPH is to become a mature technological reality. Appropriate investment will reap considerable rewards, since it is anticipated that the VPH will influence all sectors of society, with implications predominantly for improved healthcare, improved competitiveness in industry and greater understanding of (patho)physiological processes. This paper considers issues pertinent to the development of the VPH, highlighted by the work of the STEP consortium.

Consolidation of cloud computing in ATLAS

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Taylor, Ryan P.; Domingues Cordeiro, Cristovao Jose; Giordano, Domenico; Hover, John; Kouba, Tomas; Love, Peter; McNab, Andrew; Schovancova, Jaroslava; Sobie, Randall; ATLAS Collaboration

2017-10-01

Throughout the first half of LHC Run 2, ATLAS cloud computing has undergone a period of consolidation, characterized by building upon previously established systems, with the aim of reducing operational effort, improving robustness, and reaching higher scale. This paper describes the current state of ATLAS cloud computing. Cloud activities are converging on a common contextualization approach for virtual machines, and cloud resources are sharing monitoring and service discovery components. We describe the integration of Vacuum resources, streamlined usage of the Simulation at Point 1 cloud for offline processing, extreme scaling on Amazon compute resources, and procurement of commercial cloud capacity in Europe. Finally, building on the previously established monitoring infrastructure, we have deployed a real-time monitoring and alerting platform which coalesces data from multiple sources, provides flexible visualization via customizable dashboards, and issues alerts and carries out corrective actions in response to problems.

Moving Virtual Research Environments from high maintenance Stovepipes to Multi-purpose Sustainable Service-oriented Science Platforms

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Klump, Jens; Fraser, Ryan; Wyborn, Lesley; Friedrich, Carsten; Squire, Geoffrey; Barker, Michelle; Moloney, Glenn

2017-04-01

The researcher of today is likely to be part of a team distributed over multiple sites that will access data from an external repository and then process the data on a public or private cloud or even on a large centralised supercomputer. They are increasingly likely to use a mixture of their own code, third party software and libraries, or even access global community codes. These components will be connected into a Virtual Research Environments (VREs) that will enable members of the research team who are not co-located to actively work together at various scales to share data, models, tools, software, workflows, best practices, infrastructures, etc. Many VRE's are built in isolation: designed to meet a specific research program with components tightly coupled and not capable of being repurposed for other use cases - they are becoming 'stovepipes'. The limited number of users of some VREs also means that the cost of maintenance per researcher can be unacceptably high. The alternative is to develop service-oriented Science Platforms that enable multiple communities to develop specialised solutions for specific research programs. The platforms can offer access to data, software tools and processing infrastructures (cloud, supercomputers) through globally distributed, interconnected modules. In Australia, the Virtual Geophysics Laboratory (VGL) was initially built to enable a specific set of researchers in government agencies access to specific data sets and a limited number of tools, that is now rapidly evolving into a multi-purpose Earth science platform with access to an increased variety of data, a broader range of tools, users from more sectors and a diversity of computational infrastructures. The expansion has been relatively easy, because of the architecture whereby data, tools and compute resources are loosely coupled via interfaces that are built on international standards and accessed as services wherever possible. In recent years, investments in discoverability and accessibility of data via online services in Australia mean that data resources can be easily added to the virtual environments as and when required. Another key to increasing to reusability and uptake of the VRE is the capability to capturing workflows so that they can be reused and repurposed both within and beyond the community that that defined the original use case. Unfortunately, Software-as-a-Service in the research sector is not yet mature. In response, we developed a Scientific Software solutions Center (SSSC) that enables researchers to discover, deploy and then share computational codes, code snippets or processes both in a human and machine-readable manner. Growth has come not only from within the Earth science community but from the Australian Virtual Laboratory community which is building VREs for a diversity of communities such as astronomy, genomics, environment, humanities, climate etc. Components such as access control, provenance, visualisation, accounting etc. are common to all scientific domains and sharing of these across multiple domains reduces costs, but more importantly increases the ability to undertake interdisciplinary science. These efforts are transitioning VREs to more sustainable Service-oriented Science Platforms that can be delivered in an agile, adaptable manner for broader community interests.

LHC@Home: a BOINC-based volunteer computing infrastructure for physics studies at CERN

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Barranco, Javier; Cai, Yunhai; Cameron, David; Crouch, Matthew; Maria, Riccardo De; Field, Laurence; Giovannozzi, Massimo; Hermes, Pascal; Høimyr, Nils; Kaltchev, Dobrin; Karastathis, Nikos; Luzzi, Cinzia; Maclean, Ewen; McIntosh, Eric; Mereghetti, Alessio; Molson, James; Nosochkov, Yuri; Pieloni, Tatiana; Reid, Ivan D.; Rivkin, Lenny; Segal, Ben; Sjobak, Kyrre; Skands, Peter; Tambasco, Claudia; Veken, Frederik Van der; Zacharov, Igor

2017-12-01

The LHC@Home BOINC project has provided computing capacity for numerical simulations to researchers at CERN since 2004, and has since 2011 been expanded with a wider range of applications. The traditional CERN accelerator physics simulation code SixTrack enjoys continuing volunteers support, and thanks to virtualisation a number of applications from the LHC experiment collaborations and particle theory groups have joined the consolidated LHC@Home BOINC project. This paper addresses the challenges related to traditional and virtualized applications in the BOINC environment, and how volunteer computing has been integrated into the overall computing strategy of the laboratory through the consolidated LHC@Home service. Thanks to the computing power provided by volunteers joining LHC@Home, numerous accelerator beam physics studies have been carried out, yielding an improved understanding of charged particle dynamics in the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and its future upgrades. The main results are highlighted in this paper.

A Latency-Tolerant Partitioner for Distributed Computing on the Information Power Grid

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Das, Sajal K.; Harvey, Daniel J.; Biwas, Rupak; Kwak, Dochan (Technical Monitor)

2001-01-01

NASA's Information Power Grid (IPG) is an infrastructure designed to harness the power of graphically distributed computers, databases, and human expertise, in order to solve large-scale realistic computational problems. This type of a meta-computing environment is necessary to present a unified virtual machine to application developers that hides the intricacies of a highly heterogeneous environment and yet maintains adequate security. In this paper, we present a novel partitioning scheme. called MinEX, that dynamically balances processor workloads while minimizing data movement and runtime communication, for applications that are executed in a parallel distributed fashion on the IPG. We also analyze the conditions that are required for the IPG to be an effective tool for such distributed computations. Our results show that MinEX is a viable load balancer provided the nodes of the IPG are connected by a high-speed asynchronous interconnection network.

Practical application of game theory based production flow planning method in virtual manufacturing networks

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Olender, M.; Krenczyk, D.

2016-08-01

Modern enterprises have to react quickly to dynamic changes in the market, due to changing customer requirements and expectations. One of the key area of production management, that must continuously evolve by searching for new methods and tools for increasing the efficiency of manufacturing systems is the area of production flow planning and control. These aspects are closely connected with the ability to implement the concept of Virtual Enterprises (VE) and Virtual Manufacturing Network (VMN) in which integrated infrastructure of flexible resources are created. In the proposed approach, the players role perform the objects associated with the objective functions, allowing to solve the multiobjective production flow planning problems based on the game theory, which is based on the theory of the strategic situation. For defined production system and production order models ways of solving the problem of production route planning in VMN on computational examples for different variants of production flow is presented. Possible decision strategy to use together with an analysis of calculation results is shown.

Performance Studies on Distributed Virtual Screening

PubMed Central

Krüger, Jens; de la Garza, Luis; Kohlbacher, Oliver; Nagel, Wolfgang E.

2014-01-01

Virtual high-throughput screening (vHTS) is an invaluable method in modern drug discovery. It permits screening large datasets or databases of chemical structures for those structures binding possibly to a drug target. Virtual screening is typically performed by docking code, which often runs sequentially. Processing of huge vHTS datasets can be parallelized by chunking the data because individual docking runs are independent of each other. The goal of this work is to find an optimal splitting maximizing the speedup while considering overhead and available cores on Distributed Computing Infrastructures (DCIs). We have conducted thorough performance studies accounting not only for the runtime of the docking itself, but also for structure preparation. Performance studies were conducted via the workflow-enabled science gateway MoSGrid (Molecular Simulation Grid). As input we used benchmark datasets for protein kinases. Our performance studies show that docking workflows can be made to scale almost linearly up to 500 concurrent processes distributed even over large DCIs, thus accelerating vHTS campaigns significantly. PMID:25032219

Natural product-like virtual libraries: recursive atom-based enumeration.

PubMed

Yu, Melvin J

2011-03-28

A new molecular enumerator is described that allows chemically and architecturally diverse sets of natural product-like and drug-like structures to be generated from a core structure as simple as a single carbon atom or as complex as a polycyclic ring system. Integrated with a rudimentary machine-learning algorithm, the enumerator has the ability to assemble biased virtual libraries enriched in compounds predicted to meet target criteria. The ability to dynamically generate relatively small focused libraries in a recursive manner could reduce the computational time and infrastructure necessary to construct and manage extremely large static libraries. Depending on enumeration conditions, natural product-like structures can be produced with a wide range of heterocyclic and alicyclic ring assemblies. Because natural products represent a proven source of validated structures for identifying and designing new drug candidates, mimicking the structural and topological diversity found in nature with a dynamic set of virtual natural product-like compounds may facilitate the creation of new ideas for novel, biologically relevant lead structures in areas of uncharted chemical space.

Dynamic provisioning of a HEP computing infrastructure on a shared hybrid HPC system

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Meier, Konrad; Fleig, Georg; Hauth, Thomas; Janczyk, Michael; Quast, Günter; von Suchodoletz, Dirk; Wiebelt, Bernd

2016-10-01

Experiments in high-energy physics (HEP) rely on elaborate hardware, software and computing systems to sustain the high data rates necessary to study rare physics processes. The Institut fr Experimentelle Kernphysik (EKP) at KIT is a member of the CMS and Belle II experiments, located at the LHC and the Super-KEKB accelerators, respectively. These detectors share the requirement, that enormous amounts of measurement data must be processed and analyzed and a comparable amount of simulated events is required to compare experimental results with theoretical predictions. Classical HEP computing centers are dedicated sites which support multiple experiments and have the required software pre-installed. Nowadays, funding agencies encourage research groups to participate in shared HPC cluster models, where scientist from different domains use the same hardware to increase synergies. This shared usage proves to be challenging for HEP groups, due to their specialized software setup which includes a custom OS (often Scientific Linux), libraries and applications. To overcome this hurdle, the EKP and data center team of the University of Freiburg have developed a system to enable the HEP use case on a shared HPC cluster. To achieve this, an OpenStack-based virtualization layer is installed on top of a bare-metal cluster. While other user groups can run their batch jobs via the Moab workload manager directly on bare-metal, HEP users can request virtual machines with a specialized machine image which contains a dedicated operating system and software stack. In contrast to similar installations, in this hybrid setup, no static partitioning of the cluster into a physical and virtualized segment is required. As a unique feature, the placement of the virtual machine on the cluster nodes is scheduled by Moab and the job lifetime is coupled to the lifetime of the virtual machine. This allows for a seamless integration with the jobs sent by other user groups and honors the fairshare policies of the cluster. The developed thin integration layer between OpenStack and Moab can be adapted to other batch servers and virtualization systems, making the concept also applicable for other cluster operators. This contribution will report on the concept and implementation of an OpenStack-virtualized cluster used for HEP workflows. While the full cluster will be installed in spring 2016, a test-bed setup with 800 cores has been used to study the overall system performance and dedicated HEP jobs were run in a virtualized environment over many weeks. Furthermore, the dynamic integration of the virtualized worker nodes, depending on the workload at the institute's computing system, will be described.

Using IKAROS as a data transfer and management utility within the KM3NeT computing model

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Filippidis, Christos; Cotronis, Yiannis; Markou, Christos

2016-04-01

KM3NeT is a future European deep-sea research infrastructure hosting a new generation neutrino detectors that - located at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea - will open a new window on the universe and answer fundamental questions both in particle physics and astrophysics. IKAROS is a framework that enables creating scalable storage formations on-demand and helps addressing several limitations that the current file systems face when dealing with very large scale infrastructures. It enables creating ad-hoc nearby storage formations and can use a huge number of I/O nodes in order to increase the available bandwidth (I/O and network). IKAROS unifies remote and local access in the overall data flow, by permitting direct access to each I/O node. In this way we can handle the overall data flow at the network layer, limiting the interaction with the operating system. This approach allows virtually connecting, at the users level, the several different computing facilities used (Grids, Clouds, HPCs, Data Centers, Local computing Clusters and personal storage devices), on-demand, based on the needs, by using well known standards and protocols, like HTTP.

Global information infrastructure.

PubMed

Lindberg, D A

1994-01-01

The High Performance Computing and Communications Program (HPCC) is a multiagency federal initiative under the leadership of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, established by the High Performance Computing Act of 1991. It has been assigned a critical role in supporting the international collaboration essential to science and to health care. Goals of the HPCC are to extend USA leadership in high performance computing and networking technologies; to improve technology transfer for economic competitiveness, education, and national security; and to provide a key part of the foundation for the National Information Infrastructure. The first component of the National Institutes of Health to participate in the HPCC, the National Library of Medicine (NLM), recently issued a solicitation for proposals to address a range of issues, from privacy to 'testbed' networks, 'virtual reality,' and more. These efforts will build upon the NLM's extensive outreach program and other initiatives, including the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS), MEDLARS, and Grateful Med. New Internet search tools are emerging, such as Gopher and 'Knowbots'. Medicine will succeed in developing future intelligent agents to assist in utilizing computer networks. Our ability to serve patients is so often restricted by lack of information and knowledge at the time and place of medical decision-making. The new technologies, properly employed, will also greatly enhance our ability to serve the patient.

Working Group on Virtual Data Integration

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Williams, D. N.; Palanisamy, G.; van Dam, K. K.

2016-02-04

This report is the outcome of a workshop commissioned by the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Climate and Environmental Sciences Division (CESD) to examine current and future data infrastructure requirements foundational for achieving CESD scientific mission goals in advancing a robust, predictive understanding of Earth’s climate and environmental systems. Over the past several years, data volumes in CESD disciplines have risen sharply to unprecedented levels (tens of petabytes). Moreover, the complexity and diversity of this research data— including simulations, observations, and reanalysis— have grown significantly, posing new challenges for data capture, storage, verification, analysis, and integration. With the trends ofmore » increased data volume (in the hundreds of petabytes), more complex analysis processes, and growing cross-disciplinary collaborations, it is timely to investigate whether the CESD community has the computational and data support needed to fully realize the scientific potential of its data collections. In recognition of the challenges, a partnership is forming across CESD and among national and international agencies to examine the viability of creating an integrated, collaborative data infrastructure: a Virtual Laboratory. The overarching goal of this report is to identify the community’s key data technology requirements and high-priority development needs for sustaining and growing its scientific discovery potential. The report also aims to map these requirements to existing solutions and to identify gaps in current services, tools, and infrastructure that will need to be addressed in the short, medium, and long term to advance scientific progress.« less

Data And Informatics Working Group On Virtual Data Integration Workshop Report

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Williams, D. N.; Palanisamy, G.; Dam, K. K.

2015-10-13

This report is the outcome of a workshop that was commissioned by the Department of Energy’s Climate and Environmental Sciences Division (CESD) to examine current and future data infrastructure requirements that would be foundational to achieving CESD’s scientific mission goals. Over the past several years, data volumes in CESD disciplines have risen sharply to unprecedented levels (tens of petabytes). So too has the complexity and diversity of the research data (simulation, observation, and reanalysis) needing to be captured, stored, verified, analyzed, and integrated. With the trends of increased data volume (in the hundreds of petabytes), more complex analysis processes, andmore » growing crossdisciplinary collaborations, it is timely to investigate whether the CESD community has the right computational and data support to realize the full scientific potential from its data collections. In recognition of the challenges, a partnership is forming across CESD and with national and international agencies to investigate the viability of creating an integrated, collaborative data infrastructure: a virtual laboratory. The overarching goal of this report is to identify the community’s key data technology requirements and high-priority development needs for sustaining and growing their scientific discovery potential. The report also aims to map these requirements to existing solutions and to identify gaps in current services, tools, and infrastructure that will need to be addressed in the short, medium, and long term so as not to impede scientific progress« less

Design for Run-Time Monitor on Cloud Computing

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Kang, Mikyung; Kang, Dong-In; Yun, Mira; Park, Gyung-Leen; Lee, Junghoon

Cloud computing is a new information technology trend that moves computing and data away from desktops and portable PCs into large data centers. The basic principle of cloud computing is to deliver applications as services over the Internet as well as infrastructure. A cloud is the type of a parallel and distributed system consisting of a collection of inter-connected and virtualized computers that are dynamically provisioned and presented as one or more unified computing resources. The large-scale distributed applications on a cloud require adaptive service-based software, which has the capability of monitoring the system status change, analyzing the monitored information, and adapting its service configuration while considering tradeoffs among multiple QoS features simultaneously. In this paper, we design Run-Time Monitor (RTM) which is a system software to monitor the application behavior at run-time, analyze the collected information, and optimize resources on cloud computing. RTM monitors application software through library instrumentation as well as underlying hardware through performance counter optimizing its computing configuration based on the analyzed data.

Network Monitoring in the age of the Cloud

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Ciuffoletti, Augusto

Network virtualization plays a relevant role in provisioning an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), implementing the fabric that interconnects virtual components. We identify the standard protocol IEEE802.1Q, that describes Virtual LAN (VLAN) functionalities, as a cornerstone in this architecture.

Commissioning the CERN IT Agile Infrastructure with experiment workloads

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Medrano Llamas, Ramón; Harald Barreiro Megino, Fernando; Kucharczyk, Katarzyna; Kamil Denis, Marek; Cinquilli, Mattia

2014-06-01

In order to ease the management of their infrastructure, most of the WLCG sites are adopting cloud based strategies. In the case of CERN, the Tier 0 of the WLCG, is completely restructuring the resource and configuration management of their computing center under the codename Agile Infrastructure. Its goal is to manage 15,000 Virtual Machines by means of an OpenStack middleware in order to unify all the resources in CERN's two datacenters: the one placed in Meyrin and the new on in Wigner, Hungary. During the commissioning of this infrastructure, CERN IT is offering an attractive amount of computing resources to the experiments (800 cores for ATLAS and CMS) through a private cloud interface. ATLAS and CMS have joined forces to exploit them by running stress tests and simulation workloads since November 2012. This work will describe the experience of the first deployments of the current experiment workloads on the CERN private cloud testbed. The paper is organized as follows: the first section will explain the integration of the experiment workload management systems (WMS) with the cloud resources. The second section will revisit the performance and stress testing performed with HammerCloud in order to evaluate and compare the suitability for the experiment workloads. The third section will go deeper into the dynamic provisioning techniques, such as the use of the cloud APIs directly by the WMS. The paper finishes with a review of the conclusions and the challenges ahead.

Migrating EO/IR sensors to cloud-based infrastructure as service architectures

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Berglie, Stephen T.; Webster, Steven; May, Christopher M.

2014-06-01

The Night Vision Image Generator (NVIG), a product of US Army RDECOM CERDEC NVESD, is a visualization tool used widely throughout Army simulation environments to provide fully attributed synthesized, full motion video using physics-based sensor and environmental effects. The NVIG relies heavily on contemporary hardware-based acceleration and GPU processing techniques, which push the envelope of both enterprise and commodity-level hypervisor support for providing virtual machines with direct access to hardware resources. The NVIG has successfully been integrated into fully virtual environments where system architectures leverage cloudbased technologies to various extents in order to streamline infrastructure and service management. This paper details the challenges presented to engineers seeking to migrate GPU-bound processes, such as the NVIG, to virtual machines and, ultimately, Cloud-Based IAS architectures. In addition, it presents the path that led to success for the NVIG. A brief overview of Cloud-Based infrastructure management tool sets is provided, and several virtual desktop solutions are outlined. A discrimination is made between general purpose virtual desktop technologies compared to technologies that expose GPU-specific capabilities, including direct rendering and hard ware-based video encoding. Candidate hypervisor/virtual machine configurations that nominally satisfy the virtualized hardware-level GPU requirements of the NVIG are presented , and each is subsequently reviewed in light of its implications on higher-level Cloud management techniques. Implementation details are included from the hardware level, through the operating system, to the 3D graphics APls required by the NVIG and similar GPU-bound tools.

New Geodetic Infrastructure for Australia: The NCRIS / AuScope Geospatial Component

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Tregoning, P.; Watson, C. S.; Coleman, R.; Johnston, G.; Lovell, J.; Dickey, J.; Featherstone, W. E.; Rizos, C.; Higgins, M.; Priebbenow, R.

2009-12-01

In November 2006, the Australian Federal Government announced AUS15.8M in funding for geospatial research infrastructure through the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS). Funded within a broader capability area titled ‘Structure and Evolution of the Australian Continent’, NCRIS has provided a significant investment across Earth imaging, geochemistry, numerical simulation and modelling, the development of a virtual core library, and geospatial infrastructure. Known collectively as AuScope (www.auscope.org.au), this capability area has brought together Australian’s leading Earth scientists to decide upon the most pressing scientific issues and infrastructure needs for studying Earth systems and their impact on the Australian continent. Importantly and at the same time, the investment in geospatial infrastructure offers the opportunity to raise Australian geodetic science capability to the highest international level into the future. The geospatial component of AuScope builds onto the AUS15.8M of direct funding through the NCRIS process with significant in-kind and co-investment from universities and State/Territory and Federal government departments. The infrastructure to be acquired includes an FG5 absolute gravimeter, three gPhone relative gravimeters, three 12.1 m radio telescopes for geodetic VLBI, a continent-wide network of continuously operating geodetic quality GNSS receivers, a trial of a mobile SLR system and access to updated cluster computing facilities. We present an overview of the AuScope geospatial capability, review the current status of the infrastructure procurement and discuss some examples of the scientific research that will utilise the new geospatial infrastructure.

Evolution of A Distributed Live, Virtual, Constructive Environment for Human in the Loop Unmanned Aircraft Testing

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Murphy, James R.; Otto, Neil M.

2017-01-01

NASA's Unmanned Aircraft Systems Integration in the National Airspace System Project is conducting human in the loop simulations and flight testing intended to reduce barriers associated with enabling routine airspace access for unmanned aircraft. The primary focus of these tests is interaction of the unmanned aircraft pilot with the display of detect and avoid alerting and guidance information. The project's integrated test and evaluation team was charged with developing the test infrastructure. As with any development effort, compromises in the underlying system architecture and design were made to allow for the rapid prototyping and open-ended nature of the research. In order to accommodate these design choices, a distributed test environment was developed incorporating Live, Virtual, Constructive, (LVC) concepts. The LVC components form the core infrastructure support simulation of UAS operations by integrating live and virtual aircraft in a realistic air traffic environment. This LVC infrastructure enables efficient testing by leveraging the use of existing assets distributed across multiple NASA Centers. Using standard LVC concepts enable future integration with existing simulation infrastructure.

Evolution of A Distributed Live, Virtual, Constructive Environment for Human in the Loop Unmanned Aircraft Testing

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Murphy, Jim; Otto, Neil

2017-01-01

NASA's Unmanned Aircraft Systems Integration in the National Airspace System Project is conducting human in the loop simulations and flight testing intended to reduce barriers associated with enabling routine airspace access for unmanned aircraft. The primary focus of these tests is interaction of the unmanned aircraft pilot with the display of detect and avoid alerting and guidance information. The projects integrated test and evaluation team was charged with developing the test infrastructure. As with any development effort, compromises in the underlying system architecture and design were made to allow for the rapid prototyping and open-ended nature of the research. In order to accommodate these design choices, a distributed test environment was developed incorporating Live, Virtual, Constructive, (LVC) concepts. The LVC components form the core infrastructure support simulation of UAS operations by integrating live and virtual aircraft in a realistic air traffic environment. This LVC infrastructure enables efficient testing by leveraging the use of existing assets distributed across multiple NASA Centers. Using standard LVC concepts enable future integration with existing simulation infrastructure.

Advanced Optical Burst Switched Network Concepts

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Nejabati, Reza; Aracil, Javier; Castoldi, Piero; de Leenheer, Marc; Simeonidou, Dimitra; Valcarenghi, Luca; Zervas, Georgios; Wu, Jian

In recent years, as the bandwidth and the speed of networks have increased significantly, a new generation of network-based applications using the concept of distributed computing and collaborative services is emerging (e.g., Grid computing applications). The use of the available fiber and DWDM infrastructure for these applications is a logical choice offering huge amounts of cheap bandwidth and ensuring global reach of computing resources [230]. Currently, there is a great deal of interest in deploying optical circuit (wavelength) switched network infrastructure for distributed computing applications that require long-lived wavelength paths and address the specific needs of a small number of well-known users. Typical users are particle physicists who, due to their international collaborations and experiments, generate enormous amounts of data (Petabytes per year). These users require a network infrastructures that can support processing and analysis of large datasets through globally distributed computing resources [230]. However, providing wavelength granularity bandwidth services is not an efficient and scalable solution for applications and services that address a wider base of user communities with different traffic profiles and connectivity requirements. Examples of such applications may be: scientific collaboration in smaller scale (e.g., bioinformatics, environmental research), distributed virtual laboratories (e.g., remote instrumentation), e-health, national security and defense, personalized learning environments and digital libraries, evolving broadband user services (i.e., high resolution home video editing, real-time rendering, high definition interactive TV). As a specific example, in e-health services and in particular mammography applications due to the size and quantity of images produced by remote mammography, stringent network requirements are necessary. Initial calculations have shown that for 100 patients to be screened remotely, the network would have to securely transport 1.2 GB of data every 30 s [230]. According to the above explanation it is clear that these types of applications need a new network infrastructure and transport technology that makes large amounts of bandwidth at subwavelength granularity, storage, computation, and visualization resources potentially available to a wide user base for specified time durations. As these types of collaborative and network-based applications evolve addressing a wide range and large number of users, it is infeasible to build dedicated networks for each application type or category. Consequently, there should be an adaptive network infrastructure able to support all application types, each with their own access, network, and resource usage patterns. This infrastructure should offer flexible and intelligent network elements and control mechanism able to deploy new applications quickly and efficiently.

EGI-EUDAT integration activity - Pair data and high-throughput computing resources together

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Scardaci, Diego; Viljoen, Matthew; Vitlacil, Dejan; Fiameni, Giuseppe; Chen, Yin; sipos, Gergely; Ferrari, Tiziana

2016-04-01

EGI (www.egi.eu) is a publicly funded e-infrastructure put together to give scientists access to more than 530,000 logical CPUs, 200 PB of disk capacity and 300 PB of tape storage to drive research and innovation in Europe. The infrastructure provides both high throughput computing and cloud compute/storage capabilities. Resources are provided by about 350 resource centres which are distributed across 56 countries in Europe, the Asia-Pacific region, Canada and Latin America. EUDAT (www.eudat.eu) is a collaborative Pan-European infrastructure providing research data services, training and consultancy for researchers, research communities, research infrastructures and data centres. EUDAT's vision is to enable European researchers and practitioners from any research discipline to preserve, find, access, and process data in a trusted environment, as part of a Collaborative Data Infrastructure (CDI) conceived as a network of collaborating, cooperating centres, combining the richness of numerous community-specific data repositories with the permanence and persistence of some of Europe's largest scientific data centres. EGI and EUDAT, in the context of their flagship projects, EGI-Engage and EUDAT2020, started in March 2015 a collaboration to harmonise the two infrastructures, including technical interoperability, authentication, authorisation and identity management, policy and operations. The main objective of this work is to provide end-users with a seamless access to an integrated infrastructure offering both EGI and EUDAT services and, then, pairing data and high-throughput computing resources together. To define the roadmap of this collaboration, EGI and EUDAT selected a set of relevant user communities, already collaborating with both infrastructures, which could bring requirements and help to assign the right priorities to each of them. In this way, from the beginning, this activity has been really driven by the end users. The identified user communities are relevant European Research infrastructure in the field of Earth Science (EPOS and ICOS), Bioinformatics (BBMRI and ELIXIR) and Space Physics (EISCAT-3D). The first outcome of this activity has been the definition of a generic use case that captures the typical user scenario with respect the integrated use of the EGI and EUDAT infrastructures. This generic use case allows a user to instantiate a set of Virtual Machine images on the EGI Federated Cloud to perform computational jobs that analyse data previously stored on EUDAT long-term storage systems. The results of such analysis can be staged back to EUDAT storages, and if needed, allocated with Permanent identifyers (PIDs) for future use. The implementation of this generic use case requires the following integration activities between EGI and EUDAT: (1) harmonisation of the user authentication and authorisation models, (2) implementing interface connectors between the relevant EGI and EUDAT services, particularly EGI Cloud compute facilities and EUDAT long-term storage and PID systems. In the presentation, the collected user requirements and the implementation status of the universal use case will be showed. Furthermore, how the universal use case is currently applied to satisfy EPOS and ICOS needs will be described.

Crosstalk-aware virtual network embedding over inter-datacenter optical networks with few-mode fibers

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Huang, Haibin; Guo, Bingli; Li, Xin; Yin, Shan; Zhou, Yu; Huang, Shanguo

2017-12-01

Virtualization of datacenter (DC) infrastructures enables infrastructure providers (InPs) to provide novel services like virtual networks (VNs). Furthermore, optical networks have been employed to connect the metro-scale geographically distributed DCs. The synergistic virtualization of the DC infrastructures and optical networks enables the efficient VN service over inter-DC optical networks (inter-DCONs). While the capacity of the used standard single-mode fiber (SSMF) is limited by their nonlinear characteristics. Thus, mode-division multiplexing (MDM) technology based on few-mode fibers (FMFs) could be employed to increase the capacity of optical networks. Whereas, modal crosstalk (XT) introduced by optical fibers and components deployed in the MDM optical networks impacts the performance of VN embedding (VNE) over inter-DCONs with FMFs. In this paper, we propose a XT-aware VNE mechanism over inter-DCONs with FMFs. The impact of XT is considered throughout the VNE procedures. The simulation results show that the proposed XT-aware VNE can achieves better performances of blocking probability and spectrum utilization compared to conventional VNE mechanisms.

International Symposium on Grids and Clouds (ISGC) 2014

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

The International Symposium on Grids and Clouds (ISGC) 2014 will be held at Academia Sinica in Taipei, Taiwan from 23-28 March 2014, with co-located events and workshops. The conference is hosted by the Academia Sinica Grid Computing Centre (ASGC).“Bringing the data scientist to global e-Infrastructures” is the theme of ISGC 2014. The last decade has seen the phenomenal growth in the production of data in all forms by all research communities to produce a deluge of data from which information and knowledge need to be extracted. Key to this success will be the data scientist - educated to use advanced algorithms, applications and infrastructures - collaborating internationally to tackle society’s challenges. ISGC 2014 will bring together researchers working in all aspects of data science from different disciplines around the world to collaborate and educate themselves in the latest achievements and techniques being used to tackle the data deluge. In addition to the regular workshops, technical presentations and plenary keynotes, ISGC this year will focus on how to grow the data science community by considering the educational foundation needed for tomorrow’s data scientist. Topics of discussion include Physics (including HEP) and Engineering Applications, Biomedicine & Life Sciences Applications, Earth & Environmental Sciences & Biodiversity Applications, Humanities & Social Sciences Application, Virtual Research Environment (including Middleware, tools, services, workflow, ... etc.), Data Management, Big Data, Infrastructure & Operations Management, Infrastructure Clouds and Virtualisation, Interoperability, Business Models & Sustainability, Highly Distributed Computing Systems, and High Performance & Technical Computing (HPTC).

Using OSG Computing Resources with (iLC)Dirac

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Sailer, A.; Petric, M.; CLICdp Collaboration

2017-10-01

CPU cycles for small experiments and projects can be scarce, thus making use of all available resources, whether dedicated or opportunistic, is mandatory. While enabling uniform access to the LCG computing elements (ARC, CREAM), the DIRAC grid interware was not able to use OSG computing elements (GlobusCE, HTCondor-CE) without dedicated support at the grid site through so called ‘SiteDirectors’, which directly submit to the local batch system. This in turn requires additional dedicated effort for small experiments on the grid site. Adding interfaces to the OSG CEs through the respective grid middleware is therefore allowing accessing them within the DIRAC software without additional site-specific infrastructure. This enables greater use of opportunistic resources for experiments and projects without dedicated clusters or an established computing infrastructure with the DIRAC software. To allow sending jobs to HTCondor-CE and legacy Globus computing elements inside DIRAC the required wrapper classes were developed. Not only is the usage of these types of computing elements now completely transparent for all DIRAC instances, which makes DIRAC a flexible solution for OSG based virtual organisations, but it also allows LCG Grid Sites to move to the HTCondor-CE software, without shutting DIRAC based VOs out of their site. In these proceedings we detail how we interfaced the DIRAC system to the HTCondor-CE and Globus computing elements and explain the encountered obstacles and solutions developed, and how the linear collider community uses resources in the OSG.

Considerations for Software Defined Networking (SDN): Approaches and use cases

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Bakshi, K.

Software Defined Networking (SDN) is an evolutionary approach to network design and functionality based on the ability to programmatically modify the behavior of network devices. SDN uses user-customizable and configurable software that's independent of hardware to enable networked systems to expand data flow control. SDN is in large part about understanding and managing a network as a unified abstraction. It will make networks more flexible, dynamic, and cost-efficient, while greatly simplifying operational complexity. And this advanced solution provides several benefits including network and service customizability, configurability, improved operations, and increased performance. There are several approaches to SDN and its practical implementation. Among them, two have risen to prominence with differences in pedigree and implementation. This paper's main focus will be to define, review, and evaluate salient approaches and use cases of the OpenFlow and Virtual Network Overlay approaches to SDN. OpenFlow is a communication protocol that gives access to the forwarding plane of a network's switches and routers. The Virtual Network Overlay relies on a completely virtualized network infrastructure and services to abstract the underlying physical network, which allows the overlay to be mobile to other physical networks. This is an important requirement for cloud computing, where applications and associated network services are migrated to cloud service providers and remote data centers on the fly as resource demands dictate. The paper will discuss how and where SDN can be applied and implemented, including research and academia, virtual multitenant data center, and cloud computing applications. Specific attention will be given to the cloud computing use case, where automated provisioning and programmable overlay for scalable multi-tenancy is leveraged via the SDN approach.

Knowledge-Based Environmental Context Modeling

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Pukite, P. R.; Challou, D. J.

2017-12-01

As we move from the oil-age to an energy infrastructure based on renewables, the need arises for new educational tools to support the analysis of geophysical phenomena and their behavior and properties. Our objective is to present models of these phenomena to make them amenable for incorporation into more comprehensive analysis contexts. Starting at the level of a college-level computer science course, the intent is to keep the models tractable and therefore practical for student use. Based on research performed via an open-source investigation managed by DARPA and funded by the Department of Interior [1], we have adapted a variety of physics-based environmental models for a computer-science curriculum. The original research described a semantic web architecture based on patterns and logical archetypal building-blocks (see figure) well suited for a comprehensive environmental modeling framework. The patterns span a range of features that cover specific land, atmospheric and aquatic domains intended for engineering modeling within a virtual environment. The modeling engine contained within the server relied on knowledge-based inferencing capable of supporting formal terminology (through NASA JPL's Semantic Web for Earth and Environmental Technology (SWEET) ontology and a domain-specific language) and levels of abstraction via integrated reasoning modules. One of the key goals of the research was to simplify models that were ordinarily computationally intensive to keep them lightweight enough for interactive or virtual environment contexts. The breadth of the elements incorporated is well-suited for learning as the trend toward ontologies and applying semantic information is vital for advancing an open knowledge infrastructure. As examples of modeling, we have covered such geophysics topics as fossil-fuel depletion, wind statistics, tidal analysis, and terrain modeling, among others. Techniques from the world of computer science will be necessary to promote efficient use of our renewable natural resources. [1] C2M2L (Component, Context, and Manufacturing Model Library) Final Report, https://doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.1.4956.3604

Augmenting Trust Establishment in Dynamic Systems with Social Networks

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Lagesse, Brent J; Kumar, Mohan; Venkatesh, Svetha

2010-01-01

Social networking has recently flourished in popularity through the use of social websites. Pervasive computing resources have allowed people stay well-connected to each other through access to social networking resources. We take the position that utilizing information produced by relationships within social networks can assist in the establishment of trust for other pervasive computing applications. Furthermore, we describe how such a system can augment a sensor infrastructure used for event observation with information from mobile sensors (ie, mobile phones with cameras) controlled by potentially untrusted third parties. Pervasive computing systems are invisible systems, oriented around the user. As a result,more » many future pervasive systems are likely to include a social aspect to the system. The social communities that are developed in these systems can augment existing trust mechanisms with information about pre-trusted entities or entities to initially consider when beginning to establish trust. An example of such a system is the Collaborative Virtual Observation (CoVO) system fuses sensor information from disaparate sources in soft real-time to recreate a scene that provides observation of an event that has recently transpired. To accomplish this, CoVO must efficently access services whilst protecting the data from corruption from unknown remote nodes. CoVO combines dynamic service composition with virtual observation to utilize existing infrastructure with third party services available in the environment. Since these services are not under the control of the system, they may be unreliable or malicious. When an event of interest occurs, the given infrastructure (bus cameras, etc.) may not sufficiently cover the necessary information (be it in space, time, or sensor type). To enhance observation of the event, infrastructure is augmented with information from sensors in the environment that the infrastructure does not control. These sensors may be unreliable, uncooperative, or even malicious. Additionally, to execute queries in soft real-time, processing must be distributed to available systems in the environment. We propose to use information from social networks to satisfy these requirements. In this paper, we present our position that knowledge gained from social activities can be used to augment trust mechanisms in pervasive computing. The system uses social behavior of nodes to predict a subset that it wants to query for information. In this context, social behavior such as transit patterns and schedules (which can be used to determine if a queried node is likely to be reliable) or known relationships, such as a phone's address book, that can be used to determine networks of nodes that may also be able to assist in retrieving information. Neither implicit nor explicit relationships necessarily imply that the user trusts an entity, but rather will provide a starting place for establishing trust. The proposed framework utilizes social network information to assist in trust establishment when third-party sensors are used for sensing events.« less

On-demand provisioning of HEP compute resources on cloud sites and shared HPC centers

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Erli, G.; Fischer, F.; Fleig, G.; Giffels, M.; Hauth, T.; Quast, G.; Schnepf, M.; Heese, J.; Leppert, K.; Arnaez de Pedro, J.; Sträter, R.

2017-10-01

This contribution reports on solutions, experiences and recent developments with the dynamic, on-demand provisioning of remote computing resources for analysis and simulation workflows. Local resources of a physics institute are extended by private and commercial cloud sites, ranging from the inclusion of desktop clusters over institute clusters to HPC centers. Rather than relying on dedicated HEP computing centers, it is nowadays more reasonable and flexible to utilize remote computing capacity via virtualization techniques or container concepts. We report on recent experience from incorporating a remote HPC center (NEMO Cluster, Freiburg University) and resources dynamically requested from the commercial provider 1&1 Internet SE into our intitute’s computing infrastructure. The Freiburg HPC resources are requested via the standard batch system, allowing HPC and HEP applications to be executed simultaneously, such that regular batch jobs run side by side to virtual machines managed via OpenStack [1]. For the inclusion of the 1&1 commercial resources, a Python API and SDK as well as the possibility to upload images were available. Large scale tests prove the capability to serve the scientific use case in the European 1&1 datacenters. The described environment at the Institute of Experimental Nuclear Physics (IEKP) at KIT serves the needs of researchers participating in the CMS and Belle II experiments. In total, resources exceeding half a million CPU hours have been provided by remote sites.

Graphic-based musculoskeletal model for biomechanical analyses and animation.

PubMed

Chao, Edmund Y S

2003-04-01

The ability to combine physiology and engineering analyses with computer sciences has opened the door to the possibility of creating the 'Virtual Human' reality. This paper presents a broad foundation for a full-featured biomechanical simulator for the human musculoskeletal system physiology. This simulation technology unites the expertise in biomechanical analysis and graphic modeling to investigate joint and connective tissue mechanics at the structural level and to visualize the results in both static and animated forms together with the model. Adaptable anatomical models including prosthetic implants and fracture fixation devices and a robust computational infrastructure for static, kinematic, kinetic, and stress analyses under varying boundary and loading conditions are incorporated on a common platform, the VIMS (Virtual Interactive Musculoskeletal System). Within this software system, a manageable database containing long bone dimensions, connective tissue material properties and a library of skeletal joint system functional activities and loading conditions are also available and they can easily be modified, updated and expanded. Application software is also available to allow end-users to perform biomechanical analyses interactively. This paper details the design, capabilities, and features of the VIMS development at Johns Hopkins University, an effort possible only through academic and commercial collaborations. Examples using these models and the computational algorithms in a virtual laboratory environment are used to demonstrate the utility of this unique database and simulation technology. This integrated system will impact on medical education, basic research, device development and application, and clinical patient care related to musculoskeletal diseases, trauma, and rehabilitation.

A security-awareness virtual machine management scheme based on Chinese wall policy in cloud computing.

PubMed

Yu, Si; Gui, Xiaolin; Lin, Jiancai; Tian, Feng; Zhao, Jianqiang; Dai, Min

2014-01-01

Cloud computing gets increasing attention for its capacity to leverage developers from infrastructure management tasks. However, recent works reveal that side channel attacks can lead to privacy leakage in the cloud. Enhancing isolation between users is an effective solution to eliminate the attack. In this paper, to eliminate side channel attacks, we investigate the isolation enhancement scheme from the aspect of virtual machine (VM) management. The security-awareness VMs management scheme (SVMS), a VMs isolation enhancement scheme to defend against side channel attacks, is proposed. First, we use the aggressive conflict of interest relation (ACIR) and aggressive in ally with relation (AIAR) to describe user constraint relations. Second, based on the Chinese wall policy, we put forward four isolation rules. Third, the VMs placement and migration algorithms are designed to enforce VMs isolation between the conflict users. Finally, based on the normal distribution, we conduct a series of experiments to evaluate SVMS. The experimental results show that SVMS is efficient in guaranteeing isolation between VMs owned by conflict users, while the resource utilization rate decreases but not by much.

A Security-Awareness Virtual Machine Management Scheme Based on Chinese Wall Policy in Cloud Computing

PubMed Central

Gui, Xiaolin; Lin, Jiancai; Tian, Feng; Zhao, Jianqiang; Dai, Min

2014-01-01

Cloud computing gets increasing attention for its capacity to leverage developers from infrastructure management tasks. However, recent works reveal that side channel attacks can lead to privacy leakage in the cloud. Enhancing isolation between users is an effective solution to eliminate the attack. In this paper, to eliminate side channel attacks, we investigate the isolation enhancement scheme from the aspect of virtual machine (VM) management. The security-awareness VMs management scheme (SVMS), a VMs isolation enhancement scheme to defend against side channel attacks, is proposed. First, we use the aggressive conflict of interest relation (ACIR) and aggressive in ally with relation (AIAR) to describe user constraint relations. Second, based on the Chinese wall policy, we put forward four isolation rules. Third, the VMs placement and migration algorithms are designed to enforce VMs isolation between the conflict users. Finally, based on the normal distribution, we conduct a series of experiments to evaluate SVMS. The experimental results show that SVMS is efficient in guaranteeing isolation between VMs owned by conflict users, while the resource utilization rate decreases but not by much. PMID:24688434

Selecting a Virtual World Platform for Learning

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Robbins, Russell W.; Butler, Brian S.

2009-01-01

Like any infrastructure technology, Virtual World (VW) platforms provide affordances that facilitate some activities and hinder others. Although it is theoretically possible for a VW platform to support all types of activities, designers make choices that lead technologies to be more or less suited for different learning objectives. Virtual World…

Improving Virtual Collaborative Learning through Canonical Action Research

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Weber, Peter; Lehr, Christian; Gersch, Martin

2014-01-01

Virtual collaboration continues to gain in significance and is attracting attention also as virtual collaborative learning (VCL) in education. This paper addresses aspects of VCL that we identified as critical in a series of courses named "Net Economy": (1) technical infrastructure, (2) motivation and collaboration, and (3) assessment…

Immersive virtual reality for visualization of abdominal CT

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Lin, Qiufeng; Xu, Zhoubing; Li, Bo; Baucom, Rebeccah; Poulose, Benjamin; Landman, Bennett A.; Bodenheimer, Robert E.

2013-03-01

Immersive virtual environments use a stereoscopic head-mounted display and data glove to create high fidelity virtual experiences in which users can interact with three-dimensional models and perceive relationships at their true scale. This stands in stark contrast to traditional PACS-based infrastructure in which images are viewed as stacks of two dimensional slices, or, at best, disembodied renderings. Although there has substantial innovation in immersive virtual environments for entertainment and consumer media, these technologies have not been widely applied in clinical applications. Here, we consider potential applications of immersive virtual environments for ventral hernia patients with abdominal computed tomography imaging data. Nearly a half million ventral hernias occur in the United States each year, and hernia repair is the most commonly performed general surgery operation worldwide. A significant problem in these conditions is communicating the urgency, degree of severity, and impact of a hernia (and potential repair) on patient quality of life. Hernias are defined by ruptures in the abdominal wall (i.e., the absence of healthy tissues) rather than a growth (e.g., cancer); therefore, understanding a hernia necessitates understanding the entire abdomen. Our environment allows surgeons and patients to view body scans at scale and interact with these virtual models using a data glove. This visualization and interaction allows users to perceive the relationship between physical structures and medical imaging data. The system provides close integration of PACS-based CT data with immersive virtual environments and creates opportunities to study and optimize interfaces for patient communication, operative planning, and medical education.

Immersive Virtual Reality for Visualization of Abdominal CT.

PubMed

Lin, Qiufeng; Xu, Zhoubing; Li, Bo; Baucom, Rebeccah; Poulose, Benjamin; Landman, Bennett A; Bodenheimer, Robert E

2013-03-28

Immersive virtual environments use a stereoscopic head-mounted display and data glove to create high fidelity virtual experiences in which users can interact with three-dimensional models and perceive relationships at their true scale. This stands in stark contrast to traditional PACS-based infrastructure in which images are viewed as stacks of two-dimensional slices, or, at best, disembodied renderings. Although there has substantial innovation in immersive virtual environments for entertainment and consumer media, these technologies have not been widely applied in clinical applications. Here, we consider potential applications of immersive virtual environments for ventral hernia patients with abdominal computed tomography imaging data. Nearly a half million ventral hernias occur in the United States each year, and hernia repair is the most commonly performed general surgery operation worldwide. A significant problem in these conditions is communicating the urgency, degree of severity, and impact of a hernia (and potential repair) on patient quality of life. Hernias are defined by ruptures in the abdominal wall (i.e., the absence of healthy tissues) rather than a growth (e.g., cancer); therefore, understanding a hernia necessitates understanding the entire abdomen. Our environment allows surgeons and patients to view body scans at scale and interact with these virtual models using a data glove. This visualization and interaction allows users to perceive the relationship between physical structures and medical imaging data. The system provides close integration of PACS-based CT data with immersive virtual environments and creates opportunities to study and optimize interfaces for patient communication, operative planning, and medical education.

GATECloud.net: a platform for large-scale, open-source text processing on the cloud.

PubMed

Tablan, Valentin; Roberts, Ian; Cunningham, Hamish; Bontcheva, Kalina

2013-01-28

Cloud computing is increasingly being regarded as a key enabler of the 'democratization of science', because on-demand, highly scalable cloud computing facilities enable researchers anywhere to carry out data-intensive experiments. In the context of natural language processing (NLP), algorithms tend to be complex, which makes their parallelization and deployment on cloud platforms a non-trivial task. This study presents a new, unique, cloud-based platform for large-scale NLP research--GATECloud. net. It enables researchers to carry out data-intensive NLP experiments by harnessing the vast, on-demand compute power of the Amazon cloud. Important infrastructural issues are dealt with by the platform, completely transparently for the researcher: load balancing, efficient data upload and storage, deployment on the virtual machines, security and fault tolerance. We also include a cost-benefit analysis and usage evaluation.

Toward a Proof of Concept Cloud Framework for Physics Applications on Blue Gene Supercomputers

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Dreher, Patrick; Scullin, William; Vouk, Mladen

2015-09-01

Traditional high performance supercomputers are capable of delivering large sustained state-of-the-art computational resources to physics applications over extended periods of time using batch processing mode operating environments. However, today there is an increasing demand for more complex workflows that involve large fluctuations in the levels of HPC physics computational requirements during the simulations. Some of the workflow components may also require a richer set of operating system features and schedulers than normally found in a batch oriented HPC environment. This paper reports on progress toward a proof of concept design that implements a cloud framework onto BG/P and BG/Q platforms at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility. The BG/P implementation utilizes the Kittyhawk utility and the BG/Q platform uses an experimental heterogeneous FusedOS operating system environment. Both platforms use the Virtual Computing Laboratory as the cloud computing system embedded within the supercomputer. This proof of concept design allows a cloud to be configured so that it can capitalize on the specialized infrastructure capabilities of a supercomputer and the flexible cloud configurations without resorting to virtualization. Initial testing of the proof of concept system is done using the lattice QCD MILC code. These types of user reconfigurable environments have the potential to deliver experimental schedulers and operating systems within a working HPC environment for physics computations that may be different from the native OS and schedulers on production HPC supercomputers.

Brokered virtual hubs for facilitating access and use of geospatial Open Data

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Mazzetti, Paolo; Latre, Miguel; Kamali, Nargess; Brumana, Raffaella; Braumann, Stefan; Nativi, Stefano

2016-04-01

Open Data is a major trend in current information technology scenario and it is often publicised as one of the pillars of the information society in the near future. In particular, geospatial Open Data have a huge potential also for Earth Sciences, through the enablement of innovative applications and services integrating heterogeneous information. However, open does not mean usable. As it was recognized at the very beginning of the Web revolution, many different degrees of openness exist: from simple sharing in a proprietary format to advanced sharing in standard formats and including semantic information. Therefore, to fully unleash the potential of geospatial Open Data, advanced infrastructures are needed to increase the data openness degree, enhancing their usability. In October 2014, the ENERGIC OD (European NEtwork for Redistributing Geospatial Information to user Communities - Open Data) project, funded by the European Union under the Competitiveness and Innovation framework Programme (CIP), has started. In response to the EU call, the general objective of the project is to "facilitate the use of open (freely available) geographic data from different sources for the creation of innovative applications and services through the creation of Virtual Hubs". The ENERGIC OD Virtual Hubs aim to facilitate the use of geospatial Open Data by lowering and possibly removing the main barriers which hampers geo-information (GI) usage by end-users and application developers. Data and services heterogeneity is recognized as one of the major barriers to Open Data (re-)use. It imposes end-users and developers to spend a lot of effort in accessing different infrastructures and harmonizing datasets. Such heterogeneity cannot be completely removed through the adoption of standard specifications for service interfaces, metadata and data models, since different infrastructures adopt different standards to answer to specific challenges and to address specific use-cases. Thus, beyond a certain extent, heterogeneity is irreducible especially in interdisciplinary contexts. ENERGIC OD Virtual Hubs address heterogeneity adopting a mediation and brokering approach: specific components (brokers) are dedicated to harmonize service interfaces, metadata and data models, enabling seamless discovery and access to heterogeneous infrastructures and datasets. As an innovation project, ENERGIC OD integrates several existing technologies to implement Virtual Hubs as single points of access to geospatial datasets provided by new or existing platforms and infrastructures, including INSPIRE-compliant systems and Copernicus services. A first version of the ENERGIC OD brokers has been implemented based on the GI-Suite Brokering Framework developed by CNR-IIA, and complemented with other tools under integration and development. It already enables mediated discovery and harmonized access to different geospatial Open Data sources. It is accessible by users as Software-as-a-Service through a browser. Moreover, open APIs and a Javascript library are available for application developers. Six ENERGIC OD Virtual Hubs have been currently deployed: one at regional level (Berlin metropolitan area) and five at national-level (in France, Germany, Italy, Poland and Spain). Each Virtual Hub manager decided the deployment strategy (local infrastructure or commercial Infrastructure-as-a-Service cloud), and the list of connected Open Data sources. The ENERGIC OD Virtual Hubs are under test and validation through the development of ten different mobile and Web applications.

A simple grid implementation with Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing using BLAST as a model

PubMed Central

Pinthong, Watthanai; Muangruen, Panya

2016-01-01

Development of high-throughput technologies, such as Next-generation sequencing, allows thousands of experiments to be performed simultaneously while reducing resource requirement. Consequently, a massive amount of experiment data is now rapidly generated. Nevertheless, the data are not readily usable or meaningful until they are further analysed and interpreted. Due to the size of the data, a high performance computer (HPC) is required for the analysis and interpretation. However, the HPC is expensive and difficult to access. Other means were developed to allow researchers to acquire the power of HPC without a need to purchase and maintain one such as cloud computing services and grid computing system. In this study, we implemented grid computing in a computer training center environment using Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) as a job distributor and data manager combining all desktop computers to virtualize the HPC. Fifty desktop computers were used for setting up a grid system during the off-hours. In order to test the performance of the grid system, we adapted the Basic Local Alignment Search Tools (BLAST) to the BOINC system. Sequencing results from Illumina platform were aligned to the human genome database by BLAST on the grid system. The result and processing time were compared to those from a single desktop computer and HPC. The estimated durations of BLAST analysis for 4 million sequence reads on a desktop PC, HPC and the grid system were 568, 24 and 5 days, respectively. Thus, the grid implementation of BLAST by BOINC is an efficient alternative to the HPC for sequence alignment. The grid implementation by BOINC also helped tap unused computing resources during the off-hours and could be easily modified for other available bioinformatics software. PMID:27547555

The ALICE Software Release Validation cluster

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Berzano, D.; Krzewicki, M.

2015-12-01

One of the most important steps of software lifecycle is Quality Assurance: this process comprehends both automatic tests and manual reviews, and all of them must pass successfully before the software is approved for production. Some tests, such as source code static analysis, are executed on a single dedicated service: in High Energy Physics, a full simulation and reconstruction chain on a distributed computing environment, backed with a sample “golden” dataset, is also necessary for the quality sign off. The ALICE experiment uses dedicated and virtualized computing infrastructures for the Release Validation in order not to taint the production environment (i.e. CVMFS and the Grid) with non-validated software and validation jobs: the ALICE Release Validation cluster is a disposable virtual cluster appliance based on CernVM and the Virtual Analysis Facility, capable of deploying on demand, and with a single command, a dedicated virtual HTCondor cluster with an automatically scalable number of virtual workers on any cloud supporting the standard EC2 interface. Input and output data are externally stored on EOS, and a dedicated CVMFS service is used to provide the software to be validated. We will show how the Release Validation Cluster deployment and disposal are completely transparent for the Release Manager, who simply triggers the validation from the ALICE build system's web interface. CernVM 3, based entirely on CVMFS, permits to boot any snapshot of the operating system in time: we will show how this allows us to certify each ALICE software release for an exact CernVM snapshot, addressing the problem of Long Term Data Preservation by ensuring a consistent environment for software execution and data reprocessing in the future.

Infrastructure and the Virtual Observatory

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Dowler, P.; Gaudet, S.; Schade, D.

2011-07-01

The modern data center is faced with architectural and software engineering challenges that grow along with the challenges facing observatories: massive data flow, distributed computing environments, and distributed teams collaborating on large and small projects. By using VO standards as key components of the infrastructure, projects can take advantage of a decade of intellectual investment by the IVOA community. By their nature, these standards are proven and tested designs that already exist. Adopting VO standards saves considerable design effort, allows projects to take advantage of open-source software and test suites to speed development, and enables the use of third party tools that understand the VO protocols. The evolving CADC architecture now makes heavy use of VO standards. We show examples of how these standards may be used directly, coupled with non-VO standards, or extended with custom capabilities to solve real problems and provide value to our users. In the end, we use VO services as major parts of the core infrastructure to reduce cost rather than as an extra layer with additional cost and we can deliver more general purpose and robust services to our user community.

A Mobile Virtual Butler to Bridge the Gap between Users and Ambient Assisted Living: A Smart Home Case Study

PubMed Central

Costa, Nuno; Domingues, Patricio; Fdez-Riverola, Florentino; Pereira, António

2014-01-01

Ambient Intelligence promises to transform current spaces into electronic environments that are responsive, assistive and sensitive to human presence. Those electronic environments will be fully populated with dozens, hundreds or even thousands of connected devices that share information and thus become intelligent. That massive wave of electronic devices will also invade everyday objects, turning them into smart entities, keeping their native features and characteristics while seamlessly promoting them to a new class of thinking and reasoning everyday objects. Although there are strong expectations that most of the users' needs can be fulfilled without their intervention, there are still situations where interaction is required. This paper presents work being done in the field of human-computer interaction, focusing on smart home environments, while being a part of a larger project called Aging Inside a Smart Home. This initiative arose as a way to deal with a large scourge of our country, where lots of elderly persons live alone in their homes, often with limited or no physical mobility. The project relies on the mobile agent computing paradigm in order to create a Virtual Butler that provides the interface between the elderly and the smart home infrastructure. The Virtual Butler is receptive to user questions, answering them according to the context and knowledge of the AISH. It is also capable of interacting with the user whenever it senses that something has gone wrong, notifying next of kin and/or medical services, etc. The Virtual Butler is aware of the user location and moves to the computing device which is closest to the user, in order to be always present. Its avatar can also run in handheld devices keeping its main functionality in order to track user when s/he goes out. According to the evaluation carried out, the Virtual Butler is assessed as a very interesting and loved digital friend, filling the gap between the user and the smart home. The evaluation also showed that the Virtual Butler concept can be easily ported to other types of possible smart and assistive environments like airports, hospitals, shopping malls, offices, etc. PMID:25102342

A mobile Virtual Butler to bridge the gap between users and ambient assisted living: a Smart Home case study.

PubMed

Costa, Nuno; Domingues, Patricio; Fdez-Riverola, Florentino; Pereira, António

2014-08-06

Ambient Intelligence promises to transform current spaces into electronic environments that are responsive, assistive and sensitive to human presence. Those electronic environments will be fully populated with dozens, hundreds or even thousands of connected devices that share information and thus become intelligent. That massive wave of electronic devices will also invade everyday objects, turning them into smart entities, keeping their native features and characteristics while seamlessly promoting them to a new class of thinking and reasoning everyday objects. Although there are strong expectations that most of the users' needs can be fulfilled without their intervention, there are still situations where interaction is required. This paper presents work being done in the field of human-computer interaction, focusing on smart home environments, while being a part of a larger project called Aging Inside a Smart Home. This initiative arose as a way to deal with a large scourge of our country, where lots of elderly persons live alone in their homes, often with limited or no physical mobility. The project relies on the mobile agent computing paradigm in order to create a Virtual Butler that provides the interface between the elderly and the smart home infrastructure. The Virtual Butler is receptive to user questions, answering them according to the context and knowledge of the AISH. It is also capable of interacting with the user whenever it senses that something has gone wrong, notifying next of kin and/or medical services, etc. The Virtual Butler is aware of the user location and moves to the computing device which is closest to the user, in order to be always present. Its avatar can also run in handheld devices keeping its main functionality in order to track user when s/he goes out. According to the evaluation carried out, the Virtual Butler is assessed as a very interesting and loved digital friend, filling the gap between the user and the smart home. The evaluation also showed that the Virtual Butler concept can be easily ported to other types of possible smart and assistive environments like airports, hospitals, shopping malls, offices, etc.

The performance of low-cost commercial cloud computing as an alternative in computational chemistry.

PubMed

Thackston, Russell; Fortenberry, Ryan C

2015-05-05

The growth of commercial cloud computing (CCC) as a viable means of computational infrastructure is largely unexplored for the purposes of quantum chemistry. In this work, the PSI4 suite of computational chemistry programs is installed on five different types of Amazon World Services CCC platforms. The performance for a set of electronically excited state single-point energies is compared between these CCC platforms and typical, "in-house" physical machines. Further considerations are made for the number of cores or virtual CPUs (vCPUs, for the CCC platforms), but no considerations are made for full parallelization of the program (even though parallelization of the BLAS library is implemented), complete high-performance computing cluster utilization, or steal time. Even with this most pessimistic view of the computations, CCC resources are shown to be more cost effective for significant numbers of typical quantum chemistry computations. Large numbers of large computations are still best utilized by more traditional means, but smaller-scale research may be more effectively undertaken through CCC services. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

clearScience: Infrastructure for Communicating Data-Intensive Science.

PubMed

Bot, Brian M; Burdick, David; Kellen, Michael; Huang, Erich S

2013-01-01

Progress in biomedical research requires effective scientific communication to one's peers and to the public. Current research routinely encompasses large datasets and complex analytic processes, and the constraints of traditional journal formats limit useful transmission of these elements. We are constructing a framework through which authors can not only provide the narrative of what was done, but the primary and derivative data, the source code, the compute environment, and web-accessible virtual machines. This infrastructure allows authors to "hand their machine"- prepopulated with libraries, data, and code-to those interested in reviewing or building off of their work. This project, "clearScience," seeks to provide an integrated system that accommodates the ad hoc nature of discovery in the data-intensive sciences and seamless transitions from working to reporting. We demonstrate that rather than merely describing the science being reported, one can deliver the science itself.

Design and deployment of hybrid-telemedicine applications

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Ikhu-Omoregbe, N. A.; Atayero, A. A.; Ayo, C. K.; Olugbara, O. O.

2005-01-01

With advances and availability of information and communication technology infrastructures in some nations and institutions, patients are now able to receive healthcare services from doctors and healthcare centers even when they are physically separated. The availability and transfer of patient data which often include medical images for specialist opinion is invaluable both to the patient and the medical practitioner in a telemedicine session. Two existing approaches to telemedicine are real-time and stored-and-forward. The real-time requires the availability or development of video-conferencing infrastructures which are expensive especially for most developing nations of the world while stored-and-forward could allow data transmission between any hospital with computer and telephone by landline link which is less expensive but with delays. We therefore propose a hybrid design of applications using hypermedia database capable of harnessing the features of real-time and stored-and-forward deployed over a wireless Virtual Private Network for the participating centers and healthcare providers.

Constructing a Foundational Platform Driven by Japan's K Supercomputer for Next-Generation Drug Design.

PubMed

Brown, J B; Nakatsui, Masahiko; Okuno, Yasushi

2014-12-01

The cost of pharmaceutical R&D has risen enormously, both worldwide and in Japan. However, Japan faces a particularly difficult situation in that its population is aging rapidly, and the cost of pharmaceutical R&D affects not only the industry but the entire medical system as well. To attempt to reduce costs, the newly launched K supercomputer is available for big data drug discovery and structural simulation-based drug discovery. We have implemented both primary (direct) and secondary (infrastructure, data processing) methods for the two types of drug discovery, custom tailored to maximally use the 88 128 compute nodes/CPUs of K, and evaluated the implementations. We present two types of results. In the first, we executed the virtual screening of nearly 19 billion compound-protein interactions, and calculated the accuracy of predictions against publicly available experimental data. In the second investigation, we implemented a very computationally intensive binding free energy algorithm, and found that comparison of our binding free energies was considerably accurate when validated against another type of publicly available experimental data. The common feature of both result types is the scale at which computations were executed. The frameworks presented in this article provide prospectives and applications that, while tuned to the computing resources available in Japan, are equally applicable to any equivalent large-scale infrastructure provided elsewhere. © 2014 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim.

10 Myths of Virtualization

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Schaffhauser, Dian

2012-01-01

Half of servers in higher ed are virtualized. But that number's not high enough for Link Alander, interim vice chancellor and CIO at the Lone Star College System (Texas). He aspires to see 100 percent of the system's infrastructure requirements delivered as IT services from its own virtualized data centers or other cloud-based operators. Back in…

Virtual Cultural Landscape Laboratory Based on Internet GIS Technology

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Bill, R.

2012-07-01

In recent years the transfer of old documents (books, paintings, maps etc.) from analogue to digital form has gained enormous importance. Numerous interventions are concentrated in the digitalisation of library collections, but also commercial companies like Microsoft or Google try to convert large analogue stocks such as books, paintings, etc. in digital form. Data in digital form can be much easier made accessible to a large user community, especially to the interested scientific community. The aim of the described research project is to set up a virtual research environment for interdisciplinary research focusing on the landscape of the historical Mecklenburg in the north-east of Germany. Georeferenced old maps from 1786 and 1890 covering complete Mecklenburg should be combined with current geo-information, satellite and aerial imagery to support spatio-temporal research aspects in different scales in space (regional 1:200,000 to local 1:25.000) and time (nearly 250 years in three time steps, the last 30 years also in three time slices). The Virtual Laboratory for Cultural Landscape Research (VKLandLab) is designed and developed by the Chair of Geodesy and Geoinformatics, hosted at the Computing Centre (ITMZ) and linked to the Digital Library (UB) at Rostock University. VKLandLab includes new developments such as wikis, blogs, data tagging, etc. and proven components already integrated in various data-related infrastructures such as InternetGIS, data repositories and authentication structures. The focus is to build a data-related infrastructure and a work platform that supports students as well as researchers from different disciplines in their research in space and time.

Tuning In: Challenging Design for Communities through a Field Study of Radio Amateurs

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Bogdan, Cristian; Bowers, John

As illustrated by the emerging field of Communities and Technologies, the topic of community, whether further qualified by ‘virtual' (Rheingold 1993), ‘on line' or ‘networked' (Schuler 1996), has become a major focus for field study, design, technical infrastructural provision, as well as social, psychological and economic theorising. Let us review some early examples of this ‘turn to community'. (1999) discuss the ‘network communities of SeniorNet', an organisation that supports people over the age of 50 in the use of computer networking technologies. The SeniorNet study highlights the complex ‘collage' of participation and interaction styles that community members sustain, many of which go beyond conventional understandings of older people, their practices and relations to technology. While the members of SeniorNet are geographically dispersed, (1996) describe the ‘Blacksburg Electronic Village', a local community computing initiative centred around Blacksburg, Virginia, USA. As long ago as 1994, (1994) claimed the existence of over 100 such projects in the US with very diverse aims and experiences but all concerned to be responsive to a community's needs while exploiting the Internet and the technical developments it has made possible. For their part, (2001) offer some generic infrastructural tools for community computing, including support for ‘identity management'.

Architecture of a spatial data service system for statistical analysis and visualization of regional climate changes

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Titov, A. G.; Okladnikov, I. G.; Gordov, E. P.

2017-11-01

The use of large geospatial datasets in climate change studies requires the development of a set of Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) elements, including geoprocessing and cartographical visualization web services. This paper presents the architecture of a geospatial OGC web service system as an integral part of a virtual research environment (VRE) general architecture for statistical processing and visualization of meteorological and climatic data. The architecture is a set of interconnected standalone SDI nodes with corresponding data storage systems. Each node runs a specialized software, such as a geoportal, cartographical web services (WMS/WFS), a metadata catalog, and a MySQL database of technical metadata describing geospatial datasets available for the node. It also contains geospatial data processing services (WPS) based on a modular computing backend realizing statistical processing functionality and, thus, providing analysis of large datasets with the results of visualization and export into files of standard formats (XML, binary, etc.). Some cartographical web services have been developed in a system’s prototype to provide capabilities to work with raster and vector geospatial data based on OGC web services. The distributed architecture presented allows easy addition of new nodes, computing and data storage systems, and provides a solid computational infrastructure for regional climate change studies based on modern Web and GIS technologies.

Open Science in the Cloud: Towards a Universal Platform for Scientific and Statistical Computing

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Chine, Karim

The UK, through the e-Science program, the US through the NSF-funded cyber infrastructure and the European Union through the ICT Calls aimed to provide "the technological solution to the problem of efficiently connecting data, computers, and people with the goal of enabling derivation of novel scientific theories and knowledge".1 The Grid (Foster, 2002; Foster; Kesselman, Nick, & Tuecke, 2002), foreseen as a major accelerator of discovery, didn't meet the expectations it had excited at its beginnings and was not adopted by the broad population of research professionals. The Grid is a good tool for particle physicists and it has allowed them to tackle the tremendous computational challenges inherent to their field. However, as a technology and paradigm for delivering computing on demand, it doesn't work and it can't be fixed. On one hand, "the abstractions that Grids expose - to the end-user, to the deployers and to application developers - are inappropriate and they need to be higher level" (Jha, Merzky, & Fox), and on the other hand, academic Grids are inherently economically unsustainable. They can't compete with a service outsourced to the Industry whose quality and price would be driven by market forces. The virtualization technologies and their corollary, the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) style cloud, hold the promise to enable what the Grid failed to deliver: a sustainable environment for computational sciences that would lower the barriers for accessing federated computational resources, software tools and data; enable collaboration and resources sharing and provide the building blocks of a ubiquitous platform for traceable and reproducible computational research.

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Garzoglio, Gabriele

The Fermilab Grid and Cloud Computing Department and the KISTI Global Science experimental Data hub Center are working on a multi-year Collaborative Research and Development Agreement.With the knowledge developed in the first year on how to provision and manage a federation of virtual machines through Cloud management systems. In this second year, we expanded the work on provisioning and federation, increasing both scale and diversity of solutions, and we started to build on-demand services on the established fabric, introducing the paradigm of Platform as a Service to assist with the execution of scientific workflows. We have enabled scientific workflows ofmore » stakeholders to run on multiple cloud resources at the scale of 1,000 concurrent machines. The demonstrations have been in the areas of (a) Virtual Infrastructure Automation and Provisioning, (b) Interoperability and Federation of Cloud Resources, and (c) On-demand Services for ScientificWorkflows.« less

A Big Data Platform for Storing, Accessing, Mining and Learning Geospatial Data

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Yang, C. P.; Bambacus, M.; Duffy, D.; Little, M. M.

2017-12-01

Big Data is becoming a norm in geoscience domains. A platform that is capable to effiently manage, access, analyze, mine, and learn the big data for new information and knowledge is desired. This paper introduces our latest effort on developing such a platform based on our past years' experiences on cloud and high performance computing, analyzing big data, comparing big data containers, and mining big geospatial data for new information. The platform includes four layers: a) the bottom layer includes a computing infrastructure with proper network, computer, and storage systems; b) the 2nd layer is a cloud computing layer based on virtualization to provide on demand computing services for upper layers; c) the 3rd layer is big data containers that are customized for dealing with different types of data and functionalities; d) the 4th layer is a big data presentation layer that supports the effient management, access, analyses, mining and learning of big geospatial data.

Design and Development of a Run-Time Monitor for Multi-Core Architectures in Cloud Computing

PubMed Central

Kang, Mikyung; Kang, Dong-In; Crago, Stephen P.; Park, Gyung-Leen; Lee, Junghoon

2011-01-01

Cloud computing is a new information technology trend that moves computing and data away from desktops and portable PCs into large data centers. The basic principle of cloud computing is to deliver applications as services over the Internet as well as infrastructure. A cloud is a type of parallel and distributed system consisting of a collection of inter-connected and virtualized computers that are dynamically provisioned and presented as one or more unified computing resources. The large-scale distributed applications on a cloud require adaptive service-based software, which has the capability of monitoring system status changes, analyzing the monitored information, and adapting its service configuration while considering tradeoffs among multiple QoS features simultaneously. In this paper, we design and develop a Run-Time Monitor (RTM) which is a system software to monitor the application behavior at run-time, analyze the collected information, and optimize cloud computing resources for multi-core architectures. RTM monitors application software through library instrumentation as well as underlying hardware through a performance counter optimizing its computing configuration based on the analyzed data. PMID:22163811

Design and development of a run-time monitor for multi-core architectures in cloud computing.

PubMed

Kang, Mikyung; Kang, Dong-In; Crago, Stephen P; Park, Gyung-Leen; Lee, Junghoon

2011-01-01

Cloud computing is a new information technology trend that moves computing and data away from desktops and portable PCs into large data centers. The basic principle of cloud computing is to deliver applications as services over the Internet as well as infrastructure. A cloud is a type of parallel and distributed system consisting of a collection of inter-connected and virtualized computers that are dynamically provisioned and presented as one or more unified computing resources. The large-scale distributed applications on a cloud require adaptive service-based software, which has the capability of monitoring system status changes, analyzing the monitored information, and adapting its service configuration while considering tradeoffs among multiple QoS features simultaneously. In this paper, we design and develop a Run-Time Monitor (RTM) which is a system software to monitor the application behavior at run-time, analyze the collected information, and optimize cloud computing resources for multi-core architectures. RTM monitors application software through library instrumentation as well as underlying hardware through a performance counter optimizing its computing configuration based on the analyzed data.

Integration of High-Performance Computing into Cloud Computing Services

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Vouk, Mladen A.; Sills, Eric; Dreher, Patrick

High-Performance Computing (HPC) projects span a spectrum of computer hardware implementations ranging from peta-flop supercomputers, high-end tera-flop facilities running a variety of operating systems and applications, to mid-range and smaller computational clusters used for HPC application development, pilot runs and prototype staging clusters. What they all have in common is that they operate as a stand-alone system rather than a scalable and shared user re-configurable resource. The advent of cloud computing has changed the traditional HPC implementation. In this article, we will discuss a very successful production-level architecture and policy framework for supporting HPC services within a more general cloud computing infrastructure. This integrated environment, called Virtual Computing Lab (VCL), has been operating at NC State since fall 2004. Nearly 8,500,000 HPC CPU-Hrs were delivered by this environment to NC State faculty and students during 2009. In addition, we present and discuss operational data that show that integration of HPC and non-HPC (or general VCL) services in a cloud can substantially reduce the cost of delivering cloud services (down to cents per CPU hour).

Investigation of Storage Options for Scientific Computing on Grid and Cloud Facilities

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Garzoglio, Gabriele

2012-12-01

In recent years, several new storage technologies, such as Lustre, Hadoop, OrangeFS, and BlueArc, have emerged. While several groups have run benchmarks to characterize them under a variety of configurations, more work is needed to evaluate these technologies for the use cases of scientific computing on Grid clusters and Cloud facilities. This paper discusses our evaluation of the technologies as deployed on a test bed at FermiCloud, one of the Fermilab infrastructure-as-a-service Cloud facilities. The test bed consists of 4 server-class nodes with 40 TB of disk space and up to 50 virtual machine clients, some running on the storage server nodes themselves. With this configuration, the evaluation compares the performance of some of these technologies when deployed on virtual machines and on “bare metal” nodes. In addition to running standard benchmarks such as IOZone to check the sanity of our installation, we have run I/O intensive tests using physics-analysis applications. This paper presents how the storage solutions perform in a variety of realistic use cases of scientific computing. One interesting difference among the storage systems tested is found in a decrease in total read throughput with increasing number of client processes, which occurs in some implementations but not others.

Investigation of storage options for scientific computing on Grid and Cloud facilities

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Garzoglio, Gabriele

In recent years, several new storage technologies, such as Lustre, Hadoop, OrangeFS, and BlueArc, have emerged. While several groups have run benchmarks to characterize them under a variety of configurations, more work is needed to evaluate these technologies for the use cases of scientific computing on Grid clusters and Cloud facilities. This paper discusses our evaluation of the technologies as deployed on a test bed at FermiCloud, one of the Fermilab infrastructure-as-a-service Cloud facilities. The test bed consists of 4 server-class nodes with 40 TB of disk space and up to 50 virtual machine clients, some running on the storagemore » server nodes themselves. With this configuration, the evaluation compares the performance of some of these technologies when deployed on virtual machines and on bare metal nodes. In addition to running standard benchmarks such as IOZone to check the sanity of our installation, we have run I/O intensive tests using physics-analysis applications. This paper presents how the storage solutions perform in a variety of realistic use cases of scientific computing. One interesting difference among the storage systems tested is found in a decrease in total read throughput with increasing number of client processes, which occurs in some implementations but not others.« less

Blade runner. Blade server and virtualization technology can help hospitals save money--but they are far from silver bullets.

PubMed

Lawrence, Daphne

2009-03-01

Blade servers and virtualization can reduce infrastructure, maintenance, heating, electric, cooling and equipment costs. Blade server technology is evolving and some elements may become obsolete. There is very little interoperability between blades. Hospitals can virtualize 40 to 60 percent of their servers, and old servers can be reused for testing. Not all applications lend themselves to virtualization--especially those with high memory requirements. CIOs should engage their vendors in virtualization discussions.

Design and implementation of spatial knowledge grid for integrated spatial analysis

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Liu, Xiangnan; Guan, Li; Wang, Ping

2006-10-01

Supported by spatial information grid(SIG), the spatial knowledge grid (SKG) for integrated spatial analysis utilizes the middleware technology in constructing the spatial information grid computation environment and spatial information service system, develops spatial entity oriented spatial data organization technology, carries out the profound computation of the spatial structure and spatial process pattern on the basis of Grid GIS infrastructure, spatial data grid and spatial information grid (specialized definition). At the same time, it realizes the complex spatial pattern expression and the spatial function process simulation by taking the spatial intelligent agent as the core to establish space initiative computation. Moreover through the establishment of virtual geographical environment with man-machine interactivity and blending, complex spatial modeling, network cooperation work and spatial community decision knowledge driven are achieved. The framework of SKG is discussed systematically in this paper. Its implement flow and the key technology with examples of overlay analysis are proposed as well.

A Virtual Environment for Resilient Infrastructure Modeling and Design

DTIC Science & Technology

2015-09-01

Security CI Critical Infrastructure CID Center for Infrastructure Defense CSV Comma Separated Value DAD Defender-Attacker-Defender DHS Department...responses to disruptive events (e.g., cascading failure behavior) in a context- rich , controlled environment for exercises, education, and training...The general attacker-defender (AD) and defender-attacker-defender ( DAD ) models for CI are defined in Brown et al. (2006). These models help

49 CFR 15.5 - Sensitive security information.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2014 CFR

2014-10-01

... sources and methods used to gather or develop threat information, including threats against cyber infrastructure. (8) Security measures. Specific details of aviation or maritime transportation security measures... infrastructure asset information. Any list identifying systems or assets, whether physical or virtual, so vital...

49 CFR 15.5 - Sensitive security information.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2011 CFR

2011-10-01

... sources and methods used to gather or develop threat information, including threats against cyber infrastructure. (8) Security measures. Specific details of aviation or maritime transportation security measures... infrastructure asset information. Any list identifying systems or assets, whether physical or virtual, so vital...

49 CFR 15.5 - Sensitive security information.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2013 CFR

2013-10-01

... sources and methods used to gather or develop threat information, including threats against cyber infrastructure. (8) Security measures. Specific details of aviation or maritime transportation security measures... infrastructure asset information. Any list identifying systems or assets, whether physical or virtual, so vital...

49 CFR 15.5 - Sensitive security information.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2012 CFR

2012-10-01

... sources and methods used to gather or develop threat information, including threats against cyber infrastructure. (8) Security measures. Specific details of aviation or maritime transportation security measures... infrastructure asset information. Any list identifying systems or assets, whether physical or virtual, so vital...

High-reliability computing for the smarter planet

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Quinn, Heather M; Graham, Paul; Manuzzato, Andrea

2010-01-01

The geometric rate of improvement of transistor size and integrated circuit performance, known as Moore's Law, has been an engine of growth for our economy, enabling new products and services, creating new value and wealth, increasing safety, and removing menial tasks from our daily lives. Affordable, highly integrated components have enabled both life-saving technologies and rich entertainment applications. Anti-lock brakes, insulin monitors, and GPS-enabled emergency response systems save lives. Cell phones, internet appliances, virtual worlds, realistic video games, and mp3 players enrich our lives and connect us together. Over the past 40 years of silicon scaling, the increasing capabilities ofmore » inexpensive computation have transformed our society through automation and ubiquitous communications. In this paper, we will present the concept of the smarter planet, how reliability failures affect current systems, and methods that can be used to increase the reliable adoption of new automation in the future. We will illustrate these issues using a number of different electronic devices in a couple of different scenarios. Recently IBM has been presenting the idea of a 'smarter planet.' In smarter planet documents, IBM discusses increased computer automation of roadways, banking, healthcare, and infrastructure, as automation could create more efficient systems. A necessary component of the smarter planet concept is to ensure that these new systems have very high reliability. Even extremely rare reliability problems can easily escalate to problematic scenarios when implemented at very large scales. For life-critical systems, such as automobiles, infrastructure, medical implantables, and avionic systems, unmitigated failures could be dangerous. As more automation moves into these types of critical systems, reliability failures will need to be managed. As computer automation continues to increase in our society, the need for greater radiation reliability is necessary. Already critical infrastructure is failing too frequently. In this paper, we will introduce the Cross-Layer Reliability concept for designing more reliable computer systems.« less

An Open Computing Infrastructure that Facilitates Integrated Product and Process Development from a Decision-Based Perspective

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Hale, Mark A.

1996-01-01

Computer applications for design have evolved rapidly over the past several decades, and significant payoffs are being achieved by organizations through reductions in design cycle times. These applications are overwhelmed by the requirements imposed during complex, open engineering systems design. Organizations are faced with a number of different methodologies, numerous legacy disciplinary tools, and a very large amount of data. Yet they are also faced with few interdisciplinary tools for design collaboration or methods for achieving the revolutionary product designs required to maintain a competitive advantage in the future. These organizations are looking for a software infrastructure that integrates current corporate design practices with newer simulation and solution techniques. Such an infrastructure must be robust to changes in both corporate needs and enabling technologies. In addition, this infrastructure must be user-friendly, modular and scalable. This need is the motivation for the research described in this dissertation. The research is focused on the development of an open computing infrastructure that facilitates product and process design. In addition, this research explicitly deals with human interactions during design through a model that focuses on the role of a designer as that of decision-maker. The research perspective here is taken from that of design as a discipline with a focus on Decision-Based Design, Theory of Languages, Information Science, and Integration Technology. Given this background, a Model of IPPD is developed and implemented along the lines of a traditional experimental procedure: with the steps of establishing context, formalizing a theory, building an apparatus, conducting an experiment, reviewing results, and providing recommendations. Based on this Model, Design Processes and Specification can be explored in a structured and implementable architecture. An architecture for exploring design called DREAMS (Developing Robust Engineering Analysis Models and Specifications) has been developed which supports the activities of both meta-design and actual design execution. This is accomplished through a systematic process which is comprised of the stages of Formulation, Translation, and Evaluation. During this process, elements from a Design Specification are integrated into Design Processes. In addition, a software infrastructure was developed and is called IMAGE (Intelligent Multidisciplinary Aircraft Generation Environment). This represents a virtual apparatus in the Design Experiment conducted in this research. IMAGE is an innovative architecture because it explicitly supports design-related activities. This is accomplished through a GUI driven and Agent-based implementation of DREAMS. A HSCT design has been adopted from the Framework for Interdisciplinary Design Optimization (FIDO) and is implemented in IMAGE. This problem shows how Design Processes and Specification interact in a design system. In addition, the problem utilizes two different solution models concurrently: optimal and satisfying. The satisfying model allows for more design flexibility and allows a designer to maintain design freedom. As a result of following this experimental procedure, this infrastructure is an open system that it is robust to changes in both corporate needs and computer technologies. The development of this infrastructure leads to a number of significant intellectual contributions: 1) A new approach to implementing IPPD with the aid of a computer; 2) A formal Design Experiment; 3) A combined Process and Specification architecture that is language-based; 4) An infrastructure for exploring design; 5) An integration strategy for implementing computer resources; and 6) A seamless modeling language. The need for these contributions is emphasized by the demand by industry and government agencies for the development of these technologies.

Virtual Patients on the Semantic Web: A Proof-of-Application Study

PubMed Central

Dafli, Eleni; Antoniou, Panagiotis; Ioannidis, Lazaros; Dombros, Nicholas; Topps, David

2015-01-01

Background Virtual patients are interactive computer simulations that are increasingly used as learning activities in modern health care education, especially in teaching clinical decision making. A key challenge is how to retrieve and repurpose virtual patients as unique types of educational resources between different platforms because of the lack of standardized content-retrieving and repurposing mechanisms. Semantic Web technologies provide the capability, through structured information, for easy retrieval, reuse, repurposing, and exchange of virtual patients between different systems. Objective An attempt to address this challenge has been made through the mEducator Best Practice Network, which provisioned frameworks for the discovery, retrieval, sharing, and reuse of medical educational resources. We have extended the OpenLabyrinth virtual patient authoring and deployment platform to facilitate the repurposing and retrieval of existing virtual patient material. Methods A standalone Web distribution and Web interface, which contains an extension for the OpenLabyrinth virtual patient authoring system, was implemented. This extension was designed to semantically annotate virtual patients to facilitate intelligent searches, complex queries, and easy exchange between institutions. The OpenLabyrinth extension enables OpenLabyrinth authors to integrate and share virtual patient case metadata within the mEducator3.0 network. Evaluation included 3 successive steps: (1) expert reviews; (2) evaluation of the ability of health care professionals and medical students to create, share, and exchange virtual patients through specific scenarios in extended OpenLabyrinth (OLabX); and (3) evaluation of the repurposed learning objects that emerged from the procedure. Results We evaluated 30 repurposed virtual patient cases. The evaluation, with a total of 98 participants, demonstrated the system’s main strength: the core repurposing capacity. The extensive metadata schema presentation facilitated user exploration and filtering of resources. Usability weaknesses were primarily related to standard computer applications’ ease of use provisions. Most evaluators provided positive feedback regarding educational experiences on both content and system usability. Evaluation results replicated across several independent evaluation events. Conclusions The OpenLabyrinth extension, as part of the semantic mEducator3.0 approach, is a virtual patient sharing approach that builds on a collection of Semantic Web services and federates existing sources of clinical and educational data. It is an effective sharing tool for virtual patients and has been merged into the next version of the app (OpenLabyrinth 3.3). Such tool extensions may enhance the medical education arsenal with capacities of creating simulation/game-based learning episodes, massive open online courses, curricular transformations, and a future robust infrastructure for enabling mobile learning. PMID:25616272

Virtual patients on the semantic Web: a proof-of-application study.

PubMed

Dafli, Eleni; Antoniou, Panagiotis; Ioannidis, Lazaros; Dombros, Nicholas; Topps, David; Bamidis, Panagiotis D

2015-01-22

Virtual patients are interactive computer simulations that are increasingly used as learning activities in modern health care education, especially in teaching clinical decision making. A key challenge is how to retrieve and repurpose virtual patients as unique types of educational resources between different platforms because of the lack of standardized content-retrieving and repurposing mechanisms. Semantic Web technologies provide the capability, through structured information, for easy retrieval, reuse, repurposing, and exchange of virtual patients between different systems. An attempt to address this challenge has been made through the mEducator Best Practice Network, which provisioned frameworks for the discovery, retrieval, sharing, and reuse of medical educational resources. We have extended the OpenLabyrinth virtual patient authoring and deployment platform to facilitate the repurposing and retrieval of existing virtual patient material. A standalone Web distribution and Web interface, which contains an extension for the OpenLabyrinth virtual patient authoring system, was implemented. This extension was designed to semantically annotate virtual patients to facilitate intelligent searches, complex queries, and easy exchange between institutions. The OpenLabyrinth extension enables OpenLabyrinth authors to integrate and share virtual patient case metadata within the mEducator3.0 network. Evaluation included 3 successive steps: (1) expert reviews; (2) evaluation of the ability of health care professionals and medical students to create, share, and exchange virtual patients through specific scenarios in extended OpenLabyrinth (OLabX); and (3) evaluation of the repurposed learning objects that emerged from the procedure. We evaluated 30 repurposed virtual patient cases. The evaluation, with a total of 98 participants, demonstrated the system's main strength: the core repurposing capacity. The extensive metadata schema presentation facilitated user exploration and filtering of resources. Usability weaknesses were primarily related to standard computer applications' ease of use provisions. Most evaluators provided positive feedback regarding educational experiences on both content and system usability. Evaluation results replicated across several independent evaluation events. The OpenLabyrinth extension, as part of the semantic mEducator3.0 approach, is a virtual patient sharing approach that builds on a collection of Semantic Web services and federates existing sources of clinical and educational data. It is an effective sharing tool for virtual patients and has been merged into the next version of the app (OpenLabyrinth 3.3). Such tool extensions may enhance the medical education arsenal with capacities of creating simulation/game-based learning episodes, massive open online courses, curricular transformations, and a future robust infrastructure for enabling mobile learning.

Review of Enabling Technologies to Facilitate Secure Compute Customization

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Aderholdt, Ferrol; Caldwell, Blake A; Hicks, Susan Elaine

High performance computing environments are often used for a wide variety of workloads ranging from simulation, data transformation and analysis, and complex workflows to name just a few. These systems may process data for a variety of users, often requiring strong separation between job allocations. There are many challenges to establishing these secure enclaves within the shared infrastructure of high-performance computing (HPC) environments. The isolation mechanisms in the system software are the basic building blocks for enabling secure compute enclaves. There are a variety of approaches and the focus of this report is to review the different virtualization technologies thatmore » facilitate the creation of secure compute enclaves. The report reviews current operating system (OS) protection mechanisms and modern virtualization technologies to better understand the performance/isolation properties. We also examine the feasibility of running ``virtualized'' computing resources as non-privileged users, and providing controlled administrative permissions for standard users running within a virtualized context. Our examination includes technologies such as Linux containers (LXC [32], Docker [15]) and full virtualization (KVM [26], Xen [5]). We categorize these different approaches to virtualization into two broad groups: OS-level virtualization and system-level virtualization. The OS-level virtualization uses containers to allow a single OS kernel to be partitioned to create Virtual Environments (VE), e.g., LXC. The resources within the host's kernel are only virtualized in the sense of separate namespaces. In contrast, system-level virtualization uses hypervisors to manage multiple OS kernels and virtualize the physical resources (hardware) to create Virtual Machines (VM), e.g., Xen, KVM. This terminology of VE and VM, detailed in Section 2, is used throughout the report to distinguish between the two different approaches to providing virtualized execution environments. As part of our technology review we analyzed several current virtualization solutions to assess their vulnerabilities. This included a review of common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVEs) for Xen, KVM, LXC and Docker to gauge their susceptibility to different attacks. The complete details are provided in Section 5 on page 33. Based on this review we concluded that system-level virtualization solutions have many more vulnerabilities than OS level virtualization solutions. As such, security mechanisms like sVirt (Section 3.3) should be considered when using system-level virtualization solutions in order to protect the host against exploits. The majority of vulnerabilities related to KVM, LXC, and Docker are in specific regions of the system. Therefore, future "zero day attacks" are likely to be in the same regions, which suggests that protecting these areas can simplify the protection of the host and maintain the isolation between users. The evaluations of virtualization technologies done thus far are discussed in Section 4. This includes experiments with 'user' namespaces in VEs, which provides the ability to isolate user privileges and allow a user to run with different UIDs within the container while mapping them to non-privileged UIDs in the host. We have identified Linux namespaces as a promising mechanism to isolate shared resources, while maintaining good performance. In Section 4.1 we describe our tests with LXC as a non-root user and leveraging namespaces to control UID/GID mappings and support controlled sharing of parallel file-systems. We highlight several of these namespace capabilities in Section 6.2.3. The other evaluations that were performed during this initial phase of work provide baseline performance data for comparing VEs and VMs to purely native execution. In Section 4.2 we performed tests using the High-Performance Computing Conjugate Gradient (HPCCG) benchmark to establish baseline performance for a scientific application when run on the Native (host) machine in contrast with execution under Docker and KVM. Our tests verified prior studies showing roughly 2-4% overheads in application execution time & MFlops when running in hypervisor-base environments (VMs) as compared to near native performance with VEs. For more details, see Figures 4.5 (page 28), 4.6 (page 28), and 4.7 (page 29). Additionally, in Section 4.3 we include network measurements for TCP bandwidth performance over the 10GigE interface in our testbed. The Native and Docker based tests achieved >= ~9Gbits/sec, while the KVM configuration only achieved 2.5Gbits/sec (Table 4.6 on page 32). This may be a configuration issue with our KVM installation, and is a point for further testing as we refine the network settings in the testbed. The initial network tests were done using a bridged networking configuration. The report outline is as follows: - Section 1 introduces the report and clarifies the scope of the proj...« less

VERCE: a productive e-Infrastructure and e-Science environment for data-intensive seismology research

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Vilotte, J. P.; Atkinson, M.; Spinuso, A.; Rietbrock, A.; Michelini, A.; Igel, H.; Frank, A.; Carpené, M.; Schwichtenberg, H.; Casarotti, E.; Filgueira, R.; Garth, T.; Germünd, A.; Klampanos, I.; Krause, A.; Krischer, L.; Leong, S. H.; Magnoni, F.; Matser, J.; Moguilny, G.

2015-12-01

Seismology addresses both fundamental problems in understanding the Earth's internal wave sources and structures and augmented societal applications, like earthquake and tsunami hazard assessment and risk mitigation; and puts a premium on open-data accessible by the Federated Digital Seismological Networks. The VERCE project, "Virtual Earthquake and seismology Research Community e-science environment in Europe", has initiated a virtual research environment to support complex orchestrated workflows combining state-of-art wave simulation codes and data analysis tools on distributed computing and data infrastructures (DCIs) along with multiple sources of observational data and new capabilities to combine simulation results with observational data. The VERCE Science Gateway provides a view of all the available resources, supporting collaboration with shared data and methods, with data access controls. The mapping to DCIs handles identity management, authority controls, transformations between representations and controls, and access to resources. The framework for computational science that provides simulation codes, like SPECFEM3D, democratizes their use by getting data from multiple sources, managing Earth models and meshes, distilling them as input data, and capturing results with meta-data. The dispel4py data-intensive framework allows for developing data-analysis applications using Python and the ObsPy library, which can be executed on different DCIs. A set of tools allows coupling with seismology and external data services. Provenance driven tools validate results and show relationships between data to facilitate method improvement. Lessons learned from VERCE training lead us to conclude that solid-Earth scientists could make significant progress by using VERCE e-science environment. VERCE has already contributed to the European Plate Observation System (EPOS), and is part of the EPOS implementation phase. Its cross-disciplinary capabilities are being extended for the EPOS implantation phase.

Computer integrated manufacturing/processing in the HPI. [Hydrocarbon Processing Industry

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Yoshimura, J.S.

1993-05-01

Hydrocarbon Processing and Systemhouse Inc., developed a comprehensive survey on the status of computer integrated manufacturing/processing (CIM/CIP) targeted specifically to the unique requirements of the hydrocarbon processing industry. These types of surveys and other benchmarking techniques can be invaluable in assisting companies to maximize business benefits from technology investments. The survey was organized into 5 major areas: CIM/CIP planning, management perspective, functional applications, integration and technology infrastructure and trends. The CIM/CIP planning area dealt with the use and type of planning methods to plan, justify implement information technology projects. The management perspective section addressed management priorities, expenditure levels and implementationmore » barriers. The functional application area covered virtually all functional areas of organization and focused on the specific solutions and benefits in each of the functional areas. The integration section addressed the needs and integration status of the organization's functional areas. Finally, the technology infrastructure and trends section dealt with specific technologies in use as well as trends over the next three years. In February 1993, summary areas from preliminary results were presented at the 2nd International Conference on Productivity and Quality in the Hydrocarbon Processing Industry.« less

Nbody Simulations and Weak Gravitational Lensing using new HPC-Grid resources: the PI2S2 project

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Becciani, U.; Antonuccio-Delogu, V.; Costa, A.; Comparato, M.

2008-08-01

We present the main project of the new grid infrastructure and the researches, that have been already started in Sicily and will be completed by next year. The PI2S2 project of the COMETA consortium is funded by the Italian Ministry of University and Research and will be completed in 2009. Funds are from the European Union Structural Funds for Objective 1 regions. The project, together with a similar project called Trinacria GRID Virtual Laboratory (Trigrid VL), aims to create in Sicily a computational grid for e-science and e-commerce applications with the main goal of increasing the technological innovation of local enterprises and their competition on the global market. PI2S2 project aims to build and develop an e-Infrastructure in Sicily, based on the grid paradigm, mainly for research activity using the grid environment and High Performance Computer systems. As an example we present the first results of a new grid version of FLY a tree Nbody code developed by INAF Astrophysical Observatory of Catania, already published in the CPC program Library, that will be used in the Weak Gravitational Lensing field.

Australian DefenceScience. Volume 16, Number 2, Winter

DTIC Science & Technology

2008-01-01

Making Virtual Advisers speedily interactive To provide an authentically interactive experience for humans working with Virtual Advisers, the Virtual...peer trusted and strong authentication for checking of security credentials without recourse to third parties or infrastructure, thus eliminating...multiple passwords, or carry around multiple security tokens.” Each CodeStick device is readied for use with a biometric authentication process. Since

Developing a Computational Environment for Coupling MOR Data, Maps, and Models: The Virtual Research Vessel (VRV) Prototype

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Wright, D. J.; O'Dea, E.; Cushing, J. B.; Cuny, J. E.; Toomey, D. R.; Hackett, K.; Tikekar, R.

2001-12-01

The East Pacific Rise (EPR) from 9-10deg. N is currently our best-studied section of fast-spreading mid-ocean ridge. During several decades of investigation it has been explored by the full spectrum of ridge investigators, including chemists, biologists, geologists and geophysicists. These studies, and those that are ongoing, provide a wealth of observational data, results and data-driven theoretical (often numerical) studies that have not yet been fully utilized either by research scientists or by professional educators. While the situation is improving, a large amount of data, results, and related theoretical models still exist either in an inert, non-interactive form (e.g., journal publications) or as unlinked and currently incompatible computer data or algorithms. Infrastructure is needed not just for ready access to data, but linkage of disparate data sets (data to data) as well as data to models in order quantitatively evaluate hypotheses, refine numerical simulations, and explore new relations between observables. The prototype of a computational environment and toolset, called the Virtual Research Vessel (VRV), is being developed to provide scientists and educators with ready access to data, results and numerical models. While this effort is focused on the EPR 9N region, the resulting software tools and infrastructure should be helpful in establishing similar systems for other sections of the global mid-ocean ridge. Work in progress includes efforts to develop: (1) virtual database to incorporate diverse data types with domain-specific metadata into a global schema that allows web-query across different marine geology data sets, and an analogous declarative (database available) description of tools and models; (2) the ability to move data between GIS and the above DBMS, and tools to encourage data submission to archivesl (3) tools for finding and viewing archives, and translating between formats; (4) support for "computational steering" (tool composition) and model coupling (e.g., ability to run tool composition locally but access input data from the web, APIs to support coupling such as invoking programs that are running remotely, and help in writing data wrappers to publish programs); (5) support of migration paths for prototyped model coupling; and (6) export of marine geological data and data analysis to the undergraduate classroom (VRV-ET, "Educational Tool"). See the main VRV web site at http://oregonstate.edu/dept/vrv and the VRV-ET web site at: http://www.cs.uoregon.edu/research/vrv-et.

Layer 1 VPN services in distributed next-generation SONET/SDH networks with inverse multiplexing

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Ghani, N.; Muthalaly, M. V.; Benhaddou, D.; Alanqar, W.

2006-05-01

Advances in next-generation SONET/SDH along with GMPLS control architectures have enabled many new service provisioning capabilities. In particular, a key services paradigm is the emergent Layer 1 virtual private network (L1 VPN) framework, which allows multiple clients to utilize a common physical infrastructure and provision their own 'virtualized' circuit-switched networks. This precludes expensive infrastructure builds and increases resource utilization for carriers. Along these lines, a novel L1 VPN services resource management scheme for next-generation SONET/SDH networks is proposed that fully leverages advanced virtual concatenation and inverse multiplexing features. Additionally, both centralized and distributed GMPLS-based implementations are also tabled to support the proposed L1 VPN services model. Detailed performance analysis results are presented along with avenues for future research.

Grid Application Meta-Repository System: Repository Interconnectivity and Cross-domain Application Usage in Distributed Computing Environments

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Tudose, Alexandru; Terstyansky, Gabor; Kacsuk, Peter; Winter, Stephen

Grid Application Repositories vary greatly in terms of access interface, security system, implementation technology, communication protocols and repository model. This diversity has become a significant limitation in terms of interoperability and inter-repository access. This paper presents the Grid Application Meta-Repository System (GAMRS) as a solution that offers better options for the management of Grid applications. GAMRS proposes a generic repository architecture, which allows any Grid Application Repository (GAR) to be connected to the system independent of their underlying technology. It also presents applications in a uniform manner and makes applications from all connected repositories visible to web search engines, OGSI/WSRF Grid Services and other OAI (Open Archive Initiative)-compliant repositories. GAMRS can also function as a repository in its own right and can store applications under a new repository model. With the help of this model, applications can be presented as embedded in virtual machines (VM) and therefore they can be run in their native environments and can easily be deployed on virtualized infrastructures allowing interoperability with new generation technologies such as cloud computing, application-on-demand, automatic service/application deployments and automatic VM generation.

Hybrid architecture for building secure sensor networks

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Owens, Ken R., Jr.; Watkins, Steve E.

2012-04-01

Sensor networks have various communication and security architectural concerns. Three approaches are defined to address these concerns for sensor networks. The first area is the utilization of new computing architectures that leverage embedded virtualization software on the sensor. Deploying a small, embedded virtualization operating system on the sensor nodes that is designed to communicate to low-cost cloud computing infrastructure in the network is the foundation to delivering low-cost, secure sensor networks. The second area focuses on securing the sensor. Sensor security components include developing an identification scheme, and leveraging authentication algorithms and protocols that address security assurance within the physical, communication network, and application layers. This function will primarily be accomplished through encrypting the communication channel and integrating sensor network firewall and intrusion detection/prevention components to the sensor network architecture. Hence, sensor networks will be able to maintain high levels of security. The third area addresses the real-time and high priority nature of the data that sensor networks collect. This function requires that a quality-of-service (QoS) definition and algorithm be developed for delivering the right data at the right time. A hybrid architecture is proposed that combines software and hardware features to handle network traffic with diverse QoS requirements.

Holodeck: Telepresence Dome Visualization System Simulations

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Hite, Nicolas

2012-01-01

This paper explores the simulation and consideration of different image-projection strategies for the Holodeck, a dome that will be used for highly immersive telepresence operations in future endeavors of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Its visualization system will include a full 360 degree projection onto the dome's interior walls in order to display video streams from both simulations and recorded video. Because humans innately trust their vision to precisely report their surroundings, the Holodeck's visualization system is crucial to its realism. This system will be rigged with an integrated hardware and software infrastructure-namely, a system of projectors that will relay with a Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) and computer to both project images onto the dome and correct warping in those projections in real-time. Using both Computer-Aided Design (CAD) and ray-tracing software, virtual models of various dome/projector geometries were created and simulated via tracking and analysis of virtual light sources, leading to the selection of two possible configurations for installation. Research into image warping and the generation of dome-ready video content was also conducted, including generation of fisheye images, distortion correction, and the generation of a reliable content-generation pipeline.

Exploratory Application of Augmented Reality/Mixed Reality Devices for Acute Care Procedure Training.

PubMed

Kobayashi, Leo; Zhang, Xiao Chi; Collins, Scott A; Karim, Naz; Merck, Derek L

2018-01-01

Augmented reality (AR), mixed reality (MR), and virtual reality devices are enabling technologies that may facilitate effective communication in healthcare between those with information and knowledge (clinician/specialist; expert; educator) and those seeking understanding and insight (patient/family; non-expert; learner). Investigators initiated an exploratory program to enable the study of AR/MR use-cases in acute care clinical and instructional settings. Academic clinician educators, computer scientists, and diagnostic imaging specialists conducted a proof-of-concept project to 1) implement a core holoimaging pipeline infrastructure and open-access repository at the study institution, and 2) use novel AR/MR techniques on off-the-shelf devices with holoimages generated by the infrastructure to demonstrate their potential role in the instructive communication of complex medical information. The study team successfully developed a medical holoimaging infrastructure methodology to identify, retrieve, and manipulate real patients' de-identified computed tomography and magnetic resonance imagesets for rendering, packaging, transfer, and display of modular holoimages onto AR/MR headset devices and connected displays. Holoimages containing key segmentations of cervical and thoracic anatomic structures and pathology were overlaid and registered onto physical task trainers for simulation-based "blind insertion" invasive procedural training. During the session, learners experienced and used task-relevant anatomic holoimages for central venous catheter and tube thoracostomy insertion training with enhanced visual cues and haptic feedback. Direct instructor access into the learner's AR/MR headset view of the task trainer was achieved for visual-axis interactive instructional guidance. Investigators implemented a core holoimaging pipeline infrastructure and modular open-access repository to generate and enable access to modular holoimages during exploratory pilot stage applications for invasive procedure training that featured innovative AR/MR techniques on off-the-shelf headset devices.

Exploratory Application of Augmented Reality/Mixed Reality Devices for Acute Care Procedure Training

PubMed Central

Kobayashi, Leo; Zhang, Xiao Chi; Collins, Scott A.; Karim, Naz; Merck, Derek L.

2018-01-01

Introduction Augmented reality (AR), mixed reality (MR), and virtual reality devices are enabling technologies that may facilitate effective communication in healthcare between those with information and knowledge (clinician/specialist; expert; educator) and those seeking understanding and insight (patient/family; non-expert; learner). Investigators initiated an exploratory program to enable the study of AR/MR use-cases in acute care clinical and instructional settings. Methods Academic clinician educators, computer scientists, and diagnostic imaging specialists conducted a proof-of-concept project to 1) implement a core holoimaging pipeline infrastructure and open-access repository at the study institution, and 2) use novel AR/MR techniques on off-the-shelf devices with holoimages generated by the infrastructure to demonstrate their potential role in the instructive communication of complex medical information. Results The study team successfully developed a medical holoimaging infrastructure methodology to identify, retrieve, and manipulate real patients’ de-identified computed tomography and magnetic resonance imagesets for rendering, packaging, transfer, and display of modular holoimages onto AR/MR headset devices and connected displays. Holoimages containing key segmentations of cervical and thoracic anatomic structures and pathology were overlaid and registered onto physical task trainers for simulation-based “blind insertion” invasive procedural training. During the session, learners experienced and used task-relevant anatomic holoimages for central venous catheter and tube thoracostomy insertion training with enhanced visual cues and haptic feedback. Direct instructor access into the learner’s AR/MR headset view of the task trainer was achieved for visual-axis interactive instructional guidance. Conclusion Investigators implemented a core holoimaging pipeline infrastructure and modular open-access repository to generate and enable access to modular holoimages during exploratory pilot stage applications for invasive procedure training that featured innovative AR/MR techniques on off-the-shelf headset devices. PMID:29383074

Survey on Security Issues in Cloud Computing and Associated Mitigation Techniques

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Bhadauria, Rohit; Sanyal, Sugata

2012-06-01

Cloud Computing holds the potential to eliminate the requirements for setting up of high-cost computing infrastructure for IT-based solutions and services that the industry uses. It promises to provide a flexible IT architecture, accessible through internet for lightweight portable devices. This would allow multi-fold increase in the capacity or capabilities of the existing and new software. In a cloud computing environment, the entire data reside over a set of networked resources, enabling the data to be accessed through virtual machines. Since these data-centers may lie in any corner of the world beyond the reach and control of users, there are multifarious security and privacy challenges that need to be understood and taken care of. Also, one can never deny the possibility of a server breakdown that has been witnessed, rather quite often in the recent times. There are various issues that need to be dealt with respect to security and privacy in a cloud computing scenario. This extensive survey paper aims to elaborate and analyze the numerous unresolved issues threatening the cloud computing adoption and diffusion affecting the various stake-holders linked to it.

Automating ATLAS Computing Operations using the Site Status Board

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

J, Andreeva; Iglesias C, Borrego; S, Campana; Girolamo A, Di; I, Dzhunov; Curull X, Espinal; S, Gayazov; E, Magradze; M, Nowotka M.; L, Rinaldi; P, Saiz; J, Schovancova; A, Stewart G.; M, Wright

2012-12-01

The automation of operations is essential to reduce manpower costs and improve the reliability of the system. The Site Status Board (SSB) is a framework which allows Virtual Organizations to monitor their computing activities at distributed sites and to evaluate site performance. The ATLAS experiment intensively uses the SSB for the distributed computing shifts, for estimating data processing and data transfer efficiencies at a particular site, and for implementing automatic exclusion of sites from computing activities, in case of potential problems. The ATLAS SSB provides a real-time aggregated monitoring view and keeps the history of the monitoring metrics. Based on this history, usability of a site from the perspective of ATLAS is calculated. The paper will describe how the SSB is integrated in the ATLAS operations and computing infrastructure and will cover implementation details of the ATLAS SSB sensors and alarm system, based on the information in the SSB. It will demonstrate the positive impact of the use of the SSB on the overall performance of ATLAS computing activities and will overview future plans.

An integrated decision-making framework for transportation architectures: Application to aviation systems design

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Lewe, Jung-Ho

The National Transportation System (NTS) is undoubtedly a complex system-of-systems---a collection of diverse 'things' that evolve over time, organized at multiple levels, to achieve a range of possibly conflicting objectives, and never quite behaving as planned. The purpose of this research is to develop a virtual transportation architecture for the ultimate goal of formulating an integrated decision-making framework. The foundational endeavor begins with creating an abstraction of the NTS with the belief that a holistic frame of reference is required to properly study such a multi-disciplinary, trans-domain system. The culmination of the effort produces the Transportation Architecture Field (TAF) as a mental model of the NTS, in which the relationships between four basic entity groups are identified and articulated. This entity-centric abstraction framework underpins the construction of a virtual NTS couched in the form of an agent-based model. The transportation consumers and the service providers are identified as adaptive agents that apply a set of preprogrammed behavioral rules to achieve their respective goals. The transportation infrastructure and multitude of exogenous entities (disruptors and drivers) in the whole system can also be represented without resorting to an extremely complicated structure. The outcome is a flexible, scalable, computational model that allows for examination of numerous scenarios which involve the cascade of interrelated effects of aviation technology, infrastructure, and socioeconomic changes throughout the entire system.

Unidata's Vision for Transforming Geoscience by Moving Data Services and Software to the Cloud

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Ramamurthy, Mohan; Fisher, Ward; Yoksas, Tom

2015-04-01

Universities are facing many challenges: shrinking budgets, rapidly evolving information technologies, exploding data volumes, multidisciplinary science requirements, and high expectations from students who have grown up with smartphones and tablets. These changes are upending traditional approaches to accessing and using data and software. Unidata recognizes that its products and services must evolve to support new approaches to research and education. After years of hype and ambiguity, cloud computing is maturing in usability in many areas of science and education, bringing the benefits of virtualized and elastic remote services to infrastructure, software, computation, and data. Cloud environments reduce the amount of time and money spent to procure, install, and maintain new hardware and software, and reduce costs through resource pooling and shared infrastructure. Cloud services aimed at providing any resource, at any time, from any place, using any device are increasingly being embraced by all types of organizations. Given this trend and the enormous potential of cloud-based services, Unidata is taking moving to augment its products, services, data delivery mechanisms and applications to align with the cloud-computing paradigm. Specifically, Unidata is working toward establishing a community-based development environment that supports the creation and use of software services to build end-to-end data workflows. The design encourages the creation of services that can be broken into small, independent chunks that provide simple capabilities. Chunks could be used individually to perform a task, or chained into simple or elaborate workflows. The services will also be portable in the form of downloadable Unidata-in-a-box virtual images, allowing their use in researchers' own cloud-based computing environments. In this talk, we present a vision for Unidata's future in a cloud-enabled data services and discuss our ongoing efforts to deploy a suite of Unidata data services and tools in the Amazon EC2 and Microsoft Azure cloud environments, including the transfer of real-time meteorological data into its cloud instances, product generation using those data, and the deployment of TDS, McIDAS ADDE and AWIPS II data servers and the Integrated Data Server visualization tool.

Open Source Dataturbine (OSDT) Android Sensorpod in Environmental Observing Systems

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Fountain, T. R.; Shin, P.; Tilak, S.; Trinh, T.; Smith, J.; Kram, S.

2014-12-01

The OSDT Android SensorPod is a custom-designed mobile computing platform for assembling wireless sensor networks for environmental monitoring applications. Funded by an award from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the OSDT SensorPod represents a significant technological advance in the application of mobile and cloud computing technologies to near-real-time applications in environmental science, natural resources management, and disaster response and recovery. It provides a modular architecture based on open standards and open-source software that allows system developers to align their projects with industry best practices and technology trends, while avoiding commercial vendor lock-in to expensive proprietary software and hardware systems. The integration of mobile and cloud-computing infrastructure represents a disruptive technology in the field of environmental science, since basic assumptions about technology requirements are now open to revision, e.g., the roles of special purpose data loggers and dedicated site infrastructure. The OSDT Android SensorPod was designed with these considerations in mind, and the resulting system exhibits the following characteristics - it is flexible, efficient and robust. The system was developed and tested in the three science applications: 1) a fresh water limnology deployment in Wisconsin, 2) a near coastal marine science deployment at the UCSD Scripps Pier, and 3) a terrestrial ecological deployment in the mountains of Taiwan. As part of a public education and outreach effort, a Facebook page with daily ocean pH measurements from the UCSD Scripps pier was developed. Wireless sensor networks and the virtualization of data and network services is the future of environmental science infrastructure. The OSDT Android SensorPod was designed and developed to harness these new technology developments for environmental monitoring applications.

Virtualization and cloud computing in dentistry.

PubMed

Chow, Frank; Muftu, Ali; Shorter, Richard

2014-01-01

The use of virtualization and cloud computing has changed the way we use computers. Virtualization is a method of placing software called a hypervisor on the hardware of a computer or a host operating system. It allows a guest operating system to run on top of the physical computer with a virtual machine (i.e., virtual computer). Virtualization allows multiple virtual computers to run on top of one physical computer and to share its hardware resources, such as printers, scanners, and modems. This increases the efficient use of the computer by decreasing costs (e.g., hardware, electricity administration, and management) since only one physical computer is needed and running. This virtualization platform is the basis for cloud computing. It has expanded into areas of server and storage virtualization. One of the commonly used dental storage systems is cloud storage. Patient information is encrypted as required by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and stored on off-site private cloud services for a monthly service fee. As computer costs continue to increase, so too will the need for more storage and processing power. Virtual and cloud computing will be a method for dentists to minimize costs and maximize computer efficiency in the near future. This article will provide some useful information on current uses of cloud computing.

BioVeL: a virtual laboratory for data analysis and modelling in biodiversity science and ecology.

PubMed

Hardisty, Alex R; Bacall, Finn; Beard, Niall; Balcázar-Vargas, Maria-Paula; Balech, Bachir; Barcza, Zoltán; Bourlat, Sarah J; De Giovanni, Renato; de Jong, Yde; De Leo, Francesca; Dobor, Laura; Donvito, Giacinto; Fellows, Donal; Guerra, Antonio Fernandez; Ferreira, Nuno; Fetyukova, Yuliya; Fosso, Bruno; Giddy, Jonathan; Goble, Carole; Güntsch, Anton; Haines, Robert; Ernst, Vera Hernández; Hettling, Hannes; Hidy, Dóra; Horváth, Ferenc; Ittzés, Dóra; Ittzés, Péter; Jones, Andrew; Kottmann, Renzo; Kulawik, Robert; Leidenberger, Sonja; Lyytikäinen-Saarenmaa, Päivi; Mathew, Cherian; Morrison, Norman; Nenadic, Aleksandra; de la Hidalga, Abraham Nieva; Obst, Matthias; Oostermeijer, Gerard; Paymal, Elisabeth; Pesole, Graziano; Pinto, Salvatore; Poigné, Axel; Fernandez, Francisco Quevedo; Santamaria, Monica; Saarenmaa, Hannu; Sipos, Gergely; Sylla, Karl-Heinz; Tähtinen, Marko; Vicario, Saverio; Vos, Rutger Aldo; Williams, Alan R; Yilmaz, Pelin

2016-10-20

Making forecasts about biodiversity and giving support to policy relies increasingly on large collections of data held electronically, and on substantial computational capability and capacity to analyse, model, simulate and predict using such data. However, the physically distributed nature of data resources and of expertise in advanced analytical tools creates many challenges for the modern scientist. Across the wider biological sciences, presenting such capabilities on the Internet (as "Web services") and using scientific workflow systems to compose them for particular tasks is a practical way to carry out robust "in silico" science. However, use of this approach in biodiversity science and ecology has thus far been quite limited. BioVeL is a virtual laboratory for data analysis and modelling in biodiversity science and ecology, freely accessible via the Internet. BioVeL includes functions for accessing and analysing data through curated Web services; for performing complex in silico analysis through exposure of R programs, workflows, and batch processing functions; for on-line collaboration through sharing of workflows and workflow runs; for experiment documentation through reproducibility and repeatability; and for computational support via seamless connections to supporting computing infrastructures. We developed and improved more than 60 Web services with significant potential in many different kinds of data analysis and modelling tasks. We composed reusable workflows using these Web services, also incorporating R programs. Deploying these tools into an easy-to-use and accessible 'virtual laboratory', free via the Internet, we applied the workflows in several diverse case studies. We opened the virtual laboratory for public use and through a programme of external engagement we actively encouraged scientists and third party application and tool developers to try out the services and contribute to the activity. Our work shows we can deliver an operational, scalable and flexible Internet-based virtual laboratory to meet new demands for data processing and analysis in biodiversity science and ecology. In particular, we have successfully integrated existing and popular tools and practices from different scientific disciplines to be used in biodiversity and ecological research.

Building a Prototype of LHC Analysis Oriented Computing Centers

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Bagliesi, G.; Boccali, T.; Della Ricca, G.; Donvito, G.; Paganoni, M.

2012-12-01

A Consortium between four LHC Computing Centers (Bari, Milano, Pisa and Trieste) has been formed in 2010 to prototype Analysis-oriented facilities for CMS data analysis, profiting from a grant from the Italian Ministry of Research. The Consortium aims to realize an ad-hoc infrastructure to ease the analysis activities on the huge data set collected at the LHC Collider. While “Tier2” Computing Centres, specialized in organized processing tasks like Monte Carlo simulation, are nowadays a well established concept, with years of running experience, site specialized towards end user chaotic analysis activities do not yet have a defacto standard implementation. In our effort, we focus on all the aspects that can make the analysis tasks easier for a physics user not expert in computing. On the storage side, we are experimenting on storage techniques allowing for remote data access and on storage optimization on the typical analysis access patterns. On the networking side, we are studying the differences between flat and tiered LAN architecture, also using virtual partitioning of the same physical networking for the different use patterns. Finally, on the user side, we are developing tools and instruments to allow for an exhaustive monitoring of their processes at the site, and for an efficient support system in case of problems. We will report about the results of the test executed on different subsystem and give a description of the layout of the infrastructure in place at the site participating to the consortium.

Final Report Scalable Analysis Methods and In Situ Infrastructure for Extreme Scale Knowledge Discovery

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

O'Leary, Patrick

The primary challenge motivating this project is the widening gap between the ability to compute information and to store it for subsequent analysis. This gap adversely impacts science code teams, who can perform analysis only on a small fraction of the data they calculate, resulting in the substantial likelihood of lost or missed science, when results are computed but not analyzed. Our approach is to perform as much analysis or visualization processing on data while it is still resident in memory, which is known as in situ processing. The idea in situ processing was not new at the time ofmore » the start of this effort in 2014, but efforts in that space were largely ad hoc, and there was no concerted effort within the research community that aimed to foster production-quality software tools suitable for use by Department of Energy (DOE) science projects. Our objective was to produce and enable the use of production-quality in situ methods and infrastructure, at scale, on DOE high-performance computing (HPC) facilities, though we expected to have an impact beyond DOE due to the widespread nature of the challenges, which affect virtually all large-scale computational science efforts. To achieve this objective, we engaged in software technology research and development (R&D), in close partnerships with DOE science code teams, to produce software technologies that were shown to run efficiently at scale on DOE HPC platforms.« less

Enabling Research without Geographical Boundaries via Collaborative Research Infrastructures

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Gesing, S.

2016-12-01

Collaborative research infrastructures on global scale for earth and space sciences face a plethora of challenges from technical implementations to organizational aspects. Science gateways - also known as virtual research environments (VREs) or virtual laboratories - address part of such challenges by providing end-to-end solutions to aid researchers to focus on their specific research questions without the need to become acquainted with the technical details of the complex underlying infrastructures. In general, they provide a single point of entry to tools and data irrespective of organizational boundaries and thus make scientific discoveries easier and faster. The importance of science gateways has been recognized on national as well as on international level by funding bodies and by organizations. For example, the US NSF has just funded a Science Gateways Community Institute, which offers support, consultancy and open accessible software repositories for users and developers; Horizon 2020 provides funding for virtual research environments in Europe, which has led to projects such as VRE4EIC (A Europe-wide Interoperable Virtual Research Environment to Empower Multidisciplinary Research Communities and Accelerate Innovation and Collaboration); national or continental research infrastructures such as XSEDE in the USA, Nectar in Australia or EGI in Europe support the development and uptake of science gateways; the global initiatives International Coalition on Science Gateways, the RDA Virtual Research Environment Interest Group as well as the IEEE Technical Area on Science Gateways have been founded to provide global leadership on future directions for science gateways in general and facilitate awareness for science gateways. This presentation will give an overview on these projects and initiatives aiming at supporting domain researchers and developers with measures for the efficient creation of science gateways, for increasing their usability and sustainability under consideration of the breadth of topics in the context of science gateways. It will go into detail for the challenges the community faces for collaborative research on global scale without geographical boundaries and will provide suggestions for further enhancing the outreach to domain researchers.

Business Case Analysis of the Marine Corps Base Pendleton Virtual Smart Grid

DTIC Science & Technology

2017-06-01

Metering Infrastructure on DOD installations. An examination of five case studies highlights the costs and benefits of the Virtual Smart Grid (VSG...studies highlights the costs and benefits of the Virtual Smart Grid (VSG) developed by Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command for use at Marine Corps...41 A. SMART GRID BENEFITS .....................................................................41 B. SUMMARY OF VSG ESTIMATED COSTS AND BENEFITS

Telemedicine: an emerging health care technology.

PubMed

Myers, Mary R

2003-01-01

Telemedicine uses advanced telecommunication technologies to exchange health information and provide health care services across geographic, time, social, and cultural barriers. All telemedicine applications require the use of the electronic transfer of information. Telemedicine encompasses computer technologies using narrow and high bandwidths for specific types of information transmission, broadcast video, compressed video, full motion video, and even virtual reality. There are many types of common medical devices that have been adapted for use with telemedicine technology, and many clinical services can be provided via telemedicine to patients who live in physician shortage areas. The greatest challenges for telemedicine in the twenty-first century are financing, safety standards, security, and infrastructure.

VERCE, Virtual Earthquake and Seismology Research Community in Europe, a new ESFRI initiative integrating data infrastructure, Grid and HPC infrastructures for data integration, data analysis and data modeling in seismology

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

van Hemert, Jano; Vilotte, Jean-Pierre

2010-05-01

Research in earthquake and seismology addresses fundamental problems in understanding Earth's internal wave sources and structures, and augment applications to societal concerns about natural hazards, energy resources and environmental change. This community is central to the European Plate Observing System (EPOS)—the ESFRI initiative in solid Earth Sciences. Global and regional seismology monitoring systems are continuously operated and are transmitting a growing wealth of data from Europe and from around the world. These tremendous volumes of seismograms, i.e., records of ground motions as a function of time, have a definite multi-use attribute, which puts a great premium on open-access data infrastructures that are integrated globally. In Europe, the earthquake and seismology community is part of the European Integrated Data Archives (EIDA) infrastructure and is structured as "horizontal" data services. On top of this distributed data archive system, the community has developed recently within the EC project NERIES advanced SOA-based web services and a unified portal system. Enabling advanced analysis of these data by utilising a data-aware distributed computing environment is instrumental to fully exploit the cornucopia of data and to guarantee optimal operation of the high-cost monitoring facilities. The strategy of VERCE is driven by the needs of data-intensive applications in data mining and modelling and will be illustrated through a set of applications. It aims to provide a comprehensive architecture and framework adapted to the scale and the diversity of these applications, and to integrate the community data infrastructure with Grid and HPC infrastructures. A first novel aspect is a service-oriented architecture that provides well-equipped integrated workbenches, with an efficient communication layer between data and Grid infrastructures, augmented with bridges to the HPC facilities. A second novel aspect is the coupling between Grid data analysis and HPC data modelling applications through workflow and data sharing mechanisms. VERCE will develop important interactions with the European infrastructure initiatives in Grid and HPC computing. The VERCE team: CNRS-France (IPG Paris, LGIT Grenoble), UEDIN (UK), KNMI-ORFEUS (Holland), EMSC, INGV (Italy), LMU (Germany), ULIV (UK), BADW-LRZ (Germany), SCAI (Germany), CINECA (Italy)

Building A Community Focused Data and Modeling Collaborative platform with Hardware Virtualization Technology

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Michaelis, A.; Wang, W.; Melton, F. S.; Votava, P.; Milesi, C.; Hashimoto, H.; Nemani, R. R.; Hiatt, S. H.

2009-12-01

As the length and diversity of the global earth observation data records grow, modeling and analyses of biospheric conditions increasingly requires multiple terabytes of data from a diversity of models and sensors. With network bandwidth beginning to flatten, transmission of these data from centralized data archives presents an increasing challenge, and costs associated with local storage and management of data and compute resources are often significant for individual research and application development efforts. Sharing community valued intermediary data sets, results and codes from individual efforts with others that are not in direct funded collaboration can also be a challenge with respect to time, cost and expertise. We purpose a modeling, data and knowledge center that houses NASA satellite data, climate data and ancillary data where a focused community may come together to share modeling and analysis codes, scientific results, knowledge and expertise on a centralized platform, named Ecosystem Modeling Center (EMC). With the recent development of new technologies for secure hardware virtualization, an opportunity exists to create specific modeling, analysis and compute environments that are customizable, “archiveable” and transferable. Allowing users to instantiate such environments on large compute infrastructures that are directly connected to large data archives may significantly reduce costs and time associated with scientific efforts by alleviating users from redundantly retrieving and integrating data sets and building modeling analysis codes. The EMC platform also provides the possibility for users receiving indirect assistance from expertise through prefabricated compute environments, potentially reducing study “ramp up” times.

Cloud Computing Applications in Support of Earth Science Activities at Marshall Space Flight Center

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Molthan, Andrew L.; Limaye, Ashutosh S.; Srikishen, Jayanthi

2011-01-01

Currently, the NASA Nebula Cloud Computing Platform is available to Agency personnel in a pre-release status as the system undergoes a formal operational readiness review. Over the past year, two projects within the Earth Science Office at NASA Marshall Space Flight Center have been investigating the performance and value of Nebula s "Infrastructure as a Service", or "IaaS" concept and applying cloud computing concepts to advance their respective mission goals. The Short-term Prediction Research and Transition (SPoRT) Center focuses on the transition of unique NASA satellite observations and weather forecasting capabilities for use within the operational forecasting community through partnerships with NOAA s National Weather Service (NWS). SPoRT has evaluated the performance of the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model on virtual machines deployed within Nebula and used Nebula instances to simulate local forecasts in support of regional forecast studies of interest to select NWS forecast offices. In addition to weather forecasting applications, rapidly deployable Nebula virtual machines have supported the processing of high resolution NASA satellite imagery to support disaster assessment following the historic severe weather and tornado outbreak of April 27, 2011. Other modeling and satellite analysis activities are underway in support of NASA s SERVIR program, which integrates satellite observations, ground-based data and forecast models to monitor environmental change and improve disaster response in Central America, the Caribbean, Africa, and the Himalayas. Leveraging SPoRT s experience, SERVIR is working to establish a real-time weather forecasting model for Central America. Other modeling efforts include hydrologic forecasts for Kenya, driven by NASA satellite observations and reanalysis data sets provided by the broader meteorological community. Forecast modeling efforts are supplemented by short-term forecasts of convective initiation, determined by geostationary satellite observations processed on virtual machines powered by Nebula.

Software architecture and design of the web services facilitating climate model diagnostic analysis

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Pan, L.; Lee, S.; Zhang, J.; Tang, B.; Zhai, C.; Jiang, J. H.; Wang, W.; Bao, Q.; Qi, M.; Kubar, T. L.; Teixeira, J.

2015-12-01

Climate model diagnostic analysis is a computationally- and data-intensive task because it involves multiple numerical model outputs and satellite observation data that can both be high resolution. We have built an online tool that facilitates this process. The tool is called Climate Model Diagnostic Analyzer (CMDA). It employs the web service technology and provides a web-based user interface. The benefits of these choices include: (1) No installation of any software other than a browser, hence it is platform compatable; (2) Co-location of computation and big data on the server side, and small results and plots to be downloaded on the client side, hence high data efficiency; (3) multi-threaded implementation to achieve parallel performance on multi-core servers; and (4) cloud deployment so each user has a dedicated virtual machine. In this presentation, we will focus on the computer science aspects of this tool, namely the architectural design, the infrastructure of the web services, the implementation of the web-based user interface, the mechanism of provenance collection, the approach to virtualization, and the Amazon Cloud deployment. As an example, We will describe our methodology to transform an existing science application code into a web service using a Python wrapper interface and Python web service frameworks (i.e., Flask, Gunicorn, and Tornado). Another example is the use of Docker, a light-weight virtualization container, to distribute and deploy CMDA onto an Amazon EC2 instance. Our tool of CMDA has been successfully used in the 2014 Summer School hosted by the JPL Center for Climate Science. Students had positive feedbacks in general and we will report their comments. An enhanced version of CMDA with several new features, some requested by the 2014 students, will be used in the 2015 Summer School soon.

Computational Science in Armenia (Invited Talk)

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Marandjian, H.; Shoukourian, Yu.

This survey is devoted to the development of informatics and computer science in Armenia. The results in theoretical computer science (algebraic models, solutions to systems of general form recursive equations, the methods of coding theory, pattern recognition and image processing), constitute the theoretical basis for developing problem-solving-oriented environments. As examples can be mentioned: a synthesizer of optimized distributed recursive programs, software tools for cluster-oriented implementations of two-dimensional cellular automata, a grid-aware web interface with advanced service trading for linear algebra calculations. In the direction of solving scientific problems that require high-performance computing resources, examples of completed projects include the field of physics (parallel computing of complex quantum systems), astrophysics (Armenian virtual laboratory), biology (molecular dynamics study of human red blood cell membrane), meteorology (implementing and evaluating the Weather Research and Forecast Model for the territory of Armenia). The overview also notes that the Institute for Informatics and Automation Problems of the National Academy of Sciences of Armenia has established a scientific and educational infrastructure, uniting computing clusters of scientific and educational institutions of the country and provides the scientific community with access to local and international computational resources, that is a strong support for computational science in Armenia.

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Amerio, S.; Behari, S.; Boyd, J.

The Fermilab Tevatron collider's data-taking run ended in September 2011, yielding a dataset with rich scientific potential. The CDF and D0 experiments each have approximately 9 PB of collider and simulated data stored on tape. A large computing infrastructure consisting of tape storage, disk cache, and distributed grid computing for physics analysis with the Tevatron data is present at Fermilab. The Fermilab Run II data preservation project intends to keep this analysis capability sustained through the year 2020 and beyond. To achieve this goal, we have implemented a system that utilizes virtualization, automated validation, and migration to new standards inmore » both software and data storage technology and leverages resources available from currently-running experiments at Fermilab. Lastly, these efforts have also provided useful lessons in ensuring long-term data access for numerous experiments, and enable high-quality scientific output for years to come.« less

Data preservation at the Fermilab Tevatron

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Amerio, S.; Behari, S.; Boyd, J.; Brochmann, M.; Culbertson, R.; Diesburg, M.; Freeman, J.; Garren, L.; Greenlee, H.; Herner, K.; Illingworth, R.; Jayatilaka, B.; Jonckheere, A.; Li, Q.; Naymola, S.; Oleynik, G.; Sakumoto, W.; Varnes, E.; Vellidis, C.; Watts, G.; White, S.

2017-04-01

The Fermilab Tevatron collider's data-taking run ended in September 2011, yielding a dataset with rich scientific potential. The CDF and D0 experiments each have approximately 9 PB of collider and simulated data stored on tape. A large computing infrastructure consisting of tape storage, disk cache, and distributed grid computing for physics analysis with the Tevatron data is present at Fermilab. The Fermilab Run II data preservation project intends to keep this analysis capability sustained through the year 2020 and beyond. To achieve this goal, we have implemented a system that utilizes virtualization, automated validation, and migration to new standards in both software and data storage technology and leverages resources available from currently-running experiments at Fermilab. These efforts have also provided useful lessons in ensuring long-term data access for numerous experiments, and enable high-quality scientific output for years to come.

A Distributed Parallel Genetic Algorithm of Placement Strategy for Virtual Machines Deployment on Cloud Platform

PubMed Central

Dong, Yu-Shuang; Xu, Gao-Chao; Fu, Xiao-Dong

2014-01-01

The cloud platform provides various services to users. More and more cloud centers provide infrastructure as the main way of operating. To improve the utilization rate of the cloud center and to decrease the operating cost, the cloud center provides services according to requirements of users by sharding the resources with virtualization. Considering both QoS for users and cost saving for cloud computing providers, we try to maximize performance and minimize energy cost as well. In this paper, we propose a distributed parallel genetic algorithm (DPGA) of placement strategy for virtual machines deployment on cloud platform. It executes the genetic algorithm parallelly and distributedly on several selected physical hosts in the first stage. Then it continues to execute the genetic algorithm of the second stage with solutions obtained from the first stage as the initial population. The solution calculated by the genetic algorithm of the second stage is the optimal one of the proposed approach. The experimental results show that the proposed placement strategy of VM deployment can ensure QoS for users and it is more effective and more energy efficient than other placement strategies on the cloud platform. PMID:25097872

A distributed parallel genetic algorithm of placement strategy for virtual machines deployment on cloud platform.

PubMed

Dong, Yu-Shuang; Xu, Gao-Chao; Fu, Xiao-Dong

2014-01-01

The cloud platform provides various services to users. More and more cloud centers provide infrastructure as the main way of operating. To improve the utilization rate of the cloud center and to decrease the operating cost, the cloud center provides services according to requirements of users by sharding the resources with virtualization. Considering both QoS for users and cost saving for cloud computing providers, we try to maximize performance and minimize energy cost as well. In this paper, we propose a distributed parallel genetic algorithm (DPGA) of placement strategy for virtual machines deployment on cloud platform. It executes the genetic algorithm parallelly and distributedly on several selected physical hosts in the first stage. Then it continues to execute the genetic algorithm of the second stage with solutions obtained from the first stage as the initial population. The solution calculated by the genetic algorithm of the second stage is the optimal one of the proposed approach. The experimental results show that the proposed placement strategy of VM deployment can ensure QoS for users and it is more effective and more energy efficient than other placement strategies on the cloud platform.

Building a Cloud Infrastructure for a Virtual Environmental Observatory

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

El-khatib, Y.; Blair, G. S.; Gemmell, A. L.; Gurney, R. J.

2012-12-01

Environmental science is often fragmented: data is collected by different organizations using mismatched formats and conventions, and models are misaligned and run in isolation. Cloud computing offers a lot of potential in the way of resolving such issues by supporting data from different sources and at various scales, and integrating models to create more sophisticated and collaborative software services. The Environmental Virtual Observatory pilot (EVOp) project, funded by the UK Natural Environment Research Council, aims to demonstrate how cloud computing principles and technologies can be harnessed to develop more effective solutions to pressing environmental issues. The EVOp infrastructure is a tailored one constructed from resources in both private clouds (owned and managed by us) and public clouds (leased from third party providers). All system assets are accessible via a uniform web service interface in order to enable versatile and transparent resource management, and to support fundamental infrastructure properties such as reliability and elasticity. The abstraction that this 'everything as a service' principle brings also supports mashups, i.e. combining different web services (such as models) and data resources of different origins (in situ gauging stations, warehoused data stores, external sources, etc.). We adopt the RESTful style of web services in order to draw a clear line between client and server (i.e. cloud host) and also to keep the server completely stateless. This significantly improves the scalability of the infrastructure and enables easy infrastructure management. For instance, tasks such as load balancing and failure recovery are greatly simplified without the need for techniques such as advance resource reservation or shared block devices. Upon this infrastructure, we developed a web portal composed of a bespoke collection of web-based visualization tools to help bring out relationships or patterns within the data. The portal was designed for use without any programming prerequisites by stakeholders from different backgrounds such as scientists, policy makers, local communities, and the general public. The development of the portal was carried out using an iterative behaviour-driven approach. We have developed six distinct storyboards to determine the requirements of different users. From these, we identified two storyboards to implement during the pilot phase. The first explores flooding at a local catchment scale for farmers and the public. We simulate hydrological interactions to determine where saturated land-surface areas develop. Model parameter values resembling catchment characteristics could be specified either explicitly (for domain specialists) or indirectly using one of several predefined land use scenarios (for less familiar audiences). The second storyboard investigates the diffuse of agricultural pollution at a national level, with regulators as users. We study the flux of Nitrogen and Phosphorus from land to rivers and coastal regions at various scales of drainage and reporting units. This is particularly useful to uncover the impact of existing policy instruments or risk from future environmental changes on the levels of N and P flux.

Grid accounting service: state and future development

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Levshina, T.; Sehgal, C.; Bockelman, B.; Weitzel, D.; Guru, A.

2014-06-01

During the last decade, large-scale federated distributed infrastructures have been continually developed and expanded. One of the crucial components of a cyber-infrastructure is an accounting service that collects data related to resource utilization and identity of users using resources. The accounting service is important for verifying pledged resource allocation per particular groups and users, providing reports for funding agencies and resource providers, and understanding hardware provisioning requirements. It can also be used for end-to-end troubleshooting as well as billing purposes. In this work we describe Gratia, a federated accounting service jointly developed at Fermilab and Holland Computing Center at University of Nebraska-Lincoln. The Open Science Grid, Fermilab, HCC, and several other institutions have used Gratia in production for several years. The current development activities include expanding Virtual Machines provisioning information, XSEDE allocation usage accounting, and Campus Grids resource utilization. We also identify the direction of future work: improvement and expansion of Cloud accounting, persistent and elastic storage space allocation, and the incorporation of WAN and LAN network metrics.

Technical support for Life Sciences communities on a production grid infrastructure.

PubMed

Michel, Franck; Montagnat, Johan; Glatard, Tristan

2012-01-01

Production operation of large distributed computing infrastructures (DCI) still requires a lot of human intervention to reach acceptable quality of service. This may be achievable for scientific communities with solid IT support, but it remains a show-stopper for others. Some application execution environments are used to hide runtime technical issues from end users. But they mostly aim at fault-tolerance rather than incident resolution, and their operation still requires substantial manpower. A longer-term support activity is thus needed to ensure sustained quality of service for Virtual Organisations (VO). This paper describes how the biomed VO has addressed this challenge by setting up a technical support team. Its organisation, tooling, daily tasks, and procedures are described. Results are shown in terms of resource usage by end users, amount of reported incidents, and developed software tools. Based on our experience, we suggest ways to measure the impact of the technical support, perspectives to decrease its human cost and make it more community-specific.

Operating a production pilot factory serving several scientific domains

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Sfiligoi, I.; Würthwein, F.; Andrews, W.; Dost, J. M.; MacNeill, I.; McCrea, A.; Sheripon, E.; Murphy, C. W.

2011-12-01

Pilot infrastructures are becoming prominent players in the Grid environment. One of the major advantages is represented by the reduced effort required by the user communities (also known as Virtual Organizations or VOs) due to the outsourcing of the Grid interfacing services, i.e. the pilot factory, to Grid experts. One such pilot factory, based on the glideinWMS pilot infrastructure, is being operated by the Open Science Grid at University of California San Diego (UCSD). This pilot factory is serving multiple VOs from several scientific domains. Currently the three major clients are the analysis operations of the HEP experiment CMS, the community VO HCC, which serves mostly math, biology and computer science users, and the structural biology VO NEBioGrid. The UCSD glidein factory allows the served VOs to use Grid resources distributed over 150 sites in North and South America, in Europe, and in Asia. This paper presents the steps taken to create a production quality pilot factory, together with the challenges encountered along the road.

Economic models for management of resources in peer-to-peer and grid computing

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Buyya, Rajkumar; Stockinger, Heinz; Giddy, Jonathan; Abramson, David

2001-07-01

The accelerated development in Peer-to-Peer (P2P) and Grid computing has positioned them as promising next generation computing platforms. They enable the creation of Virtual Enterprises (VE) for sharing resources distributed across the world. However, resource management, application development and usage models in these environments is a complex undertaking. This is due to the geographic distribution of resources that are owned by different organizations or peers. The resource owners of each of these resources have different usage or access policies and cost models, and varying loads and availability. In order to address complex resource management issues, we have proposed a computational economy framework for resource allocation and for regulating supply and demand in Grid computing environments. The framework provides mechanisms for optimizing resource provider and consumer objective functions through trading and brokering services. In a real world market, there exist various economic models for setting the price for goods based on supply-and-demand and their value to the user. They include commodity market, posted price, tenders and auctions. In this paper, we discuss the use of these models for interaction between Grid components in deciding resource value and the necessary infrastructure to realize them. In addition to normal services offered by Grid computing systems, we need an infrastructure to support interaction protocols, allocation mechanisms, currency, secure banking, and enforcement services. Furthermore, we demonstrate the usage of some of these economic models in resource brokering through Nimrod/G deadline and cost-based scheduling for two different optimization strategies on the World Wide Grid (WWG) testbed that contains peer-to-peer resources located on five continents: Asia, Australia, Europe, North America, and South America.

The Virtual Environment for Reactor Applications (VERA): Design and architecture

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Turner, John A., E-mail: turnerja@ornl.gov; Clarno, Kevin; Sieger, Matt

VERA, the Virtual Environment for Reactor Applications, is the system of physics capabilities being developed and deployed by the Consortium for Advanced Simulation of Light Water Reactors (CASL). CASL was established for the modeling and simulation of commercial nuclear reactors. VERA consists of integrating and interfacing software together with a suite of physics components adapted and/or refactored to simulate relevant physical phenomena in a coupled manner. VERA also includes the software development environment and computational infrastructure needed for these components to be effectively used. We describe the architecture of VERA from both software and numerical perspectives, along with the goalsmore » and constraints that drove major design decisions, and their implications. We explain why VERA is an environment rather than a framework or toolkit, why these distinctions are relevant (particularly for coupled physics applications), and provide an overview of results that demonstrate the use of VERA tools for a variety of challenging applications within the nuclear industry.« less

The Virtual Mission Operations Center

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Moore, Mike; Fox, Jeffrey

1994-01-01

Spacecraft management is becoming more human intensive as spacecraft become more complex and as operations costs are growing accordingly. Several automation approaches have been proposed to lower these costs. However, most of these approaches are not flexible enough in the operations processes and levels of automation that they support. This paper presents a concept called the Virtual Mission Operations Center (VMOC) that provides highly flexible support for dynamic spacecraft management processes and automation. In a VMOC, operations personnel can be shared among missions, the operations team can change personnel and their locations, and automation can be added and removed as appropriate. The VMOC employs a form of on-demand supervisory control called management by exception to free operators from having to actively monitor their system. The VMOC extends management by exception, however, so that distributed, dynamic teams can work together. The VMOC uses work-group computing concepts and groupware tools to provide a team infrastructure, and it employs user agents to allow operators to define and control system automation.

Use of Docker for deployment and testing of astronomy software

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Morris, D.; Voutsinas, S.; Hambly, N. C.; Mann, R. G.

2017-07-01

We describe preliminary investigations of using Docker for the deployment and testing of astronomy software. Docker is a relatively new containerization technology that is developing rapidly and being adopted across a range of domains. It is based upon virtualization at operating system level, which presents many advantages in comparison to the more traditional hardware virtualization that underpins most cloud computing infrastructure today. A particular strength of Docker is its simple format for describing and managing software containers, which has benefits for software developers, system administrators and end users. We report on our experiences from two projects - a simple activity to demonstrate how Docker works, and a more elaborate set of services that demonstrates more of its capabilities and what they can achieve within an astronomical context - and include an account of how we solved problems through interaction with Docker's very active open source development community, which is currently the key to the most effective use of this rapidly-changing technology.

Optical network democratization.

PubMed

Nejabati, Reza; Peng, Shuping; Simeonidou, Dimitra

2016-03-06

The current Internet infrastructure is not able to support independent evolution and innovation at physical and network layer functionalities, protocols and services, while at same time supporting the increasing bandwidth demands of evolving and heterogeneous applications. This paper addresses this problem by proposing a completely democratized optical network infrastructure. It introduces the novel concepts of the optical white box and bare metal optical switch as key technology enablers for democratizing optical networks. These are programmable optical switches whose hardware is loosely connected internally and is completely separated from their control software. To alleviate their complexity, a multi-dimensional abstraction mechanism using software-defined network technology is proposed. It creates a universal model of the proposed switches without exposing their technological details. It also enables a conventional network programmer to develop network applications for control of the optical network without specific technical knowledge of the physical layer. Furthermore, a novel optical network virtualization mechanism is proposed, enabling the composition and operation of multiple coexisting and application-specific virtual optical networks sharing the same physical infrastructure. Finally, the optical white box and the abstraction mechanism are experimentally evaluated, while the virtualization mechanism is evaluated with simulation. © 2016 The Author(s).

Virtual reality in surgery and medicine.

PubMed

Chinnock, C

1994-01-01

This report documents the state of development of enhanced and virtual reality-based systems in medicine. Virtual reality systems seek to simulate a surgical procedure in a computer-generated world in order to improve training. Enhanced reality systems seek to augment or enhance reality by providing improved imaging alternatives for specific patient data. Virtual reality represents a paradigm shift in the way we teach and evaluate the skills of medical personnel. Driving the development of virtual reality-based simulators is laparoscopic abdominal surgery, where there is a perceived need for better training techniques; within a year, systems will be fielded for second-year residency students. Further refinements over perhaps the next five years should allow surgeons to evaluate and practice new techniques in a simulator before using them on patients. Technical developments are rapidly improving the realism of these machines to an amazing degree, as well as bringing the price down to affordable levels. In the next five years, many new anatomical models, procedures, and skills are likely to become available on simulators. Enhanced reality systems are generally being developed to improve visualization of specific patient data. Three-dimensional (3-D) stereovision systems for endoscopic applications, head-mounted displays, and stereotactic image navigation systems are being fielded now, with neurosurgery and laparoscopic surgery being major driving influences. Over perhaps the next five years, enhanced and virtual reality systems are likely to merge. This will permit patient-specific images to be used on virtual reality simulators or computer-generated landscapes to be input into surgical visualization instruments. Percolating all around these activities are developments in robotics and telesurgery. An advanced information infrastructure eventually will permit remote physicians to share video, audio, medical records, and imaging data with local physicians in real time. Surgical robots are likely to be deployed for specific tasks in the operating room (OR) and to support telesurgery applications. Technical developments in robotics and motion control are key components of many virtual reality systems. Since almost all of the virtual reality and enhanced reality systems will be digitally based, they are also capable of being put "on-line" for tele-training, consulting, and even surgery. Advancements in virtual and enhanced reality systems will be driven in part by consumer applications of this technology. Many of the companies that will supply systems for medical applications are also working on commercial products. A big consumer hit can benefit the entire industry by increasing volumes and bringing down costs.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)

Virtual-optical information security system based on public key infrastructure

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Peng, Xiang; Zhang, Peng; Cai, Lilong; Niu, Hanben

2005-01-01

A virtual-optical based encryption model with the aid of public key infrastructure (PKI) is presented in this paper. The proposed model employs a hybrid architecture in which our previously published encryption method based on virtual-optics scheme (VOS) can be used to encipher and decipher data while an asymmetric algorithm, for example RSA, is applied for enciphering and deciphering the session key(s). The whole information security model is run under the framework of international standard ITU-T X.509 PKI, which is on basis of public-key cryptography and digital signatures. This PKI-based VOS security approach has additional features like confidentiality, authentication, and integrity for the purpose of data encryption under the environment of network. Numerical experiments prove the effectiveness of the method. The security of proposed model is briefly analyzed by examining some possible attacks from the viewpoint of a cryptanalysis.

Concurrent access to a virtual microscope using a web service oriented architecture

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Corredor, Germán.; Iregui, Marcela; Arias, Viviana; Romero, Eduardo

2013-11-01

Virtual microscopy (VM) facilitates visualization and deployment of histopathological virtual slides (VS), a useful tool for education, research and diagnosis. In recent years, it has become popular, yet its use is still limited basically because of the very large sizes of VS, typically of the order of gigabytes. Such volume of data requires efficacious and efficient strategies to access the VS content. In an educative or research scenario, several users may require to access and interact with VS at the same time, so, due to large data size, a very expensive and powerful infrastructure is usually required. This article introduces a novel JPEG2000-based service oriented architecture for streaming and visualizing very large images under scalable strategies, which in addition need not require very specialized infrastructure. Results suggest that the proposed architecture enables transmission and simultaneous visualization of large images, while it is efficient using resources and offering users proper response times.

Web Services and Handle Infrastructure - WDCC's Contributions to International Projects

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Föll, G.; Weigelt, T.; Kindermann, S.; Lautenschlager, M.; Toussaint, F.

2012-04-01

Climate science demands on data management are growing rapidly as climate models grow in the precision with which they depict spatial structures and in the completeness with which they describe a vast range of physical processes. The ExArch project is exploring the challenges of developing a software management infrastructure which will scale to the multi-exabyte archives of climate data which are likely to be crucial to major policy decisions in by the end of the decade. The ExArch approach to future integration of exascale climate archives is based on one hand on a distributed web service architecture providing data analysis and quality control functionality across archvies. On the other hand a consistent persistent identifier infrastructure is deployed to support distributed data management and data replication. Distributed data analysis functionality is based on the CDO climate data operators' package. The CDO-Tool is used for processing of the archived data and metadata. CDO is a collection of command line Operators to manipulate and analyse Climate and forecast model Data. A range of formats is supported and over 500 operators are provided. CDO presently is designed to work in a scripting environment with local files. ExArch will extend the tool to support efficient usage in an exascale archive with distributed data and computational resources by providing flexible scheduling capabilities. Quality control will become increasingly important in an exascale computing context. Researchers will be dealing with millions of data files from multiple sources and will need to know whether the files satisfy a range of basic quality criterea. Hence ExArch will provide a flexible and extensible quality control system. The data will be held at more than 30 computing centres and data archives around the world, but for users it will appear as a single archive due to a standardized ExArch Web Processing Service. Data infrastructures such as the one built by ExArch can greatly benefit from assigning persistent identifiers (PIDs) to the main entities, such as data and metadata records. A PID should then not only consist of a globally unique identifier, but also support built-in facilities to relate PIDs to each other, to build multi-hierarchical virtual collections and to enable attaching basic metadata directly to PIDs. With such a toolset, PIDs can support crucial data management tasks. For example, data replication performed in ExArch can be supported through PIDs as they can help to establish durable links between identical copies. By linking derivative data objects together, their provenance can be traced with a level of detail and reliability currently unavailable in the Earth system modelling domain. Regarding data transfers, virtual collections of PIDs may be used to package data prior to transmission. If the PID of such a collection is used as the primary key in data transfers, safety of transfer and traceability of data objects across repositories increases. End-users can benefit from PIDs as well since they make data discovery independent from particular storage sites and enable user-friendly communication about primary research objects. A generic PID system can in fact be a fundamental building block for scientific e-infrastructures across projects and domains.

UAS Integration in the NAS Project: Integrated Test and LVC Infrastructure

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Murphy, Jim; Hoang, Ty

2015-01-01

Overview presentation of the Integrated Test and Evaluation sub-project of the Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) in the National Airspace System (NAS). The emphasis of the presentation is the Live, Virtual, and Constructive (LVC) system (a broadly used name for classifying modeling and simulation) infrastructure and use of external assets and connection.

Application of large-scale computing infrastructure for diverse environmental research applications using GC3Pie

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Maffioletti, Sergio; Dawes, Nicholas; Bavay, Mathias; Sarni, Sofiane; Lehning, Michael

2013-04-01

The Swiss Experiment platform (SwissEx: http://www.swiss-experiment.ch) provides a distributed storage and processing infrastructure for environmental research experiments. The aim of the second phase project (the Open Support Platform for Environmental Research, OSPER, 2012-2015) is to develop the existing infrastructure to provide scientists with an improved workflow. This improved workflow will include pre-defined, documented and connected processing routines. A large-scale computing and data facility is required to provide reliable and scalable access to data for analysis, and it is desirable that such an infrastructure should be free of traditional data handling methods. Such an infrastructure has been developed using the cloud-based part of the Swiss national infrastructure SMSCG (http://www.smscg.ch) and Academic Cloud. The infrastructure under construction supports two main usage models: 1) Ad-hoc data analysis scripts: These scripts are simple processing scripts, written by the environmental researchers themselves, which can be applied to large data sets via the high power infrastructure. Examples of this type of script are spatial statistical analysis scripts (R-based scripts), mostly computed on raw meteorological and/or soil moisture data. These provide processed output in the form of a grid, a plot, or a kml. 2) Complex models: A more intense data analysis pipeline centered (initially) around the physical process model, Alpine3D, and the MeteoIO plugin; depending on the data set, this may require a tightly coupled infrastructure. SMSCG already supports Alpine3D executions as both regular grid jobs and as virtual software appliances. A dedicated appliance with the Alpine3D specific libraries has been created and made available through the SMSCG infrastructure. The analysis pipelines are activated and supervised by simple control scripts that, depending on the data fetched from the meteorological stations, launch new instances of the Alpine3D appliance, execute location-based subroutines at each grid point and store the results back into the central repository for post-processing. An optional extension of this infrastructure will be to provide a 'ring buffer'-type database infrastructure, such that model results (e.g. test runs made to check parameter dependency or for development) can be visualised and downloaded after completion without submitting them to a permanent storage infrastructure. Data organization Data collected from sensors are archived and classified in distributed sites connected with an open-source software middleware, GSN. Publicly available data are available through common web services and via a cloud storage server (based on Swift). Collocation of the data and processing in the cloud would eventually eliminate data transfer requirements. Execution control logic Execution of the data analysis pipelines (for both the R-based analysis and the Alpine3D simulations) has been implemented using the GC3Pie framework developed by UZH. (https://code.google.com/p/gc3pie/). This allows large-scale, fault-tolerant execution of the pipelines to be described in terms of software appliances. GC3Pie also allows supervision of the execution of large campaigns of appliances as a single simulation. This poster will present the fundamental architectural components of the data analysis pipelines together with initial experimental results.

Facilitating NASA Earth Science Data Processing Using Nebula Cloud Computing

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Chen, A.; Pham, L.; Kempler, S.; Theobald, M.; Esfandiari, A.; Campino, J.; Vollmer, B.; Lynnes, C.

2011-12-01

Cloud Computing technology has been used to offer high-performance and low-cost computing and storage resources for both scientific problems and business services. Several cloud computing services have been implemented in the commercial arena, e.g. Amazon's EC2 & S3, Microsoft's Azure, and Google App Engine. There are also some research and application programs being launched in academia and governments to utilize Cloud Computing. NASA launched the Nebula Cloud Computing platform in 2008, which is an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) to deliver on-demand distributed virtual computers. Nebula users can receive required computing resources as a fully outsourced service. NASA Goddard Earth Science Data and Information Service Center (GES DISC) migrated several GES DISC's applications to the Nebula as a proof of concept, including: a) The Simple, Scalable, Script-based Science Processor for Measurements (S4PM) for processing scientific data; b) the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) data process workflow for processing AIRS raw data; and c) the GES-DISC Interactive Online Visualization ANd aNalysis Infrastructure (GIOVANNI) for online access to, analysis, and visualization of Earth science data. This work aims to evaluate the practicability and adaptability of the Nebula. The initial work focused on the AIRS data process workflow to evaluate the Nebula. The AIRS data process workflow consists of a series of algorithms being used to process raw AIRS level 0 data and output AIRS level 2 geophysical retrievals. Migrating the entire workflow to the Nebula platform is challenging, but practicable. After installing several supporting libraries and the processing code itself, the workflow is able to process AIRS data in a similar fashion to its current (non-cloud) configuration. We compared the performance of processing 2 days of AIRS level 0 data through level 2 using a Nebula virtual computer and a local Linux computer. The result shows that Nebula has significantly better performance than the local machine. Much of the difference was due to newer equipment in the Nebula than the legacy computer, which is suggestive of a potential economic advantage beyond elastic power, i.e., access to up-to-date hardware vs. legacy hardware that must be maintained past its prime to amortize the cost. In addition to a trade study of advantages and challenges of porting complex processing to the cloud, a tutorial was developed to enable further progress in utilizing the Nebula for Earth Science applications and understanding better the potential for Cloud Computing in further data- and computing-intensive Earth Science research. In particular, highly bursty computing such as that experienced in the user-demand-driven Giovanni system may become more tractable in a Cloud environment. Our future work will continue to focus on migrating more GES DISC's applications/instances, e.g. Giovanni instances, to the Nebula platform and making matured migrated applications to be in operation on the Nebula.

Virtual healthcare delivery: defined, modeled, and predictive barriers to implementation identified.

PubMed

Harrop, V M

2001-01-01

Provider organizations lack: 1. a definition of "virtual" healthcare delivery relative to the products, services, and processes offered by dot.coms, web-compact disk healthcare content providers, telemedicine, and telecommunications companies, and 2. a model for integrating real and virtual healthcare delivery. This paper defines virtual healthcare delivery as asynchronous, outsourced, and anonymous, then proposes a 2x2 Real-Virtual Healthcare Delivery model focused on real and virtual patients and real and virtual provider organizations. Using this model, provider organizations can systematically deconstruct healthcare delivery in the real world and reconstruct appropriate pieces in the virtual world. Observed barriers to virtual healthcare delivery are: resistance to telecommunication integrated delivery networks and outsourcing; confusion over virtual infrastructure requirements for telemedicine and full-service web portals, and the impact of integrated delivery networks and outsourcing on extant cultural norms and revenue generating practices. To remain competitive provider organizations must integrate real and virtual healthcare delivery.

Virtual healthcare delivery: defined, modeled, and predictive barriers to implementation identified.

PubMed Central

Harrop, V. M.

2001-01-01

Provider organizations lack: 1. a definition of "virtual" healthcare delivery relative to the products, services, and processes offered by dot.coms, web-compact disk healthcare content providers, telemedicine, and telecommunications companies, and 2. a model for integrating real and virtual healthcare delivery. This paper defines virtual healthcare delivery as asynchronous, outsourced, and anonymous, then proposes a 2x2 Real-Virtual Healthcare Delivery model focused on real and virtual patients and real and virtual provider organizations. Using this model, provider organizations can systematically deconstruct healthcare delivery in the real world and reconstruct appropriate pieces in the virtual world. Observed barriers to virtual healthcare delivery are: resistance to telecommunication integrated delivery networks and outsourcing; confusion over virtual infrastructure requirements for telemedicine and full-service web portals, and the impact of integrated delivery networks and outsourcing on extant cultural norms and revenue generating practices. To remain competitive provider organizations must integrate real and virtual healthcare delivery. PMID:11825189

Software architecture standard for simulation virtual machine, version 2.0

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Sturtevant, Robert; Wessale, William

1994-01-01

The Simulation Virtual Machine (SBM) is an Ada architecture which eases the effort involved in the real-time software maintenance and sustaining engineering. The Software Architecture Standard defines the infrastructure which all the simulation models are built from. SVM was developed for and used in the Space Station Verification and Training Facility.

Scalable Analysis Methods and In Situ Infrastructure for Extreme Scale Knowledge Discovery

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Bethel, Wes

2016-07-24

The primary challenge motivating this team’s work is the widening gap between the ability to compute information and to store it for subsequent analysis. This gap adversely impacts science code teams, who are able to perform analysis only on a small fraction of the data they compute, resulting in the very real likelihood of lost or missed science, when results are computed but not analyzed. Our approach is to perform as much analysis or visualization processing on data while it is still resident in memory, an approach that is known as in situ processing. The idea in situ processing wasmore » not new at the time of the start of this effort in 2014, but efforts in that space were largely ad hoc, and there was no concerted effort within the research community that aimed to foster production-quality software tools suitable for use by DOE science projects. In large, our objective was produce and enable use of production-quality in situ methods and infrastructure, at scale, on DOE HPC facilities, though we expected to have impact beyond DOE due to the widespread nature of the challenges, which affect virtually all large-scale computational science efforts. To achieve that objective, we assembled a unique team of researchers consisting of representatives from DOE national laboratories, academia, and industry, and engaged in software technology R&D, as well as engaged in close partnerships with DOE science code teams, to produce software technologies that were shown to run effectively at scale on DOE HPC platforms.« less

HPCC and the National Information Infrastructure: an overview.

PubMed Central

Lindberg, D A

1995-01-01

The National Information Infrastructure (NII) or "information superhighway" is a high-priority federal initiative to combine communications networks, computers, databases, and consumer electronics to deliver information services to all U.S. citizens. The NII will be used to improve government and social services while cutting administrative costs. Operated by the private sector, the NII will rely on advanced technologies developed under the direction of the federal High Performance Computing and Communications (HPCC) Program. These include computing systems capable of performing trillions of operations (teraops) per second and networks capable of transmitting billions of bits (gigabits) per second. Among other activities, the HPCC Program supports the national supercomputer research centers, the federal portion of the Internet, and the development of interface software, such as Mosaic, that facilitates access to network information services. Health care has been identified as a critical demonstration area for HPCC technology and an important application area for the NII. As an HPCC participant, the National Library of Medicine (NLM) assists hospitals and medical centers to connect to the Internet through projects directed by the Regional Medical Libraries and through an Internet Connections Program cosponsored by the National Science Foundation. In addition to using the Internet to provide enhanced access to its own information services, NLM sponsors health-related applications of HPCC technology. Examples include the "Visible Human" project and recently awarded contracts for test-bed networks to share patient data and medical images, telemedicine projects to provide consultation and medical care to patients in rural areas, and advanced computer simulations of human anatomy for training in "virtual surgery." PMID:7703935

The Virtual Observatory as Critical Scientific Cyber Infrastructure.

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Fox, P.

2006-12-01

Virtual Observatories can provide access to vast stores of scientific data: observations and models as well as services to analyze, visualize and assimilate multiple data sources. As these electronic resource become widely used, there is potential to improve the efficiency, interoperability, collaborative potential, and impact of a wide range of interdisciplinary scientific research. In addition, we know that as the diversity of collaborative science and volume of accompanying data and data generators/consumers grows so do the challenges. In order for Virtual Observatories to realize their potential and become indispensible infrastructure, social, political and technical challenges need to be addressed concerning (at least) roles and responsibilities, data and services policies, representations and interoperability of services, data search, access, and usability. In this presentation, we discuss several concepts and instances of the Virtual Observatory and related projects that may, and may not, be meeting the abovementioned challanges. We also argue that science driven needs and architecture development are critical in the development of sustainable (and thus agile) cyberinfrastructure. Finally we some present or emerging candidate technologies and organizational constructs that will need to be pursued.

Distributed Processing of Sentinel-2 Products using the BIGEARTH Platform

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Bacu, Victor; Stefanut, Teodor; Nandra, Constantin; Mihon, Danut; Gorgan, Dorian

2017-04-01

The constellation of observational satellites orbiting around Earth is constantly increasing, providing more data that need to be processed in order to extract meaningful information and knowledge from it. Sentinel-2 satellites, part of the Copernicus Earth Observation program, aim to be used in agriculture, forestry and many other land management applications. ESA's SNAP toolbox can be used to process data gathered by Sentinel-2 satellites but is limited to the resources provided by a stand-alone computer. In this paper we present a cloud based software platform that makes use of this toolbox together with other remote sensing software applications to process Sentinel-2 products. The BIGEARTH software platform [1] offers an integrated solution for processing Earth Observation data coming from different sources (such as satellites or on-site sensors). The flow of processing is defined as a chain of tasks based on the WorDeL description language [2]. Each task could rely on a different software technology (such as Grass GIS and ESA's SNAP) in order to process the input data. One important feature of the BIGEARTH platform comes from this possibility of interconnection and integration, throughout the same flow of processing, of the various well known software technologies. All this integration is transparent from the user perspective. The proposed platform extends the SNAP capabilities by enabling specialists to easily scale the processing over distributed architectures, according to their specific needs and resources. The software platform [3] can be used in multiple configurations. In the basic one the software platform runs as a standalone application inside a virtual machine. Obviously in this case the computational resources are limited but it will give an overview of the functionalities of the software platform, and also the possibility to define the flow of processing and later on to execute it on a more complex infrastructure. The most complex and robust configuration is based on cloud computing and allows the installation on a private or public cloud infrastructure. In this configuration, the processing resources can be dynamically allocated and the execution time can be considerably improved by the available virtual resources and the number of parallelizable sequences in the processing flow. The presentation highlights the benefits and issues of the proposed solution by analyzing some significant experimental use cases. Main references for further information: [1] BigEarth project, http://cgis.utcluj.ro/projects/bigearth [2] Constantin Nandra, Dorian Gorgan: "Defining Earth data batch processing tasks by means of a flexible workflow description language", ISPRS Ann. Photogramm. Remote Sens. Spatial Inf. Sci., III-4, 59-66, (2016). [3] Victor Bacu, Teodor Stefanut, Dorian Gorgan, "Adaptive Processing of Earth Observation Data on Cloud Infrastructures Based on Workflow Description", Proceedings of the Intelligent Computer Communication and Processing (ICCP), IEEE-Press, pp.444-454, (2015).

Towards Monitoring-as-a-service for Scientific Computing Cloud applications using the ElasticSearch ecosystem

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Bagnasco, S.; Berzano, D.; Guarise, A.; Lusso, S.; Masera, M.; Vallero, S.

2015-12-01

The INFN computing centre in Torino hosts a private Cloud, which is managed with the OpenNebula cloud controller. The infrastructure offers Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) services to different scientific computing applications. The main stakeholders of the facility are a grid Tier-2 site for the ALICE collaboration at LHC, an interactive analysis facility for the same experiment and a grid Tier-2 site for the BESIII collaboration, plus an increasing number of other small tenants. The dynamic allocation of resources to tenants is partially automated. This feature requires detailed monitoring and accounting of the resource usage. We set up a monitoring framework to inspect the site activities both in terms of IaaS and applications running on the hosted virtual instances. For this purpose we used the ElasticSearch, Logstash and Kibana (ELK) stack. The infrastructure relies on a MySQL database back-end for data preservation and to ensure flexibility to choose a different monitoring solution if needed. The heterogeneous accounting information is transferred from the database to the ElasticSearch engine via a custom Logstash plugin. Each use-case is indexed separately in ElasticSearch and we setup a set of Kibana dashboards with pre-defined queries in order to monitor the relevant information in each case. For the IaaS metering, we developed sensors for the OpenNebula API. The IaaS level information gathered through the API is sent to the MySQL database through an ad-hoc developed RESTful web service. Moreover, we have developed a billing system for our private Cloud, which relies on the RabbitMQ message queue for asynchronous communication to the database and on the ELK stack for its graphical interface. The Italian Grid accounting framework is also migrating to a similar set-up. Concerning the application level, we used the Root plugin TProofMonSenderSQL to collect accounting data from the interactive analysis facility. The BESIII virtual instances used to be monitored with Zabbix, as a proof of concept we also retrieve the information contained in the Zabbix database. In this way we have achieved a uniform monitoring interface for both the IaaS and the scientific applications, mostly leveraging off-the-shelf tools. At present, we are working to define a model for monitoring-as-a-service, based on the tools described above, which the Cloud tenants can easily configure to suit their specific needs.

World Wind: NASA's Virtual Globe

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Hogan, P.

2007-12-01

Virtual globes have set the standard for information exchange. Once you've experienced the visually rich and highly compelling nature of data delivered via virtual globes with their highly engaging context of 3D, it's hard to go back to a flat 2D world. Just as the sawbones of not-too-long-ago have given way to sophisticated surgical operating theater, today's medium for information exchange is just beginning to leap from the staid chalkboards and remote libraries to fingertip navigable 3D worlds. How we harness this technology to serve a world inundated with information will describe the quality of our future. Our instincts for discovery and entertainment urge us on. There's so much we could know if the world's knowledge was presented to us in its natural context. Virtual globes are almost magical in their ability to reveal natural wonders. Anyone flying along a chain of volcanoes, a mid-ocean ridge or deep ocean trench, while simultaneously seeing the different depths to the history of earthquakes in those areas, will be delighted to sense Earth's dynamic nature in a way that would otherwise take several paragraphs of "boring" text. The sophisticated concepts related to global climate change would be far more comprehensible when experienced via a virtual globe. There is a large universe of public and private geospatial data sets that virtual globes can bring to light. The benefit derived from access to this data within virtual globes represents a significant return on investment for government, industry, the general public, and especially in the realm of education. Data access remains a key issue. Just as the highway infrastructure allows unimpeded access from point A to point B, an open standards-based infrastructure for data access allows virtual globes to exchange data in the most efficient manner possible. This data can be either free or proprietary. The Open Geospatial Consortium is providing the leadership necessary for this open standards-based data access infrastructure. The open-source community plays a crucial role in advancing virtual globe technology. This world community identifies, tracks and resolves technical problems, suggests new features and source code modifications, and often provides high-resolution data sets and other types of user-generated content, all while extending the functionality of virtual globe technology. NASA World Wind is one example of open source virtual globe technology that provides the world with the ability to build any desired functionality and make any desired data accessible.

Energy Consumption Management of Virtual Cloud Computing Platform

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Li, Lin

2017-11-01

For energy consumption management research on virtual cloud computing platforms, energy consumption management of virtual computers and cloud computing platform should be understood deeper. Only in this way can problems faced by energy consumption management be solved. In solving problems, the key to solutions points to data centers with high energy consumption, so people are in great need to use a new scientific technique. Virtualization technology and cloud computing have become powerful tools in people’s real life, work and production because they have strong strength and many advantages. Virtualization technology and cloud computing now is in a rapid developing trend. It has very high resource utilization rate. In this way, the presence of virtualization and cloud computing technologies is very necessary in the constantly developing information age. This paper has summarized, explained and further analyzed energy consumption management questions of the virtual cloud computing platform. It eventually gives people a clearer understanding of energy consumption management of virtual cloud computing platform and brings more help to various aspects of people’s live, work and son on.

The EPOS Vision for the Open Science Cloud

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Jeffery, Keith; Harrison, Matt; Cocco, Massimo

2016-04-01

Cloud computing offers dynamic elastic scalability for data processing on demand. For much research activity, demand for computing is uneven over time and so CLOUD computing offers both cost-effectiveness and capacity advantages. However, as reported repeatedly by the EC Cloud Expert Group, there are barriers to the uptake of Cloud Computing: (1) security and privacy; (2) interoperability (avoidance of lock-in); (3) lack of appropriate systems development environments for application programmers to characterise their applications to allow CLOUD middleware to optimize their deployment and execution. From CERN, the Helix-Nebula group has proposed the architecture for the European Open Science Cloud. They are discussing with other e-Infrastructure groups such as EGI (GRIDs), EUDAT (data curation), AARC (network authentication and authorisation) and also with the EIROFORUM group of 'international treaty' RIs (Research Infrastructures) and the ESFRI (European Strategic Forum for Research Infrastructures) RIs including EPOS. Many of these RIs are either e-RIs (electronic-RIs) or have an e-RI interface for access and use. The EPOS architecture is centred on a portal: ICS (Integrated Core Services). The architectural design already allows for access to e-RIs (which may include any or all of data, software, users and resources such as computers or instruments). Those within any one domain (subject area) of EPOS are considered within the TCS (Thematic Core Services). Those outside, or available across multiple domains of EPOS, are ICS-d (Integrated Core Services-Distributed) since the intention is that they will be used by any or all of the TCS via the ICS. Another such service type is CES (Computational Earth Science); effectively an ICS-d specializing in high performance computation, analytics, simulation or visualization offered by a TCS for others to use. Already discussions are underway between EPOS and EGI, EUDAT, AARC and Helix-Nebula for those offerings to be considered as ICS-ds by EPOS.. Provision of access to ICS-Ds from ICS-C concerns several aspects: (a) Technical : it may be more or less difficult to connect and pass from ICS-C to the ICS-d/ CES the 'package' (probably a virtual machine) of data and software; (b) Security/privacy : including passing personal information e.g. related to AAAI (Authentication, authorization, accounting Infrastructure); (c) financial and legal : such as payment, licence conditions; Appropriate interfaces from ICS-C to ICS-d are being designed to accommodate these aspects. The Open Science Cloud is timely because it provides a framework to discuss governance and sustainability for computational resource provision as well as an effective interpretation of federated approach to HPC(High Performance Computing) -HTC (High Throughput Computing). It will be a unique opportunity to share and adopt procurement policies to provide access to computational resources for RIs. The current state of discussions and expected roadmap for the EPOS-Open Science Cloud relationship are presented.

Technical Challenges and Opportunities of Centralizing Space Science Mission Operations (SSMO) at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Ido, Haisam; Burns, Rich

2015-01-01

The NASA Goddard Space Science Mission Operations project (SSMO) is performing a technical cost-benefit analysis for centralizing and consolidating operations of a diverse set of missions into a unified and integrated technical infrastructure. The presentation will focus on the notion of normalizing spacecraft operations processes, workflows, and tools. It will also show the processes of creating a standardized open architecture, creating common security models and implementations, interfaces, services, automations, notifications, alerts, logging, publish, subscribe and middleware capabilities. The presentation will also discuss how to leverage traditional capabilities, along with virtualization, cloud computing services, control groups and containers, and possibly Big Data concepts.

OCCAM: a flexible, multi-purpose and extendable HPC cluster

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Aldinucci, M.; Bagnasco, S.; Lusso, S.; Pasteris, P.; Rabellino, S.; Vallero, S.

2017-10-01

The Open Computing Cluster for Advanced data Manipulation (OCCAM) is a multipurpose flexible HPC cluster designed and operated by a collaboration between the University of Torino and the Sezione di Torino of the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare. It is aimed at providing a flexible, reconfigurable and extendable infrastructure to cater to a wide range of different scientific computing use cases, including ones from solid-state chemistry, high-energy physics, computer science, big data analytics, computational biology, genomics and many others. Furthermore, it will serve as a platform for R&D activities on computational technologies themselves, with topics ranging from GPU acceleration to Cloud Computing technologies. A heterogeneous and reconfigurable system like this poses a number of challenges related to the frequency at which heterogeneous hardware resources might change their availability and shareability status, which in turn affect methods and means to allocate, manage, optimize, bill, monitor VMs, containers, virtual farms, jobs, interactive bare-metal sessions, etc. This work describes some of the use cases that prompted the design and construction of the HPC cluster, its architecture and resource provisioning model, along with a first characterization of its performance by some synthetic benchmark tools and a few realistic use-case tests.

The Australian Computational Earth Systems Simulator

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Mora, P.; Muhlhaus, H.; Lister, G.; Dyskin, A.; Place, D.; Appelbe, B.; Nimmervoll, N.; Abramson, D.

2001-12-01

Numerical simulation of the physics and dynamics of the entire earth system offers an outstanding opportunity for advancing earth system science and technology but represents a major challenge due to the range of scales and physical processes involved, as well as the magnitude of the software engineering effort required. However, new simulation and computer technologies are bringing this objective within reach. Under a special competitive national funding scheme to establish new Major National Research Facilities (MNRF), the Australian government together with a consortium of Universities and research institutions have funded construction of the Australian Computational Earth Systems Simulator (ACcESS). The Simulator or computational virtual earth will provide the research infrastructure to the Australian earth systems science community required for simulations of dynamical earth processes at scales ranging from microscopic to global. It will consist of thematic supercomputer infrastructure and an earth systems simulation software system. The Simulator models and software will be constructed over a five year period by a multi-disciplinary team of computational scientists, mathematicians, earth scientists, civil engineers and software engineers. The construction team will integrate numerical simulation models (3D discrete elements/lattice solid model, particle-in-cell large deformation finite-element method, stress reconstruction models, multi-scale continuum models etc) with geophysical, geological and tectonic models, through advanced software engineering and visualization technologies. When fully constructed, the Simulator aims to provide the software and hardware infrastructure needed to model solid earth phenomena including global scale dynamics and mineralisation processes, crustal scale processes including plate tectonics, mountain building, interacting fault system dynamics, and micro-scale processes that control the geological, physical and dynamic behaviour of earth systems. ACcESS represents a part of Australia's contribution to the APEC Cooperation for Earthquake Simulation (ACES) international initiative. Together with other national earth systems science initiatives including the Japanese Earth Simulator and US General Earthquake Model projects, ACcESS aims to provide a driver for scientific advancement and technological breakthroughs including: quantum leaps in understanding of earth evolution at global, crustal, regional and microscopic scales; new knowledge of the physics of crustal fault systems required to underpin the grand challenge of earthquake prediction; new understanding and predictive capabilities of geological processes such as tectonics and mineralisation.

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Boyd, J.; Herner, K.; Jayatilaka, B.

The Fermilab Tevatron collider's data-taking run ended in September 2011, yielding a dataset with rich scientific potential. The CDF and DO experiments each have nearly 9 PB of collider and simulated data stored on tape. A large computing infrastructure consisting of tape storage, disk cache, and distributed grid computing for physics analysis with the Tevatron data is present at Fermilab. The Fermilab Run II data preservation project intends to keep this analysis capability sustained through the year 2020 or beyond. To achieve this, we are implementing a system that utilizes virtualization, automated validation, and migration to new standards in bothmore » software and data storage technology as well as leveraging resources available from currently-running experiments at Fermilab. Furthermore, these efforts will provide useful lessons in ensuring long-term data access for numerous experiments throughout high-energy physics, and provide a roadmap for high-quality scientific output for years to come.« less

On localization attacks against cloud infrastructure

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Ge, Linqiang; Yu, Wei; Sistani, Mohammad Ali

2013-05-01

One of the key characteristics of cloud computing is the device and location independence that enables the user to access systems regardless of their location. Because cloud computing is heavily based on sharing resource, it is vulnerable to cyber attacks. In this paper, we investigate a localization attack that enables the adversary to leverage central processing unit (CPU) resources to localize the physical location of server used by victims. By increasing and reducing CPU usage through the malicious virtual machine (VM), the response time from the victim VM will increase and decrease correspondingly. In this way, by embedding the probing signal into the CPU usage and correlating the same pattern in the response time from the victim VM, the adversary can find the location of victim VM. To determine attack accuracy, we investigate features in both the time and frequency domains. We conduct both theoretical and experimental study to demonstrate the effectiveness of such an attack.

Data preservation at the Fermilab Tevatron

DOE PAGES

Amerio, S.; Behari, S.; Boyd, J.; ...

2017-01-22

The Fermilab Tevatron collider's data-taking run ended in September 2011, yielding a dataset with rich scientific potential. The CDF and D0 experiments each have approximately 9 PB of collider and simulated data stored on tape. A large computing infrastructure consisting of tape storage, disk cache, and distributed grid computing for physics analysis with the Tevatron data is present at Fermilab. The Fermilab Run II data preservation project intends to keep this analysis capability sustained through the year 2020 and beyond. To achieve this goal, we have implemented a system that utilizes virtualization, automated validation, and migration to new standards inmore » both software and data storage technology and leverages resources available from currently-running experiments at Fermilab. Lastly, these efforts have also provided useful lessons in ensuring long-term data access for numerous experiments, and enable high-quality scientific output for years to come.« less

Data preservation at the Fermilab Tevatron

DOE PAGES

Boyd, J.; Herner, K.; Jayatilaka, B.; ...

2015-12-23

The Fermilab Tevatron collider's data-taking run ended in September 2011, yielding a dataset with rich scientific potential. The CDF and DO experiments each have nearly 9 PB of collider and simulated data stored on tape. A large computing infrastructure consisting of tape storage, disk cache, and distributed grid computing for physics analysis with the Tevatron data is present at Fermilab. The Fermilab Run II data preservation project intends to keep this analysis capability sustained through the year 2020 or beyond. To achieve this, we are implementing a system that utilizes virtualization, automated validation, and migration to new standards in bothmore » software and data storage technology as well as leveraging resources available from currently-running experiments at Fermilab. Furthermore, these efforts will provide useful lessons in ensuring long-term data access for numerous experiments throughout high-energy physics, and provide a roadmap for high-quality scientific output for years to come.« less

Secure Enclaves: An Isolation-centric Approach for Creating Secure High Performance Computing Environments

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Aderholdt, Ferrol; Caldwell, Blake A.; Hicks, Susan Elaine

High performance computing environments are often used for a wide variety of workloads ranging from simulation, data transformation and analysis, and complex workflows to name just a few. These systems may process data at various security levels but in so doing are often enclaved at the highest security posture. This approach places significant restrictions on the users of the system even when processing data at a lower security level and exposes data at higher levels of confidentiality to a much broader population than otherwise necessary. The traditional approach of isolation, while effective in establishing security enclaves poses significant challenges formore » the use of shared infrastructure in HPC environments. This report details current state-of-the-art in virtualization, reconfigurable network enclaving via Software Defined Networking (SDN), and storage architectures and bridging techniques for creating secure enclaves in HPC environments.« less

EarthCube: A Community-Driven Cyberinfrastructure for the Geosciences

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Koskela, Rebecca; Ramamurthy, Mohan; Pearlman, Jay; Lehnert, Kerstin; Ahern, Tim; Fredericks, Janet; Goring, Simon; Peckham, Scott; Powers, Lindsay; Kamalabdi, Farzad; Rubin, Ken; Yarmey, Lynn

2017-04-01

EarthCube is creating a dynamic, System of Systems (SoS) infrastructure and data tools to collect, access, analyze, share, and visualize all forms of geoscience data and resources, using advanced collaboration, technological, and computational capabilities. EarthCube, as a joint effort between the U.S. National Science Foundation Directorate for Geosciences and the Division of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure, is a quickly growing community of scientists across all geoscience domains, as well as geoinformatics researchers and data scientists. EarthCube has attracted an evolving, dynamic virtual community of more than 2,500 contributors, including earth, ocean, polar, planetary, atmospheric, geospace, computer and social scientists, educators, and data and information professionals. During 2017, EarthCube will transition to the implementation phase. The implementation will balance "innovation" and "production" to advance cross-disciplinary science goals as well as the development of future data scientists. This presentation will describe the current architecture design for the EarthCube cyberinfrastructure and implementation plan.

Data preservation at the Fermilab Tevatron

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Boyd, J.; Herner, K.; Jayatilaka, B.; Roser, R.; Sakumoto, W.

2015-12-01

The Fermilab Tevatron collider's data-taking run ended in September 2011, yielding a dataset with rich scientific potential. The CDF and DO experiments each have nearly 9 PB of collider and simulated data stored on tape. A large computing infrastructure consisting of tape storage, disk cache, and distributed grid computing for physics analysis with the Tevatron data is present at Fermilab. The Fermilab Run II data preservation project intends to keep this analysis capability sustained through the year 2020 or beyond. To achieve this, we are implementing a system that utilizes virtualization, automated validation, and migration to new standards in both software and data storage technology as well as leveraging resources available from currently-running experiments at Fermilab. These efforts will provide useful lessons in ensuring long-term data access for numerous experiments throughout high-energy physics, and provide a roadmap for high-quality scientific output for years to come.

Environmental Research Infrastructures providing shared solutions for science and society (ENVRIplus)

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Kutsch, Werner Leo; Asmi, Ari; Laj, Paolo; Brus, Magdalena; Sorvari, Sanna

2016-04-01

ENVRIplus is a Horizon 2020 project bringing together Environmental and Earth System Research Infrastructures, projects and networks together with technical specialist partners to create a more coherent, interdisciplinary and interoperable cluster of Environmental Research Infrastructures (RIs) across Europe. The objective of ENVRIplus is to provide common solutions to shared challenges for these RIs in their efforts to deliver new services for science and society. To reach this overall goal, ENVRIplus brings together the current ESFRI roadmap environmental and associate fields RIs, leading I3 projects, key developing RI networks and specific technical specialist partners to build common synergic solutions for pressing issues in RI construction and implementation. ENVRIplus will be organized along 6 main objectives, further on called "Themes": 1) Improve the RI's abilities to observe the Earth System, particularly in developing and testing new sensor technologies, harmonizing observation methodologies and developing methods to overcome common problems associated with distributed remote observation networks; 2) Generate common solutions for shared information technology and data related challenges of the environmental RIs in data and service discovery and use, workflow documentation, data citations methodologies, service virtualization, and user characterization and interaction; 3) Develop harmonized policies for access (physical and virtual) for the environmental RIs, including access services for the multidisciplinary users; 4) Investigate the interactions between RIs and society: Find common approaches and methodologies how to assess the RIs' ability to answer the economical and societal challenges, develop ethics guidelines for RIs and investigate the possibility to enhance the use Citizen Science approaches in RI products and services; 5) Ensure the cross-fertilisation and knowledge transfer of new technologies, best practices, approaches and policies of the RIs by generating training material for RI personnel to use the new observational, technological and computational tools and facilitate inter-RI knowledge transfer via a staff exchange program; 6) Create RI communication and cooperation framework to coordinate activities of the environmental RIs towards common strategic development, improved user interaction and interdisciplinary cross-RI products and services. The produced solutions, services, systems and other project results are made available to all environmental research infrastructure initiatives.

New frontiers in design synthesis

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Goldin, D. S.; Venneri, S. L.; Noor, A. K.

1999-01-01

The Intelligent Synthesis Environment (ISE), which is one of the major strategic technologies under development at NASA centers and the University of Virginia, is described. One of the major objectives of ISE is to significantly enhance the rapid creation of innovative affordable products and missions. ISE uses a synergistic combination of leading-edge technologies, including high performance computing, high capacity communications and networking, human-centered computing, knowledge-based engineering, computational intelligence, virtual product development, and product information management. The environment will link scientists, design teams, manufacturers, suppliers, and consultants who participate in the mission synthesis as well as in the creation and operation of the aerospace system. It will radically advance the process by which complex science missions are synthesized, and high-tech engineering Systems are designed, manufactured and operated. The five major components critical to ISE are human-centered computing, infrastructure for distributed collaboration, rapid synthesis and simulation tools, life cycle integration and validation, and cultural change in both the engineering and science creative process. The five components and their subelements are described. Related U.S. government programs are outlined and the future impact of ISE on engineering research and education is discussed.

Computational biomedicine: a challenge for the twenty-first century.

PubMed

Coveney, Peter V; Shublaq, Nour W

2012-01-01

With the relentless increase of computer power and the widespread availability of digital patient-specific medical data, we are now entering an era when it is becoming possible to develop predictive models of human disease and pathology, which can be used to support and enhance clinical decision-making. The approach amounts to a grand challenge to computational science insofar as we need to be able to provide seamless yet secure access to large scale heterogeneous personal healthcare data in a facile way, typically integrated into complex workflows-some parts of which may need to be run on high performance computers-in a facile way that is integrated into clinical decision support software. In this paper, we review the state of the art in terms of case studies drawn from neurovascular pathologies and HIV/AIDS. These studies are representative of a large number of projects currently being performed within the Virtual Physiological Human initiative. They make demands of information technology at many scales, from the desktop to national and international infrastructures for data storage and processing, linked by high performance networks.

Cloud flexibility using DIRAC interware

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Fernandez Albor, Víctor; Seco Miguelez, Marcos; Fernandez Pena, Tomas; Mendez Muñoz, Victor; Saborido Silva, Juan Jose; Graciani Diaz, Ricardo

2014-06-01

Communities of different locations are running their computing jobs on dedicated infrastructures without the need to worry about software, hardware or even the site where their programs are going to be executed. Nevertheless, this usually implies that they are restricted to use certain types or versions of an Operating System because either their software needs an definite version of a system library or a specific platform is required by the collaboration to which they belong. On this scenario, if a data center wants to service software to incompatible communities, it has to split its physical resources among those communities. This splitting will inevitably lead to an underuse of resources because the data centers are bound to have periods where one or more of its subclusters are idle. It is, in this situation, where Cloud Computing provides the flexibility and reduction in computational cost that data centers are searching for. This paper describes a set of realistic tests that we ran on one of such implementations. The test comprise software from three different HEP communities (Auger, LHCb and QCD phenomelogists) and the Parsec Benchmark Suite running on one or more of three Linux flavors (SL5, Ubuntu 10.04 and Fedora 13). The implemented infrastructure has, at the cloud level, CloudStack that manages the virtual machines (VM) and the hosts on which they run, and, at the user level, the DIRAC framework along with a VM extension that will submit, monitorize and keep track of the user jobs and also requests CloudStack to start or stop the necessary VM's. In this infrastructure, the community software is distributed via the CernVM-FS, which has been proven to be a reliable and scalable software distribution system. With the resulting infrastructure, users are allowed to send their jobs transparently to the Data Center. The main purpose of this system is the creation of flexible cluster, multiplatform with an scalable method for software distribution for several VOs. Users from different communities do not need to care about the installation of the standard software that is available at the nodes, nor the operating system of the host machine, which is transparent to the user.

Economic analysis of cloud-based desktop virtualization implementation at a hospital

PubMed Central

2012-01-01

Background Cloud-based desktop virtualization infrastructure (VDI) is known as providing simplified management of application and desktop, efficient management of physical resources, and rapid service deployment, as well as connection to the computer environment at anytime, anywhere with anydevice. However, the economic validity of investing in the adoption of the system at a hospital has not been established. Methods This study computed the actual investment cost of the hospital-wide VDI implementation at the 910-bed Seoul National University Bundang Hospital in Korea and the resulting effects (i.e., reductions in PC errors and difficulties, application and operating system update time, and account management time). Return on investment (ROI), net present value (NPV), and internal rate of return (IRR) indexes used for corporate investment decision-making were used for the economic analysis of VDI implementation. Results The results of five-year cost-benefit analysis given for 400 Virtual Machines (VMs; i.e., 1,100 users in the case of SNUBH) showed that the break-even point was reached in the fourth year of the investment. At that point, the ROI was 122.6%, the NPV was approximately US$192,000, and the IRR showed an investment validity of 10.8%. From our sensitivity analysis to changing the number of VMs (in terms of number of users), the greater the number of adopted VMs was the more investable the system was. Conclusions This study confirms that the emerging VDI can have an economic impact on hospital information system (HIS) operation and utilization in a tertiary hospital setting. PMID:23110661

Economic analysis of cloud-based desktop virtualization implementation at a hospital.

PubMed

Yoo, Sooyoung; Kim, Seok; Kim, Taeki; Baek, Rong-Min; Suh, Chang Suk; Chung, Chin Youb; Hwang, Hee

2012-10-30

Cloud-based desktop virtualization infrastructure (VDI) is known as providing simplified management of application and desktop, efficient management of physical resources, and rapid service deployment, as well as connection to the computer environment at anytime, anywhere with any device. However, the economic validity of investing in the adoption of the system at a hospital has not been established. This study computed the actual investment cost of the hospital-wide VDI implementation at the 910-bed Seoul National University Bundang Hospital in Korea and the resulting effects (i.e., reductions in PC errors and difficulties, application and operating system update time, and account management time). Return on investment (ROI), net present value (NPV), and internal rate of return (IRR) indexes used for corporate investment decision-making were used for the economic analysis of VDI implementation. The results of five-year cost-benefit analysis given for 400 Virtual Machines (VMs; i.e., 1,100 users in the case of SNUBH) showed that the break-even point was reached in the fourth year of the investment. At that point, the ROI was 122.6%, the NPV was approximately US$192,000, and the IRR showed an investment validity of 10.8%. From our sensitivity analysis to changing the number of VMs (in terms of number of users), the greater the number of adopted VMs was the more investable the system was. This study confirms that the emerging VDI can have an economic impact on hospital information system (HIS) operation and utilization in a tertiary hospital setting.

On-demand Simulation of Atmospheric Transport Processes on the AlpEnDAC Cloud

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Hachinger, S.; Harsch, C.; Meyer-Arnek, J.; Frank, A.; Heller, H.; Giemsa, E.

2016-12-01

The "Alpine Environmental Data Analysis Centre" (AlpEnDAC) develops a data-analysis platform for high-altitude research facilities within the "Virtual Alpine Observatory" project (VAO). This platform, with its web portal, will support use cases going much beyond data management: On user request, the data are augmented with "on-demand" simulation results, such as air-parcel trajectories for tracing down the source of pollutants when they appear in high concentration. The respective back-end mechanism uses the Compute Cloud of the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ) to transparently calculate results requested by the user, as far as they have not yet been stored in AlpEnDAC. The queuing-system operation model common in supercomputing is replaced by a model in which Virtual Machines (VMs) on the cloud are automatically created/destroyed, providing the necessary computing power immediately on demand. From a security point of view, this allows to perform simulations in a sandbox defined by the VM configuration, without direct access to a computing cluster. Within few minutes, the user receives conveniently visualized results. The AlpEnDAC infrastructure is distributed among two participating institutes [front-end at German Aerospace Centre (DLR), simulation back-end at LRZ], requiring an efficient mechanism for synchronization of measured and augmented data. We discuss our iRODS-based solution for these data-management tasks as well as the general AlpEnDAC framework. Our cloud-based offerings aim at making scientific computing for our users much more convenient and flexible than it has been, and to allow scientists without a broad background in scientific computing to benefit from complex numerical simulations.

VESPA: A community-driven Virtual Observatory in Planetary Science

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Erard, S.; Cecconi, B.; Le Sidaner, P.; Rossi, A. P.; Capria, M. T.; Schmitt, B.; Génot, V.; André, N.; Vandaele, A. C.; Scherf, M.; Hueso, R.; Määttänen, A.; Thuillot, W.; Carry, B.; Achilleos, N.; Marmo, C.; Santolik, O.; Benson, K.; Fernique, P.; Beigbeder, L.; Millour, E.; Rousseau, B.; Andrieu, F.; Chauvin, C.; Minin, M.; Ivanoski, S.; Longobardo, A.; Bollard, P.; Albert, D.; Gangloff, M.; Jourdane, N.; Bouchemit, M.; Glorian, J.-M.; Trompet, L.; Al-Ubaidi, T.; Juaristi, J.; Desmars, J.; Guio, P.; Delaa, O.; Lagain, A.; Soucek, J.; Pisa, D.

2018-01-01

The VESPA data access system focuses on applying Virtual Observatory (VO) standards and tools to Planetary Science. Building on a previous EC-funded Europlanet program, it has reached maturity during the first year of a new Europlanet 2020 program (started in 2015 for 4 years). The infrastructure has been upgraded to handle many fields of Solar System studies, with a focus both on users and data providers. This paper describes the broad lines of the current VESPA infrastructure as seen by a potential user, and provides examples of real use cases in several thematic areas. These use cases are also intended to identify hints for future developments and adaptations of VO tools to Planetary Science.

Virtual Civilian Aeromedical Evacuation Sustainment Training Project (V-CAEST)

DTIC Science & Technology

2015-08-01

evacuation liaison team (AELT), and the mobile aeromedical staging facility (MASF). The content covered in the V-CAEST environment therefore covered the...environment was set-up in a large gymnasium building including a mock military plane and Mobile Aeromedical Staging Facility (MASF) located just...staffing exam backhoe scenarios exam infrastructure interface tsunami infrastructure commander telecommunication disrupting commander

Using Cloud Computing infrastructure with CloudBioLinux, CloudMan and Galaxy

PubMed Central

Afgan, Enis; Chapman, Brad; Jadan, Margita; Franke, Vedran; Taylor, James

2012-01-01

Cloud computing has revolutionized availability and access to computing and storage resources; making it possible to provision a large computational infrastructure with only a few clicks in a web browser. However, those resources are typically provided in the form of low-level infrastructure components that need to be procured and configured before use. In this protocol, we demonstrate how to utilize cloud computing resources to perform open-ended bioinformatics analyses, with fully automated management of the underlying cloud infrastructure. By combining three projects, CloudBioLinux, CloudMan, and Galaxy into a cohesive unit, we have enabled researchers to gain access to more than 100 preconfigured bioinformatics tools and gigabytes of reference genomes on top of the flexible cloud computing infrastructure. The protocol demonstrates how to setup the available infrastructure and how to use the tools via a graphical desktop interface, a parallel command line interface, and the web-based Galaxy interface. PMID:22700313

Using cloud computing infrastructure with CloudBioLinux, CloudMan, and Galaxy.

PubMed

Afgan, Enis; Chapman, Brad; Jadan, Margita; Franke, Vedran; Taylor, James

2012-06-01

Cloud computing has revolutionized availability and access to computing and storage resources, making it possible to provision a large computational infrastructure with only a few clicks in a Web browser. However, those resources are typically provided in the form of low-level infrastructure components that need to be procured and configured before use. In this unit, we demonstrate how to utilize cloud computing resources to perform open-ended bioinformatic analyses, with fully automated management of the underlying cloud infrastructure. By combining three projects, CloudBioLinux, CloudMan, and Galaxy, into a cohesive unit, we have enabled researchers to gain access to more than 100 preconfigured bioinformatics tools and gigabytes of reference genomes on top of the flexible cloud computing infrastructure. The protocol demonstrates how to set up the available infrastructure and how to use the tools via a graphical desktop interface, a parallel command-line interface, and the Web-based Galaxy interface.

Raising Virtual Laboratories in Australia onto global platforms

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Wyborn, L. A.; Barker, M.; Fraser, R.; Evans, B. J. K.; Moloney, G.; Proctor, R.; Moise, A. F.; Hamish, H.

2016-12-01

Across the globe, Virtual Laboratories (VLs), Science Gateways (SGs), and Virtual Research Environments (VREs) are being developed that enable users who are not co-located to actively work together at various scales to share data, models, tools, software, workflows, best practices, etc. Outcomes range from enabling `long tail' researchers to more easily access specific data collections, to facilitating complex workflows on powerful supercomputers. In Australia, government funding has facilitated the development of a range of VLs through the National eResearch Collaborative Tools and Resources (NeCTAR) program. The VLs provide highly collaborative, research-domain oriented, integrated software infrastructures that meet user community needs. Twelve VLs have been funded since 2012, including the Virtual Geophysics Laboratory (VGL); Virtual Hazards, Impact and Risk Laboratory (VHIRL); Climate and Weather Science Laboratory (CWSLab); Marine Virtual Laboratory (MarVL); and Biodiversity and Climate Change Virtual Laboratory (BCCVL). These VLs share similar technical challenges, with common issues emerging on integration of tools, applications and access data collections via both cloud-based environments and other distributed resources. While each VL began with a focus on a specific research domain, communities of practice have now formed across the VLs around common issues, and facilitate identification of best practice case studies, and new standards. As a result, tools are now being shared where the VLs access data via data services using international standards such as ISO, OGC, W3C. The sharing of these approaches is starting to facilitate re-usability of infrastructure and is a step towards supporting interdisciplinary research. Whilst the focus of the VLs are Australia-centric, by using standards, these environments are able to be extended to analysis on other international datasets. Many VL datasets are subsets of global datasets and so extension to global is a small (and often requested) step. Similarly, most of the tools, software, and other technologies could be shared across infrastructures globally. Therefore, it is now time to better connect the Australian VLs with similar initiatives elsewhere to create international platforms that can contribute to global research challenges.

The World Wide Web and Higher Education: The Promise of Virtual Universities and Online Libraries.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Barnard, John

1997-01-01

While many universities and colleges are emphasizing distance education as a way to reach working adults and control costs associated with maintaining campus infrastructures, the World Wide Web is beginning to provide a medium for offering courses to students anywhere in the world. Discusses virtual universities which combine the Web with other…

The War Next Time: Countering Rogue States and Terrorists Armed with Chemical and Biological Weapons. Second Edition

DTIC Science & Technology

2004-04-01

Washington in 1814. 20 Woolsey Virtually all of our infrastructure has been put together with this spirit of transparency and ease of access. About...containers that cross U.S. borders every day and we decide that U.S. customs has to start inspecting virtually all of the containers at ports, instead of the...flexibility by giving the United States a virtually unlimited range of response options. While ambiguity gives flexibility to policymakers, it also

FDA's Activities Supporting Regulatory Application of "Next Gen" Sequencing Technologies.

PubMed

Wilson, Carolyn A; Simonyan, Vahan

2014-01-01

Applications of next-generation sequencing (NGS) technologies require availability and access to an information technology (IT) infrastructure and bioinformatics tools for large amounts of data storage and analyses. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) anticipates that the use of NGS data to support regulatory submissions will continue to increase as the scientific and clinical communities become more familiar with the technologies and identify more ways to apply these advanced methods to support development and evaluation of new biomedical products. FDA laboratories are conducting research on different NGS platforms and developing the IT infrastructure and bioinformatics tools needed to enable regulatory evaluation of the technologies and the data sponsors will submit. A High-performance Integrated Virtual Environment, or HIVE, has been launched, and development and refinement continues as a collaborative effort between the FDA and George Washington University to provide the tools to support these needs. The use of a highly parallelized environment facilitated by use of distributed cloud storage and computation has resulted in a platform that is both rapid and responsive to changing scientific needs. The FDA plans to further develop in-house capacity in this area, while also supporting engagement by the external community, by sponsoring an open, public workshop to discuss NGS technologies and data formats standardization, and to promote the adoption of interoperability protocols in September 2014. Next-generation sequencing (NGS) technologies are enabling breakthroughs in how the biomedical community is developing and evaluating medical products. One example is the potential application of this method to the detection and identification of microbial contaminants in biologic products. In order for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to be able to evaluate the utility of this technology, we need to have the information technology infrastructure and bioinformatics tools to be able to store and analyze large amounts of data. To address this need, we have developed the High-performance Integrated Virtual Environment, or HIVE. HIVE uses a combination of distributed cloud storage and distributed cloud computations to provide a platform that is both rapid and responsive to support the growing and increasingly diverse scientific and regulatory needs of FDA scientists in their evaluation of NGS in research and ultimately for evaluation of NGS data in regulatory submissions. © PDA, Inc. 2014.

Paging memory from random access memory to backing storage in a parallel computer

DOEpatents

Archer, Charles J; Blocksome, Michael A; Inglett, Todd A; Ratterman, Joseph D; Smith, Brian E

2013-05-21

Paging memory from random access memory (`RAM`) to backing storage in a parallel computer that includes a plurality of compute nodes, including: executing a data processing application on a virtual machine operating system in a virtual machine on a first compute node; providing, by a second compute node, backing storage for the contents of RAM on the first compute node; and swapping, by the virtual machine operating system in the virtual machine on the first compute node, a page of memory from RAM on the first compute node to the backing storage on the second compute node.

Computer network defense system

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Urias, Vincent; Stout, William M. S.; Loverro, Caleb

A method and apparatus for protecting virtual machines. A computer system creates a copy of a group of the virtual machines in an operating network in a deception network to form a group of cloned virtual machines in the deception network when the group of the virtual machines is accessed by an adversary. The computer system creates an emulation of components from the operating network in the deception network. The components are accessible by the group of the cloned virtual machines as if the group of the cloned virtual machines was in the operating network. The computer system moves networkmore » connections for the group of the virtual machines in the operating network used by the adversary from the group of the virtual machines in the operating network to the group of the cloned virtual machines, enabling protecting the group of the virtual machines from actions performed by the adversary.« less

GEO Supersites Data Exploitation Platform

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Lengert, W.; Popp, H.-J.; Gleyzes, J.-P.

2012-04-01

In the framework of the GEO Geohazard Supersite initiative, an international partnership of organizations and scientists involved in the monitoring and assessment of geohazards has been established. The mission is to advance the scientific understanding of geohazards by improving geohazard monitoring through the combination of in-situ and space-based data, and by facilitating the access to data relevant for geohazard research. The stakeholders are: (1) governmental organizations or research institutions responsible for the ground-based monitoring of earthquake and volcanic areas, (2) space agencies and satellite operators providing satellite data, (3) the global geohazard scientific community. The 10.000's of ESA's SAR products are accessible, since beginning 2008, using ESA's "Virtual Archive", a Cloud Computing assets, allowing the global community an utmost downloading performance of these high volume data sets for mass-market costs. In the GEO collaborative context, the management of ESA's "Virtual Archive" and the ordering of these large data sets is being performed by UNAVCO, who is also coordinating the data demand for the several hundreds of co-PIs. ESA is envisaging to provide scientists and developers access to a highly elastic operational e-infrastructure, providing interdisciplinary data on a large scale as well as tools ensuring innovation and a permanent evolution of the products. Consequently, this science environment will help in defining and testing new applications and technologies fostering innovation and new science findings. In Europe, the collaboration between EPOS, "European Plate Observatory System" lead by INGV, and ESA with support of DLR, ASI, and CNES are the main institutional stakeholders for the GEO Supersites contributing also to a unifying e-infrastructure. The overarching objective of the Geohazard Supersites is: "To implement a sustainable Global Earthquake Observation System and a Global Volcano Observation System as part of the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS)." This presentation will outline the overall concept, objectives, and examples of the e-infrastructure, which is currently being set up for the GEO Supersite initiative helping to advance science.

Big Data Analytics Test Bed

DTIC Science & Technology

2013-09-01

25 2. Backend Database Support ...............................................................25 3. Installing...29 A. SETUP VIRTUAL INFRASTRUCTURE ...................................................29 B...59 APPENDIX F. INSTALLING AND CONFIGURING BACKEND DATABASE SUPPORT FOR VCENTER

Atomic and Molecular Databases, VAMDC (Virtual Atomic and Molecular Data Centre)

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Dubernet, Marie-Lise; Zwölf, Carlo Maria; Moreau, Nicolas; Awa Ba, Yaya; VAMDC Consortium

2015-08-01

The "Virtual Atomic and Molecular Data Centre Consortium",(VAMDC Consortium, http://www.vamdc.eu) is a Consortium bound by an Memorandum of Understanding aiming at ensuring the sustainability of the VAMDC e-infrastructure. The current VAMDC e-infrastructure inter-connects about 30 atomic and molecular databases with the number of connected databases increasing every year: some databases are well-known databases such as CDMS, JPL, HITRAN, VALD,.., other databases have been created since the start of VAMDC. About 90% of our databases are used for astrophysical applications. The data can be queried, retrieved, visualized in a single format from a general portal (http://portal.vamdc.eu) and VAMDC is also developing standalone tools in order to retrieve and handle the data. VAMDC provides software and support in order to include databases within the VAMDC e-infrastructure. One current feature of VAMDC is the constrained environnement of description of data that ensures a higher quality for distribution of data; a future feature is the link of VAMDC with evaluation/validation groups. The talk will present the VAMDC Consortium and the VAMDC e infrastructure with its underlying technology, its services, its science use cases and its etension towards other communities than the academic research community.

Virtual hand: a 3D tactile interface to virtual environments

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Rogowitz, Bernice E.; Borrel, Paul

2008-02-01

We introduce a novel system that allows users to experience the sensation of touch in a computer graphics environment. In this system, the user places his/her hand on an array of pins, which is moved about space on a 6 degree-of-freedom robot arm. The surface of the pins defines a surface in the virtual world. This "virtual hand" can move about the virtual world. When the virtual hand encounters an object in the virtual world, the heights of the pins are adjusted so that they represent the object's shape, surface, and texture. A control system integrates pin and robot arm motions to transmit information about objects in the computer graphics world to the user. It also allows the user to edit, change and move the virtual objects, shapes and textures. This system provides a general framework for touching, manipulating, and modifying objects in a 3-D computer graphics environment, which may be useful in a wide range of applications, including computer games, computer aided design systems, and immersive virtual worlds.

The Infrastructure of an Integrated Virtual Reality Environment for International Space Welding Experiment

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Wang, Peter Hor-Ching

1996-01-01

This study is a continuation of the summer research of 1995 NASA/ASEE Summer Faculty Fellowship Program. This effort is to provide the infrastructure of an integrated Virtual Reality (VR) environment for the International Space Welding Experiment (ISWE) Analytical Tool and Trainer and the Microgravity Science Glovebox (MSG) Analytical Tool study. Due to the unavailability of the MSG CAD files and the 3D-CAD converter, little was done to the MSG study. However, the infrastructure of the integrated VR environment for ISWE is capable of performing the MSG study when the CAD files become available. Two primary goals are established for this research. First, the essential peripheral devices for an integrated VR environment will be studied and developed for the ISWE and MSG studies. Secondly, the training of the flight crew (astronaut) in general orientation, procedures, and location, orientation, and sequencing of the welding samples and tools are built into the VR system for studying the welding process and training the astronaut.

Virtual reality and consciousness inference in dreaming

PubMed Central

Hobson, J. Allan; Hong, Charles C.-H.; Friston, Karl J.

2014-01-01

This article explores the notion that the brain is genetically endowed with an innate virtual reality generator that – through experience-dependent plasticity – becomes a generative or predictive model of the world. This model, which is most clearly revealed in rapid eye movement (REM) sleep dreaming, may provide the theater for conscious experience. Functional neuroimaging evidence for brain activations that are time-locked to rapid eye movements (REMs) endorses the view that waking consciousness emerges from REM sleep – and dreaming lays the foundations for waking perception. In this view, the brain is equipped with a virtual model of the world that generates predictions of its sensations. This model is continually updated and entrained by sensory prediction errors in wakefulness to ensure veridical perception, but not in dreaming. In contrast, dreaming plays an essential role in maintaining and enhancing the capacity to model the world by minimizing model complexity and thereby maximizing both statistical and thermodynamic efficiency. This perspective suggests that consciousness corresponds to the embodied process of inference, realized through the generation of virtual realities (in both sleep and wakefulness). In short, our premise or hypothesis is that the waking brain engages with the world to predict the causes of sensations, while in sleep the brain’s generative model is actively refined so that it generates more efficient predictions during waking. We review the evidence in support of this hypothesis – evidence that grounds consciousness in biophysical computations whose neuronal and neurochemical infrastructure has been disclosed by sleep research. PMID:25346710

Virtual reality and consciousness inference in dreaming.

PubMed

Hobson, J Allan; Hong, Charles C-H; Friston, Karl J

2014-01-01

This article explores the notion that the brain is genetically endowed with an innate virtual reality generator that - through experience-dependent plasticity - becomes a generative or predictive model of the world. This model, which is most clearly revealed in rapid eye movement (REM) sleep dreaming, may provide the theater for conscious experience. Functional neuroimaging evidence for brain activations that are time-locked to rapid eye movements (REMs) endorses the view that waking consciousness emerges from REM sleep - and dreaming lays the foundations for waking perception. In this view, the brain is equipped with a virtual model of the world that generates predictions of its sensations. This model is continually updated and entrained by sensory prediction errors in wakefulness to ensure veridical perception, but not in dreaming. In contrast, dreaming plays an essential role in maintaining and enhancing the capacity to model the world by minimizing model complexity and thereby maximizing both statistical and thermodynamic efficiency. This perspective suggests that consciousness corresponds to the embodied process of inference, realized through the generation of virtual realities (in both sleep and wakefulness). In short, our premise or hypothesis is that the waking brain engages with the world to predict the causes of sensations, while in sleep the brain's generative model is actively refined so that it generates more efficient predictions during waking. We review the evidence in support of this hypothesis - evidence that grounds consciousness in biophysical computations whose neuronal and neurochemical infrastructure has been disclosed by sleep research.

The Ever-Est Virtual Research Environment Infrastructure for Marine - the Sea Monitoring Virtual Research Community (vrc) Use Case

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Foglini, F.

2016-12-01

The EVER-EST project aims to develop a generic Virtual Research Environment (VRE) tailored to the needs and validated by the Earth Science domain. To achieve this the EVER-EST VRE provides earth scientists with the means to seamlessly manage both the data involved in their computationally intensive disciplines and the scientific methods applied in their observations and modellings, which lead to the specific results that need to be attributable, validated and shared within the community e.g. in the form of scholarly communications. Central to this approach is the concept of Research Objects (ROs) as semantically rich aggregations of resources that bring together data, methods and people in scientific investigations. ROs enable the creation of digital artifacts that can encapsulate scientific knowledge and provide a mechanism for sharing and discovering assets of reusable research and scientific assets as first-class citizens. The EVER-EST VRE is the first RO-centric native infrastructure leveraging the notion of ROs and their application in observational rather than experimental disciplines and particularly in Earth Science. The Institute of MARine Science (ISMAR-CNR) is a scientific partner of the EVER-EST project providing useful and applicable contributions to the identification and definition of variables indicated by the European Commission in the Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD) to achieve the Good Environment Status (GES). The VRC is willing to deliver practical methods, procedures and protocols to support coherent and widely accepted interpretation of the MSFD. The use case deal with 1. the Posidonia meadows along the Apulian coast, 2. the deep-sea corals along the Apulian continenatal slope and 3. the jellyfish abundance in the Italian water. The SeaMonitoring VRC created specific RO for asesing deep sea corals suitabilty, Posidonia meadows occurrences and for detecting jelly fish density aloing the italian coast. The VRC developed specific RO for bathymetric data implementing a data preservation plan and a specific vocabulary for metadata.

Grid accounting service: state and future development

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Levshina, T.; Sehgal, C.; Bockelman, B.

2014-01-01

During the last decade, large-scale federated distributed infrastructures have been continually developed and expanded. One of the crucial components of a cyber-infrastructure is an accounting service that collects data related to resource utilization and identity of users using resources. The accounting service is important for verifying pledged resource allocation per particular groups and users, providing reports for funding agencies and resource providers, and understanding hardware provisioning requirements. It can also be used for end-to-end troubleshooting as well as billing purposes. In this work we describe Gratia, a federated accounting service jointly developed at Fermilab and Holland Computing Center at Universitymore » of Nebraska-Lincoln. The Open Science Grid, Fermilab, HCC, and several other institutions have used Gratia in production for several years. The current development activities include expanding Virtual Machines provisioning information, XSEDE allocation usage accounting, and Campus Grids resource utilization. We also identify the direction of future work: improvement and expansion of Cloud accounting, persistent and elastic storage space allocation, and the incorporation of WAN and LAN network metrics.« less

A secure and efficiently searchable health information architecture.

PubMed

Yasnoff, William A

2016-06-01

Patient-centric repositories of health records are an important component of health information infrastructure. However, patient information in a single repository is potentially vulnerable to loss of the entire dataset from a single unauthorized intrusion. A new health record storage architecture, the personal grid, eliminates this risk by separately storing and encrypting each person's record. The tradeoff for this improved security is that a personal grid repository must be sequentially searched since each record must be individually accessed and decrypted. To allow reasonable search times for large numbers of records, parallel processing with hundreds (or even thousands) of on-demand virtual servers (now available in cloud computing environments) is used. Estimated search times for a 10 million record personal grid using 500 servers vary from 7 to 33min depending on the complexity of the query. Since extremely rapid searching is not a critical requirement of health information infrastructure, the personal grid may provide a practical and useful alternative architecture that eliminates the large-scale security vulnerabilities of traditional databases by sacrificing unnecessary searching speed. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

VESPA: Developing the Planetary Science Virtual Observatory in H2020

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Erard, S.; Cecconi, B.; Le Sidaner, P.; Capria, T.; Rossi, A. P.; Schmitt, B.; André, N.; Vandaele, A.-C.; Scherf, M.; Hueso, R.; Maattanen, A.; Thuillot, W.; Achilleos, N.; Marmo, C.; Santolik, O.; Benson, K.; Bollard, Ph.

2015-10-01

The Europlanet H2020 programme will develop a research infrastructure in Horizon 2020. The programme includes a follow-on to the FP7 activity aimed at developing the Planetary Science Virtual Observatory (VO). This activity is called VESPA, which stands for Virtual European Solar and Planetary Access. Building on the IDIS activity of Europlanet FP7, VESPA will distribute more data, will improve the connected tools and infrastructure, and will help developing a community of both users and data providers. One goal of the Europlanet FP7 programme was to set the basis for a European Virtual Observatory in Planetary Science. A prototype has been set up during FP7, most of the activity being dedicated to the definition of standards to handle data in this field. The aim was to facilitate searches in big archives as well as sparse databases, to make on-line data access and visualization possible, and to allow small data providers to make their data available in an interoperable environment with minimum effort. This system makes intensive use of studies and developments led in Astronomy (IVOA), Solar Science (HELIO), plasma physics (SPASE), and space archive services (IPDA). It remains consistent with extensions of IVOA standards.

VESPA: developing the planetary science Virtual Observatory in H2020

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Erard, Stéphane; Cecconi, Baptiste; Le Sidaner, Pierre; Capria, Teresa; Rossi, Angelo Pio

2016-04-01

The Europlanet H2020 programme will develop a research infrastructure in Horizon 2020. The programme includes a follow-on to the FP7 activity aimed at developing the Planetary Science Virtual Observatory (VO). This activity is called VESPA, which stands for Virtual European Solar and Planetary Access. Building on the IDIS activity of Europlanet FP7, VESPA will distribute more data, will improve the connected tools and infrastructure, and will help developing a community of both users and data providers. One goal of the Europlanet FP7 programme was to set the basis for a European Virtual Observatory in Planetary Science. A prototype has been set up during FP7, most of the activity being dedicated to the definition of standards to handle data in this field. The aim was to facilitate searches in big archives as well as sparse databases, to make on-line data access and visualization possible, and to allow small data providers to make their data available in an interoperable environment with minimum effort. This system makes intensive use of studies and developments led in Astronomy (IVOA), Solar Science (HELIO), plasma physics (SPASE), and space archive services (IPDA). It remains consistent with extensions of IVOA standards.

The Virtual Environment for Reactor Applications (VERA): Design and architecture

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Turner, John A.; Clarno, Kevin; Sieger, Matt

VERA, the Virtual Environment for Reactor Applications, is the system of physics capabilities being developed and deployed by the Consortium for Advanced Simulation of Light Water Reactors (CASL), the first DOE Hub, which was established in July 2010 for the modeling and simulation of commercial nuclear reactors. VERA consists of integrating and interfacing software together with a suite of physics components adapted and/or refactored to simulate relevant physical phenomena in a coupled manner. VERA also includes the software development environment and computational infrastructure needed for these components to be effectively used. We describe the architecture of VERA from both amore » software and a numerical perspective, along with the goals and constraints that drove the major design decisions and their implications. As a result, we explain why VERA is an environment rather than a framework or toolkit, why these distinctions are relevant (particularly for coupled physics applications), and provide an overview of results that demonstrate the application of VERA tools for a variety of challenging problems within the nuclear industry.« less

The Virtual Environment for Reactor Applications (VERA): Design and architecture

DOE PAGES

Turner, John A.; Clarno, Kevin; Sieger, Matt; ...

2016-09-08

VERA, the Virtual Environment for Reactor Applications, is the system of physics capabilities being developed and deployed by the Consortium for Advanced Simulation of Light Water Reactors (CASL), the first DOE Hub, which was established in July 2010 for the modeling and simulation of commercial nuclear reactors. VERA consists of integrating and interfacing software together with a suite of physics components adapted and/or refactored to simulate relevant physical phenomena in a coupled manner. VERA also includes the software development environment and computational infrastructure needed for these components to be effectively used. We describe the architecture of VERA from both amore » software and a numerical perspective, along with the goals and constraints that drove the major design decisions and their implications. As a result, we explain why VERA is an environment rather than a framework or toolkit, why these distinctions are relevant (particularly for coupled physics applications), and provide an overview of results that demonstrate the application of VERA tools for a variety of challenging problems within the nuclear industry.« less

Characterizing Crowd Participation and Productivity of Foldit Through Web Scraping

DTIC Science & Technology

2016-03-01

Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing CDF Cumulative Distribution Function CPU Central Processing Unit CSSG Crowdsourced Serious Game...computers at once can create a similar capacity. According to Anderson [6], principal investigator for the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network...extraterrestrial life. From this project, a software-based distributed computing platform called the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing

Virtual Hubs for facilitating access to Open Data

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Mazzetti, Paolo; Latre, Miguel Á.; Ernst, Julia; Brumana, Raffaella; Brauman, Stefan; Nativi, Stefano

2015-04-01

In October 2014 the ENERGIC-OD (European NEtwork for Redistributing Geospatial Information to user Communities - Open Data) project, funded by the European Union under the Competitiveness and Innovation framework Programme (CIP), has started. In response to the EU call, the general objective of the project is to "facilitate the use of open (freely available) geographic data from different sources for the creation of innovative applications and services through the creation of Virtual Hubs". In ENERGIC-OD, Virtual Hubs are conceived as information systems supporting the full life cycle of Open Data: publishing, discovery and access. They facilitate the use of Open Data by lowering and possibly removing the main barriers which hampers geo-information (GI) usage by end-users and application developers. Data and data services heterogeneity is recognized as one of the major barriers to Open Data (re-)use. It imposes end-users and developers to spend a lot of effort in accessing different infrastructures and harmonizing datasets. Such heterogeneity cannot be completely removed through the adoption of standard specifications for service interfaces, metadata and data models, since different infrastructures adopt different standards to answer to specific challenges and to address specific use-cases. Thus, beyond a certain extent, heterogeneity is irreducible especially in interdisciplinary contexts. ENERGIC-OD Virtual Hubs address heterogeneity adopting a mediation and brokering approach: specific components (brokers) are dedicated to harmonize service interfaces, metadata and data models, enabling seamless discovery and access to heterogeneous infrastructures and datasets. As an innovation project, ENERGIC-OD will integrate several existing technologies to implement Virtual Hubs as single points of access to geospatial datasets provided by new or existing platforms and infrastructures, including INSPIRE-compliant systems and Copernicus services. ENERGIC OD will deploy a set of five Virtual Hubs (VHs) at national level in France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain and an additional one at the European level. VHs will be provided according to the cloud Software-as-a-Services model. The main expected impact of VHs is the creation of new business opportunities opening up access to Research Data and Public Sector Information. Therefore, ENERGIC-OD addresses not only end-users, who will have the opportunity to access the VH through a geo-portal, but also application developers who will be able to access VH functionalities through simple Application Programming Interfaces (API). ENERGIC-OD Consortium will develop ten different applications on top of the deployed VHs. They aim to demonstrate how VHs facilitate the development of new and multidisciplinary applications based on the full exploitation of (open) GI, hence stimulating innovation and business activities.

Large-Scale Data Collection Metadata Management at the National Computation Infrastructure

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Wang, J.; Evans, B. J. K.; Bastrakova, I.; Ryder, G.; Martin, J.; Duursma, D.; Gohar, K.; Mackey, T.; Paget, M.; Siddeswara, G.

2014-12-01

Data Collection management has become an essential activity at the National Computation Infrastructure (NCI) in Australia. NCI's partners (CSIRO, Bureau of Meteorology, Australian National University, and Geoscience Australia), supported by the Australian Government and Research Data Storage Infrastructure (RDSI), have established a national data resource that is co-located with high-performance computing. This paper addresses the metadata management of these data assets over their lifetime. NCI manages 36 data collections (10+ PB) categorised as earth system sciences, climate and weather model data assets and products, earth and marine observations and products, geosciences, terrestrial ecosystem, water management and hydrology, astronomy, social science and biosciences. The data is largely sourced from NCI partners, the custodians of many of the national scientific records, and major research community organisations. The data is made available in a HPC and data-intensive environment - a ~56000 core supercomputer, virtual labs on a 3000 core cloud system, and data services. By assembling these large national assets, new opportunities have arisen to harmonise the data collections, making a powerful cross-disciplinary resource.To support the overall management, a Data Management Plan (DMP) has been developed to record the workflows, procedures, the key contacts and responsibilities. The DMP has fields that can be exported to the ISO19115 schema and to the collection level catalogue of GeoNetwork. The subset or file level metadata catalogues are linked with the collection level through parent-child relationship definition using UUID. A number of tools have been developed that support interactive metadata management, bulk loading of data, and support for computational workflows or data pipelines. NCI creates persistent identifiers for each of the assets. The data collection is tracked over its lifetime, and the recognition of the data providers, data owners, data generators and data aggregators are updated. A Digital Object Identifier is assigned using the Australian National Data Service (ANDS). Once the data has been quality assured, a DOI is minted and the metadata record updated. NCI's data citation policy establishes the relationship between research outcomes, data providers, and the data.

Unidata Cyberinfrastructure in the Cloud

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Ramamurthy, M. K.; Young, J. W.

2016-12-01

Data services, software, and user support are critical components of geosciences cyber-infrastructure to help researchers to advance science. With the maturity of and significant advances in cloud computing, it has recently emerged as an alternative new paradigm for developing and delivering a broad array of services over the Internet. Cloud computing is now mature enough in usability in many areas of science and education, bringing the benefits of virtualized and elastic remote services to infrastructure, software, computation, and data. Cloud environments reduce the amount of time and money spent to procure, install, and maintain new hardware and software, and reduce costs through resource pooling and shared infrastructure. Given the enormous potential of cloud-based services, Unidata has been moving to augment its software, services, data delivery mechanisms to align with the cloud-computing paradigm. To realize the above vision, Unidata has worked toward: * Providing access to many types of data from a cloud (e.g., via the THREDDS Data Server, RAMADDA and EDEX servers); * Deploying data-proximate tools to easily process, analyze, and visualize those data in a cloud environment cloud for consumption by any one, by any device, from anywhere, at any time; * Developing and providing a range of pre-configured and well-integrated tools and services that can be deployed by any university in their own private or public cloud settings. Specifically, Unidata has developed Docker for "containerized applications", making them easy to deploy. Docker helps to create "disposable" installs and eliminates many configuration challenges. Containerized applications include tools for data transport, access, analysis, and visualization: THREDDS Data Server, Integrated Data Viewer, GEMPAK, Local Data Manager, RAMADDA Data Server, and Python tools; * Leveraging Jupyter as a central platform and hub with its powerful set of interlinking tools to connect interactively data servers, Python scientific libraries, scripts, and workflows; * Exploring end-to-end modeling and prediction capabilities in the cloud; * Partnering with NOAA and public cloud vendors (e.g., Amazon and OCC) on the NOAA Big Data Project to harness their capabilities and resources for the benefit of the academic community.

The Virtual Earthquake and Seismology Research Community e-science environment in Europe (VERCE) FP7-INFRA-2011-2 project

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Vilotte, J.-P.; Atkinson, M.; Michelini, A.; Igel, H.; van Eck, T.

2012-04-01

Increasingly dense seismic and geodetic networks are continuously transmitting a growing wealth of data from around the world. The multi-use of these data leaded the seismological community to pioneer globally distributed open-access data infrastructures, standard services and formats, e.g., the Federation of Digital Seismic Networks (FDSN) and the European Integrated Data Archives (EIDA). Our ability to acquire observational data outpaces our ability to manage, analyze and model them. Research in seismology is today facing a fundamental paradigm shift. Enabling advanced data-intensive analysis and modeling applications challenges conventional storage, computation and communication models and requires a new holistic approach. It is instrumental to exploit the cornucopia of data, and to guarantee optimal operation and design of the high-cost monitoring facilities. The strategy of VERCE is driven by the needs of the seismological data-intensive applications in data analysis and modeling. It aims to provide a comprehensive architecture and framework adapted to the scale and the diversity of those applications, and integrating the data infrastructures with Grid, Cloud and HPC infrastructures. It will allow prototyping solutions for new use cases as they emerge within the European Plate Observatory Systems (EPOS), the ESFRI initiative of the solid Earth community. Computational seismology, and information management, is increasingly revolving around massive amounts of data that stem from: (1) the flood of data from the observational systems; (2) the flood of data from large-scale simulations and inversions; (3) the ability to economically store petabytes of data online; (4) the evolving Internet and Data-aware computing capabilities. As data-intensive applications are rapidly increasing in scale and complexity, they require additional services-oriented architectures offering a virtualization-based flexibility for complex and re-usable workflows. Scientific information management poses computer science challenges: acquisition, organization, query and visualization tasks scale almost linearly with the data volumes. Commonly used FTP-GREP metaphor allows today to scan gigabyte-sized datasets but will not work for scanning terabyte-sized continuous waveform datasets. New data analysis and modeling methods, exploiting the signal coherence within dense network arrays, are nonlinear. Pair-algorithms on N points scale as N2. Wave form inversion and stochastic simulations raise computing and data handling challenges These applications are unfeasible for tera-scale datasets without new parallel algorithms that use near-linear processing, storage and bandwidth, and that can exploit new computing paradigms enabled by the intersection of several technologies (HPC, parallel scalable database crawler, data-aware HPC). This issues will be discussed based on a number of core pilot data-intensive applications and use cases retained in VERCE. This core applications are related to: (1) data processing and data analysis methods based on correlation techniques; (2) cpu-intensive applications such as large-scale simulation of synthetic waveforms in complex earth systems, and full waveform inversion and tomography. We shall analyze their workflow and data flow, and their requirements for a new service-oriented architecture and a data-aware platform with services and tools. Finally, we will outline the importance of a new collaborative environment between seismology and computer science, together with the need for the emergence and the recognition of 'research technologists' mastering the evolving data-aware technologies and the data-intensive research goals in seismology.

Adventures in Private Cloud: Balancing Cost and Capability at the CloudSat Data Processing Center

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Partain, P.; Finley, S.; Fluke, J.; Haynes, J. M.; Cronk, H. Q.; Miller, S. D.

2016-12-01

Since the beginning of the CloudSat Mission in 2006, The CloudSat Data Processing Center (DPC) at the Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere (CIRA) has been ingesting data from the satellite and other A-Train sensors, producing data products, and distributing them to researchers around the world. The computing infrastructure was specifically designed to fulfill the requirements as specified at the beginning of what nominally was a two-year mission. The environment consisted of servers dedicated to specific processing tasks in a rigid workflow to generate the required products. To the benefit of science and with credit to the mission engineers, CloudSat has lasted well beyond its planned lifetime and is still collecting data ten years later. Over that period requirements of the data processing system have greatly expanded and opportunities for providing value-added services have presented themselves. But while demands on the system have increased, the initial design allowed for very little expansion in terms of scalability and flexibility. The design did change to include virtual machine processing nodes and distributed workflows but infrastructure management was still a time consuming task when system modification was required to run new tests or implement new processes. To address the scalability, flexibility, and manageability of the system Cloud computing methods and technologies are now being employed. The use of a public cloud like Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud or Google Compute Engine was considered but, among other issues, data transfer and storage cost becomes a problem especially when demand fluctuates as a result of reprocessing and the introduction of new products and services. Instead, the existing system was converted to an on premises private Cloud using the OpenStack computing platform and Ceph software defined storage to reap the benefits of the Cloud computing paradigm. This work details the decisions that were made, the benefits that have been realized, the difficulties that were encountered and issues that still exist.

WLCG Transfers Dashboard: a Unified Monitoring Tool for Heterogeneous Data Transfers

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Andreeva, J.; Beche, A.; Belov, S.; Kadochnikov, I.; Saiz, P.; Tuckett, D.

2014-06-01

The Worldwide LHC Computing Grid provides resources for the four main virtual organizations. Along with data processing, data distribution is the key computing activity on the WLCG infrastructure. The scale of this activity is very large, the ATLAS virtual organization (VO) alone generates and distributes more than 40 PB of data in 100 million files per year. Another challenge is the heterogeneity of data transfer technologies. Currently there are two main alternatives for data transfers on the WLCG: File Transfer Service and XRootD protocol. Each LHC VO has its own monitoring system which is limited to the scope of that particular VO. There is a need for a global system which would provide a complete cross-VO and cross-technology picture of all WLCG data transfers. We present a unified monitoring tool - WLCG Transfers Dashboard - where all the VOs and technologies coexist and are monitored together. The scale of the activity and the heterogeneity of the system raise a number of technical challenges. Each technology comes with its own monitoring specificities and some of the VOs use several of these technologies. This paper describes the implementation of the system with particular focus on the design principles applied to ensure the necessary scalability and performance, and to easily integrate any new technology providing additional functionality which might be specific to that technology.

EU H2020 SERA: Seismology and Earthquake Engineering Research Infrastructure Alliance for Europe

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Giardini, Domenico; Saleh, Kauzar; SERA Consortium, the

2017-04-01

SERA - Seismology and Earthquake Engineering Research Infrastructure Alliance for Europe - is a new infrastructure project awarded in the last Horizon 2020 call for Integrating Activities for Advanced Communities (INFRAIA-01-2016-2017). Building up on precursor projects like NERA, SHARE, NERIES, SERIES, etc., SERA is expected to contribute significantly to the access of data, services and research infrastructures, and to develop innovative solutions in seismology and earthquake engineering, with the overall objective of reducing the exposure to risks associated to natural and anthropogenic earthquakes. For instance, SERA will revise the European Seismic Hazard reference model for input in the current revision of the Eurocode 8 on Seismic Design of Buildings; we also foresee to develop the first comprehensive framework for seismic risk modeling at European scale, and to develop new standards for future experimental observations and instruments for earthquake engineering and seismology. To that aim, SERA is engaging 31 institutions across Europe with leading expertise in the operation of research facilities, monitoring infrastructures, data repositories and experimental facilities in the fields of seismology, anthropogenic hazards and earthquake engineering. SERA comprises 26 activities, including 5 Networking Activities (NA) to improve the availability and access of data through enhanced community coordination and pooling of resources, 6 Joint Research Activities (JRA) aimed at creating new European standards for the optimal use of the data collected by the European infrastructures, Virtual Access (VA) to the 5 main European services for seismology and engineering seismology, and Trans-national Access (TA) to 10 high-class experimental facilities for earthquake engineering and seismology in Europe. In fact, around 50% of the SERA resources will be dedicated to virtual and transnational access. SERA and EPOS (European Platform Observing System, a European Research Infrastructure Consortium for solid Earth services in Europe) will be developed in parallel, giving SERA the capacity to develop building blocks for EPOS in the areas of seismology, anthropogenic hazards and seismic engineering, such as new virtual access, new anthropogenic hazards products, expanded access to waveform data, etc. In addition, services developed and validated in SERA will be produced in a way that is compatible for integration in EPOS. This communication is aimed at informing the scientific community about the objectives and workplan of SERA, starting in spring 2017 for a duration of 3 years.

Using the iPlant collaborative discovery environment.

PubMed

Oliver, Shannon L; Lenards, Andrew J; Barthelson, Roger A; Merchant, Nirav; McKay, Sheldon J

2013-06-01

The iPlant Collaborative is an academic consortium whose mission is to develop an informatics and social infrastructure to address the "grand challenges" in plant biology. Its cyberinfrastructure supports the computational needs of the research community and facilitates solving major challenges in plant science. The Discovery Environment provides a powerful and rich graphical interface to the iPlant Collaborative cyberinfrastructure by creating an accessible virtual workbench that enables all levels of expertise, ranging from students to traditional biology researchers and computational experts, to explore, analyze, and share their data. By providing access to iPlant's robust data-management system and high-performance computing resources, the Discovery Environment also creates a unified space in which researchers can access scalable tools. Researchers can use available Applications (Apps) to execute analyses on their data, as well as customize or integrate their own tools to better meet the specific needs of their research. These Apps can also be used in workflows that automate more complicated analyses. This module describes how to use the main features of the Discovery Environment, using bioinformatics workflows for high-throughput sequence data as examples. © 2013 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Earth System Grid II, Turning Climate Datasets into Community Resources

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Middleton, Don

2006-08-01

The Earth System Grid (ESG) II project, funded by the Department of Energy’s Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing program, has transformed climate data into community resources. ESG II has accomplished this goal by creating a virtual collaborative environment that links climate centers and users around the world to models and data via a computing Grid, which is based on the Department of Energy’s supercomputing resources and the Internet. Our project’s success stems from partnerships between climate researchers and computer scientists to advance basic and applied research in the terrestrial, atmospheric, and oceanic sciences. By interfacing with other climate science projects,more » we have learned that commonly used methods to manage and remotely distribute data among related groups lack infrastructure and under-utilize existing technologies. Knowledge and expertise gained from ESG II have helped the climate community plan strategies to manage a rapidly growing data environment more effectively. Moreover, approaches and technologies developed under the ESG project have impacted datasimulation integration in other disciplines, such as astrophysics, molecular biology and materials science.« less

Virtual health platform for medical tourism purposes.

PubMed

Martinez, Debora; Ferriol, Pedro; Tous, Xisco; Cabrer, Miguel; Prats, Mercedes

2008-01-01

This paper introduces an overview of the Virtual Health Platform (VHP), an alternative approach to create a functional PHR system in a medical tourism environment. The proposed platform has been designed in order to be integrated with EHR infrastructures and in this way it expects to be useful and more advantageous to the patient or tourist. Use cases of the VHP and its potential benefits summarize the analysis.

Cloud Computing Applications in Support of Earth Science Activities at Marshall Space Flight Center

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Molthan, A.; Limaye, A. S.

2011-12-01

Currently, the NASA Nebula Cloud Computing Platform is available to Agency personnel in a pre-release status as the system undergoes a formal operational readiness review. Over the past year, two projects within the Earth Science Office at NASA Marshall Space Flight Center have been investigating the performance and value of Nebula's "Infrastructure as a Service", or "IaaS" concept and applying cloud computing concepts to advance their respective mission goals. The Short-term Prediction Research and Transition (SPoRT) Center focuses on the transition of unique NASA satellite observations and weather forecasting capabilities for use within the operational forecasting community through partnerships with NOAA's National Weather Service (NWS). SPoRT has evaluated the performance of the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model on virtual machines deployed within Nebula and used Nebula instances to simulate local forecasts in support of regional forecast studies of interest to select NWS forecast offices. In addition to weather forecasting applications, rapidly deployable Nebula virtual machines have supported the processing of high resolution NASA satellite imagery to support disaster assessment following the historic severe weather and tornado outbreak of April 27, 2011. Other modeling and satellite analysis activities are underway in support of NASA's SERVIR program, which integrates satellite observations, ground-based data and forecast models to monitor environmental change and improve disaster response in Central America, the Caribbean, Africa, and the Himalayas. Leveraging SPoRT's experience, SERVIR is working to establish a real-time weather forecasting model for Central America. Other modeling efforts include hydrologic forecasts for Kenya, driven by NASA satellite observations and reanalysis data sets provided by the broader meteorological community. Forecast modeling efforts are supplemented by short-term forecasts of convective initiation, determined by geostationary satellite observations processed on virtual machines powered by Nebula. This presentation will provide an overview of these activities from a scientific and cloud computing applications perspective, identifying the strengths and weaknesses for deploying each project within an IaaS environment, and ways to collaborate with the Nebula or other cloud-user communities to collaborate on projects as they go forward.

Towards a single seismological service infrastructure in Europe

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Spinuso, A.; Trani, L.; Frobert, L.; Van Eck, T.

2012-04-01

In the last five year services and data providers, within the seismological community in Europe, focused their efforts in migrating the way of opening their archives towards a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). This process tries to follow pragmatically the technological trends and available solutions aiming at effectively improving all the data stewardship activities. These advancements are possible thanks to the cooperation and the follow-ups of several EC infrastructural projects that, by looking at general purpose techniques, combine their developments envisioning a multidisciplinary platform for the earth observation as the final common objective (EPOS, Earth Plate Observation System) One of the first results of this effort is the Earthquake Data Portal (http://www.seismicportal.eu), which provides a collection of tools to discover, visualize and access a variety of seismological data sets like seismic waveform, accelerometric data, earthquake catalogs and parameters. The Portal offers a cohesive distributed search environment, linking data search and access across multiple data providers through interactive web-services, map-based tools and diverse command-line clients. Our work continues under other EU FP7 projects. Here we will address initiatives in two of those projects. The NERA, (Network of European Research Infrastructures for Earthquake Risk Assessment and Mitigation) project will implement a Common Services Architecture based on OGC services APIs, in order to provide Resource-Oriented common interfaces across the data access and processing services. This will improve interoperability between tools and across projects, enabling the development of higher-level applications that can uniformly access the data and processing services of all participants. This effort will be conducted jointly with the VERCE project (Virtual Earthquake and Seismology Research Community for Europe). VERCE aims to enable seismologists to exploit the wealth of seismic data within a data-intensive computation framework, which will be tailored to the specific needs of the community. It will provide a new interoperable infrastructure, as the computational backbone laying behind the publicly available interfaces. VERCE will have to face the challenges of implementing a service oriented architecture providing an efficient layer between the Data and the Grid infrastructures, coupling HPC data analysis and HPC data modeling applications through the execution of workflows and data sharing mechanism. Online registries of interoperable worklflow components, storage of intermediate results and data provenance are those aspects that are currently under investigations to make the VERCE facilities usable from a large scale of users, data and service providers. For such purposes the adoption of a Digital Object Architecture, to create online catalogs referencing and describing semantically all these distributed resources, such as datasets, computational processes and derivative products, is seen as one of the viable solution to monitor and steer the usage of the infrastructure, increasing its efficiency and the cooperation among the community.

Modernization of the USGS Hawaiian Volcano Observatory Seismic Processing Infrastructure

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Antolik, L.; Shiro, B.; Friberg, P. A.

2016-12-01

The USGS Hawaiian Volcano Observatory (HVO) operates a Tier 1 Advanced National Seismic System (ANSS) seismic network to monitor, characterize, and report on volcanic and earthquake activity in the State of Hawaii. Upgrades at the observatory since 2009 have improved the digital telemetry network, computing resources, and seismic data processing with the adoption of the ANSS Quake Management System (AQMS) system. HVO aims to build on these efforts by further modernizing its seismic processing infrastructure and strengthen its ability to meet ANSS performance standards. Most notably, this will also allow HVO to support redundant systems, both onsite and offsite, in order to provide better continuity of operation during intermittent power and network outages. We are in the process of implementing a number of upgrades and improvements on HVO's seismic processing infrastructure, including: 1) Virtualization of AQMS physical servers; 2) Migration of server operating systems from Solaris to Linux; 3) Consolidation of AQMS real-time and post-processing services to a single server; 4) Upgrading database from Oracle 10 to Oracle 12; and 5) Upgrading to the latest Earthworm and AQMS software. These improvements will make server administration more efficient, minimize hardware resources required by AQMS, simplify the Oracle replication setup, and provide better integration with HVO's existing state of health monitoring tools and backup system. Ultimately, it will provide HVO with the latest and most secure software available while making the software easier to deploy and support.

A prototype Infrastructure for Cloud-based distributed services in High Availability over WAN

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Bulfon, C.; Carlino, G.; De Salvo, A.; Doria, A.; Graziosi, C.; Pardi, S.; Sanchez, A.; Carboni, M.; Bolletta, P.; Puccio, L.; Capone, V.; Merola, L.

2015-12-01

In this work we present the architectural and performance studies concerning a prototype of a distributed Tier2 infrastructure for HEP, instantiated between the two Italian sites of INFN-Romal and INFN-Napoli. The network infrastructure is based on a Layer-2 geographical link, provided by the Italian NREN (GARR), directly connecting the two remote LANs of the named sites. By exploiting the possibilities offered by the new distributed file systems, a shared storage area with synchronous copy has been set up. The computing infrastructure, based on an OpenStack facility, is using a set of distributed Hypervisors installed in both sites. The main parameter to be taken into account when managing two remote sites with a single framework is the effect of the latency, due to the distance and the end-to-end service overhead. In order to understand the capabilities and limits of our setup, the impact of latency has been investigated by means of a set of stress tests, including data I/O throughput, metadata access performance evaluation and network occupancy, during the life cycle of a Virtual Machine. A set of resilience tests has also been performed, in order to verify the stability of the system on the event of hardware or software faults. The results of this work show that the reliability and robustness of the chosen architecture are effective enough to build a production system and to provide common services. This prototype can also be extended to multiple sites with small changes of the network topology, thus creating a National Network of Cloud-based distributed services, in HA over WAN.

Development of Web GIS for complex processing and visualization of climate geospatial datasets as an integral part of dedicated Virtual Research Environment

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Gordov, Evgeny; Okladnikov, Igor; Titov, Alexander

2017-04-01

For comprehensive usage of large geospatial meteorological and climate datasets it is necessary to create a distributed software infrastructure based on the spatial data infrastructure (SDI) approach. Currently, it is generally accepted that the development of client applications as integrated elements of such infrastructure should be based on the usage of modern web and GIS technologies. The paper describes the Web GIS for complex processing and visualization of geospatial (mainly in NetCDF and PostGIS formats) datasets as an integral part of the dedicated Virtual Research Environment for comprehensive study of ongoing and possible future climate change, and analysis of their implications, providing full information and computing support for the study of economic, political and social consequences of global climate change at the global and regional levels. The Web GIS consists of two basic software parts: 1. Server-side part representing PHP applications of the SDI geoportal and realizing the functionality of interaction with computational core backend, WMS/WFS/WPS cartographical services, as well as implementing an open API for browser-based client software. Being the secondary one, this part provides a limited set of procedures accessible via standard HTTP interface. 2. Front-end part representing Web GIS client developed according to a "single page application" technology based on JavaScript libraries OpenLayers (http://openlayers.org/), ExtJS (https://www.sencha.com/products/extjs), GeoExt (http://geoext.org/). It implements application business logic and provides intuitive user interface similar to the interface of such popular desktop GIS applications, as uDIG, QuantumGIS etc. Boundless/OpenGeo architecture was used as a basis for Web-GIS client development. According to general INSPIRE requirements to data visualization Web GIS provides such standard functionality as data overview, image navigation, scrolling, scaling and graphical overlay, displaying map legends and corresponding metadata information. The specialized Web GIS client contains three basic tires: • Tier of NetCDF metadata in JSON format • Middleware tier of JavaScript objects implementing methods to work with: o NetCDF metadata o XML file of selected calculations configuration (XML task) o WMS/WFS/WPS cartographical services • Graphical user interface tier representing JavaScript objects realizing general application business logic Web-GIS developed provides computational processing services launching to support solving tasks in the area of environmental monitoring, as well as presenting calculation results in the form of WMS/WFS cartographical layers in raster (PNG, JPG, GeoTIFF), vector (KML, GML, Shape), and binary (NetCDF) formats. It has shown its effectiveness in the process of solving real climate change research problems and disseminating investigation results in cartographical formats. The work is supported by the Russian Science Foundation grant No 16-19-10257.

Enhancing Security by System-Level Virtualization in Cloud Computing Environments

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Sun, Dawei; Chang, Guiran; Tan, Chunguang; Wang, Xingwei

Many trends are opening up the era of cloud computing, which will reshape the IT industry. Virtualization techniques have become an indispensable ingredient for almost all cloud computing system. By the virtual environments, cloud provider is able to run varieties of operating systems as needed by each cloud user. Virtualization can improve reliability, security, and availability of applications by using consolidation, isolation, and fault tolerance. In addition, it is possible to balance the workloads by using live migration techniques. In this paper, the definition of cloud computing is given; and then the service and deployment models are introduced. An analysis of security issues and challenges in implementation of cloud computing is identified. Moreover, a system-level virtualization case is established to enhance the security of cloud computing environments.

The dependence of educational infrastructure on clinical infrastructure.

PubMed Central

Cimino, C.

1998-01-01

The Albert Einstein College of Medicine needed to assess the growth of its infrastructure for educational computing as a first step to determining if student needs were being met. Included in computing infrastructure are space, equipment, software, and computing services. The infrastructure was assessed by reviewing purchasing and support logs for a six year period from 1992 to 1998. This included equipment, software, and e-mail accounts provided to students and to faculty for educational purposes. Student space has grown at a constant rate (averaging 14% increase each year respectively). Student equipment on campus has grown by a constant amount each year (average 8.3 computers each year). Student infrastructure off campus and educational support of faculty has not kept pace. It has either declined or remained level over the six year period. The availability of electronic mail clearly demonstrates this with accounts being used by 99% of students, 78% of Basic Science Course Leaders, 38% of Clerkship Directors, 18% of Clerkship Site Directors, and 8% of Clinical Elective Directors. The collection of the initial descriptive infrastructure data has revealed problems that may generalize to other medical schools. The discrepancy between infrastructure available to students and faculty on campus and students and faculty off campus creates a setting where students perceive a paradoxical declining support for computer use as they progress through medical school. While clinical infrastructure may be growing, it is at the expense of educational infrastructure at affiliate hospitals. PMID:9929262

Advanced Computational Methods for Optimization of Non-Periodic Inspection Intervals for Aging Infrastructure

DTIC Science & Technology

2017-01-05

AFRL-AFOSR-JP-TR-2017-0002 Advanced Computational Methods for Optimization of Non-Periodic Inspection Intervals for Aging Infrastructure Manabu...Computational Methods for Optimization of Non-Periodic Inspection Intervals for Aging Infrastructure 5a.  CONTRACT NUMBER 5b.  GRANT NUMBER FA2386...UNLIMITED: PB Public Release 13. SUPPLEMENTARY NOTES 14. ABSTRACT This report for the project titled ’Advanced Computational Methods for Optimization of

Role of post-mapping computed tomography in virtual-assisted lung mapping.

PubMed

Sato, Masaaki; Nagayama, Kazuhiro; Kuwano, Hideki; Nitadori, Jun-Ichi; Anraku, Masaki; Nakajima, Jun

2017-02-01

Background Virtual-assisted lung mapping is a novel bronchoscopic preoperative lung marking technique in which virtual bronchoscopy is used to predict the locations of multiple dye markings. Post-mapping computed tomography is performed to confirm the locations of the actual markings. This study aimed to examine the accuracy of marking locations predicted by virtual bronchoscopy and elucidate the role of post-mapping computed tomography. Methods Automated and manual virtual bronchoscopy was used to predict marking locations. After bronchoscopic dye marking under local anesthesia, computed tomography was performed to confirm the actual marking locations before surgery. Discrepancies between marking locations predicted by the different methods and the actual markings were examined on computed tomography images. Forty-three markings in 11 patients were analyzed. Results The average difference between the predicted and actual marking locations was 30 mm. There was no significant difference between the latest version of the automated virtual bronchoscopy system (30.7 ± 17.2 mm) and manual virtual bronchoscopy (29.8 ± 19.1 mm). The difference was significantly greater in the upper vs. lower lobes (37.1 ± 20.1 vs. 23.0 ± 6.8 mm, for automated virtual bronchoscopy; p < 0.01). Despite this discrepancy, all targeted lesions were successfully resected using 3-dimensional image guidance based on post-mapping computed tomography reflecting the actual marking locations. Conclusions Markings predicted by virtual bronchoscopy were dislocated from the actual markings by an average of 3 cm. However, surgery was accurately performed using post-mapping computed tomography guidance, demonstrating the indispensable role of post-mapping computed tomography in virtual-assisted lung mapping.

A Combination Therapy of JO-I and Chemotherapy in Ovarian Cancer Models

DTIC Science & Technology

2013-10-01

which consists of a 3PAR storage backend and is sharing data via a highly available NetApp storage gateway and 2 high throughput commodity storage...Environment is configured as self- service Enterprise cloud and currently hosts more than 700 virtual machines. The network infrastructure consists of...technology infrastructure and information system applications designed to integrate, automate, and standardize operations. These systems fuse state of

Virtualization in network and servers infrastructure to support dynamic system reconfiguration in ALMA

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Shen, Tzu-Chiang; Ovando, Nicolás.; Bartsch, Marcelo; Simmond, Max; Vélez, Gastón; Robles, Manuel; Soto, Rubén.; Ibsen, Jorge; Saldias, Christian

2012-09-01

ALMA is the first astronomical project being constructed and operated under industrial approach due to the huge amount of elements involved. In order to achieve the maximum through put during the engineering and scientific commissioning phase, several production lines have been established to work in parallel. This decision required modification in the original system architecture in which all the elements are controlled and operated within a unique Standard Test Environment (STE). The advance in the network industry and together with the maturity of virtualization paradigm allows us to provide a solution which can replicate the STE infrastructure without changing their network address definition. This is only possible with Virtual Routing and Forwarding (VRF) and Virtual LAN (VLAN) concepts. The solution allows dynamic reconfiguration of antennas and other hardware across the production lines with minimum time and zero human intervention in the cabling. We also push the virtualization even further, classical rack mount servers are being replaced and consolidated by blade servers. On top of them virtualized server are centrally administrated with VMWare ESX. Hardware costs and system administration effort will be reduced considerably. This mechanism has been established and operated successfully during the last two years. This experience gave us confident to propose a solution to divide the main operation array into subarrays using the same concept which will introduce huge flexibility and efficiency for ALMA operation and eventually may simplify the complexity of ALMA core observing software since there will be no need to deal with subarrays complexity at software level.

Auscope: Australian Earth Science Information Infrastructure using Free and Open Source Software

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Woodcock, R.; Cox, S. J.; Fraser, R.; Wyborn, L. A.

2013-12-01

Since 2005 the Australian Government has supported a series of initiatives providing researchers with access to major research facilities and information networks necessary for world-class research. Starting with the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS) the Australian earth science community established an integrated national geoscience infrastructure system called AuScope. AuScope is now in operation, providing a number of components to assist in understanding the structure and evolution of the Australian continent. These include the acquisition of subsurface imaging , earth composition and age analysis, a virtual drill core library, geological process simulation, and a high resolution geospatial reference framework. To draw together information from across the earth science community in academia, industry and government, AuScope includes a nationally distributed information infrastructure. Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) has been a significant enabler in building the AuScope community and providing a range of interoperable services for accessing data and scientific software. A number of FOSS components have been created, adopted or upgraded to create a coherent, OGC compliant Spatial Information Services Stack (SISS). SISS is now deployed at all Australian Geological Surveys, many Universities and the CSIRO. Comprising a set of OGC catalogue and data services, and augmented with new vocabulary and identifier services, the SISS provides a comprehensive package for organisations to contribute their data to the AuScope network. This packaging and a variety of software testing and documentation activities enabled greater trust and notably reduced barriers to adoption. FOSS selection was important, not only for technical capability and robustness, but also for appropriate licensing and community models to ensure sustainability of the infrastructure in the long term. Government agencies were sensitive to these issues and AuScope's careful selection has been rewarded by adoption. In some cases the features provided by the SISS solution are now significantly in advance of COTS offerings which will create expectations that can be passed back from users to their preferred vendors. Using FOSS, AuScope has addressed the challenge of data exchange across organisations nationally. The data standards (e.g. GeosciML) and platforms that underpin AuScope provide important new datasets and multi-agency links independent of underlying software and hardware differences. AuScope has created an infrastructure, a platform of technologies and the opportunity for new ways of working with and integrating disparate data at much lower cost. Research activities are now exploiting the information infrastructure to create virtual laboratories for research ranging from geophysics through water and the environment. Once again the AuScope community is making heavy use of FOSS to provide access to processing software and Cloud computing and HPC. The successful use of FOSS by AuScope, and the efforts made to ensure it is suitable for adoption, have resulted in the SISS being selected as a reference implementation for a number of Australian Government initiatives beyond AuScope in environmental information and bioregional assessments.

MOLA: a bootable, self-configuring system for virtual screening using AutoDock4/Vina on computer clusters.

PubMed

Abreu, Rui Mv; Froufe, Hugo Jc; Queiroz, Maria João Rp; Ferreira, Isabel Cfr

2010-10-28

Virtual screening of small molecules using molecular docking has become an important tool in drug discovery. However, large scale virtual screening is time demanding and usually requires dedicated computer clusters. There are a number of software tools that perform virtual screening using AutoDock4 but they require access to dedicated Linux computer clusters. Also no software is available for performing virtual screening with Vina using computer clusters. In this paper we present MOLA, an easy-to-use graphical user interface tool that automates parallel virtual screening using AutoDock4 and/or Vina in bootable non-dedicated computer clusters. MOLA automates several tasks including: ligand preparation, parallel AutoDock4/Vina jobs distribution and result analysis. When the virtual screening project finishes, an open-office spreadsheet file opens with the ligands ranked by binding energy and distance to the active site. All results files can automatically be recorded on an USB-flash drive or on the hard-disk drive using VirtualBox. MOLA works inside a customized Live CD GNU/Linux operating system, developed by us, that bypass the original operating system installed on the computers used in the cluster. This operating system boots from a CD on the master node and then clusters other computers as slave nodes via ethernet connections. MOLA is an ideal virtual screening tool for non-experienced users, with a limited number of multi-platform heterogeneous computers available and no access to dedicated Linux computer clusters. When a virtual screening project finishes, the computers can just be restarted to their original operating system. The originality of MOLA lies on the fact that, any platform-independent computer available can he added to the cluster, without ever using the computer hard-disk drive and without interfering with the installed operating system. With a cluster of 10 processors, and a potential maximum speed-up of 10x, the parallel algorithm of MOLA performed with a speed-up of 8,64× using AutoDock4 and 8,60× using Vina.

APPLICATION OF INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGIES IN MEDICAL EDUCATION

PubMed Central

Al-Tamimi, Dalal M.

2003-01-01

The recognition that information and communication technologies should play an increasingly important role in medical education is a key to educating physicians in the 21st century. Computer use in medical education includes, Internet hypermedia/multimedia technologies, medical informatics, distance learning and telemedicine. Adaptation to the use of these technologies should ideally start from the elementary school level. Medical schools must introduce medical informatics courses very early in the medical curriculum. Teachers will need regular CME courses to prepare and update themselves with the changing circumstances. Our infrastructure must be prepared for the new developments with computer labs, basic skill labs, close circuit television facilities, virtual class rooms, smart class rooms, simulated teaching facilities, and distance teaching by tele-techniques. Our existing manpower including, doctors, nurses, technicians, librarians, and administration personal require hands-on training, while new recruitment will have to emphasize compulsory knowledge of and familiarity with information technology. This paper highlights these subjects in detail as a means to prepare us to meet the challenges of the 21st century. PMID:23011983

A Development of Lightweight Grid Interface

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Iwai, G.; Kawai, Y.; Sasaki, T.; Watase, Y.

2011-12-01

In order to help a rapid development of Grid/Cloud aware applications, we have developed API to abstract the distributed computing infrastructures based on SAGA (A Simple API for Grid Applications). SAGA, which is standardized in the OGF (Open Grid Forum), defines API specifications to access distributed computing infrastructures, such as Grid, Cloud and local computing resources. The Universal Grid API (UGAPI), which is a set of command line interfaces (CLI) and APIs, aims to offer simpler API to combine several SAGA interfaces with richer functionalities. These CLIs of the UGAPI offer typical functionalities required by end users for job management and file access to the different distributed computing infrastructures as well as local computing resources. We have also built a web interface for the particle therapy simulation and demonstrated the large scale calculation using the different infrastructures at the same time. In this paper, we would like to present how the web interface based on UGAPI and SAGA achieve more efficient utilization of computing resources over the different infrastructures with technical details and practical experiences.

Software platform virtualization in chemistry research and university teaching

PubMed Central

2009-01-01

Background Modern chemistry laboratories operate with a wide range of software applications under different operating systems, such as Windows, LINUX or Mac OS X. Instead of installing software on different computers it is possible to install those applications on a single computer using Virtual Machine software. Software platform virtualization allows a single guest operating system to execute multiple other operating systems on the same computer. We apply and discuss the use of virtual machines in chemistry research and teaching laboratories. Results Virtual machines are commonly used for cheminformatics software development and testing. Benchmarking multiple chemistry software packages we have confirmed that the computational speed penalty for using virtual machines is low and around 5% to 10%. Software virtualization in a teaching environment allows faster deployment and easy use of commercial and open source software in hands-on computer teaching labs. Conclusion Software virtualization in chemistry, mass spectrometry and cheminformatics is needed for software testing and development of software for different operating systems. In order to obtain maximum performance the virtualization software should be multi-core enabled and allow the use of multiprocessor configurations in the virtual machine environment. Server consolidation, by running multiple tasks and operating systems on a single physical machine, can lead to lower maintenance and hardware costs especially in small research labs. The use of virtual machines can prevent software virus infections and security breaches when used as a sandbox system for internet access and software testing. Complex software setups can be created with virtual machines and are easily deployed later to multiple computers for hands-on teaching classes. We discuss the popularity of bioinformatics compared to cheminformatics as well as the missing cheminformatics education at universities worldwide. PMID:20150997

Software platform virtualization in chemistry research and university teaching.

PubMed

Kind, Tobias; Leamy, Tim; Leary, Julie A; Fiehn, Oliver

2009-11-16

Modern chemistry laboratories operate with a wide range of software applications under different operating systems, such as Windows, LINUX or Mac OS X. Instead of installing software on different computers it is possible to install those applications on a single computer using Virtual Machine software. Software platform virtualization allows a single guest operating system to execute multiple other operating systems on the same computer. We apply and discuss the use of virtual machines in chemistry research and teaching laboratories. Virtual machines are commonly used for cheminformatics software development and testing. Benchmarking multiple chemistry software packages we have confirmed that the computational speed penalty for using virtual machines is low and around 5% to 10%. Software virtualization in a teaching environment allows faster deployment and easy use of commercial and open source software in hands-on computer teaching labs. Software virtualization in chemistry, mass spectrometry and cheminformatics is needed for software testing and development of software for different operating systems. In order to obtain maximum performance the virtualization software should be multi-core enabled and allow the use of multiprocessor configurations in the virtual machine environment. Server consolidation, by running multiple tasks and operating systems on a single physical machine, can lead to lower maintenance and hardware costs especially in small research labs. The use of virtual machines can prevent software virus infections and security breaches when used as a sandbox system for internet access and software testing. Complex software setups can be created with virtual machines and are easily deployed later to multiple computers for hands-on teaching classes. We discuss the popularity of bioinformatics compared to cheminformatics as well as the missing cheminformatics education at universities worldwide.

Using a Virtual Class to Demonstrate Computer-Mediated Group Dynamics Concepts

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Franz, Timothy M.; Vicker, Lauren A.

2010-01-01

We report about an active learning demonstration designed to use a virtual class to present computer-mediated group communication course concepts to show that students can learn about these concepts in a virtual class. We designated 1 class period as a virtual rather than face-to-face class, when class members "attended" virtually using…

Dynamic electronic institutions in agent oriented cloud robotic systems.

PubMed

Nagrath, Vineet; Morel, Olivier; Malik, Aamir; Saad, Naufal; Meriaudeau, Fabrice

2015-01-01

The dot-com bubble bursted in the year 2000 followed by a swift movement towards resource virtualization and cloud computing business model. Cloud computing emerged not as new form of computing or network technology but a mere remoulding of existing technologies to suit a new business model. Cloud robotics is understood as adaptation of cloud computing ideas for robotic applications. Current efforts in cloud robotics stress upon developing robots that utilize computing and service infrastructure of the cloud, without debating on the underlying business model. HTM5 is an OMG's MDA based Meta-model for agent oriented development of cloud robotic systems. The trade-view of HTM5 promotes peer-to-peer trade amongst software agents. HTM5 agents represent various cloud entities and implement their business logic on cloud interactions. Trade in a peer-to-peer cloud robotic system is based on relationships and contracts amongst several agent subsets. Electronic Institutions are associations of heterogeneous intelligent agents which interact with each other following predefined norms. In Dynamic Electronic Institutions, the process of formation, reformation and dissolution of institutions is automated leading to run time adaptations in groups of agents. DEIs in agent oriented cloud robotic ecosystems bring order and group intellect. This article presents DEI implementations through HTM5 methodology.

Virtual button interface

DOEpatents

Jones, Jake S.

1999-01-01

An apparatus and method of issuing commands to a computer by a user interfacing with a virtual reality environment. To issue a command, the user directs gaze at a virtual button within the virtual reality environment, causing a perceptible change in the virtual button, which then sends a command corresponding to the virtual button to the computer, optionally after a confirming action is performed by the user, such as depressing a thumb switch.

The Secure Medical Research Workspace: An IT Infrastructure to Enable Secure Research on Clinical Data

PubMed Central

Owen, Phillips; Mostafa, Javed; Lamm, Brent; Wang, Xiaoshu; Schmitt, Charles P.; Ahalt, Stanley C.

2013-01-01

Abstract Clinical data have tremendous value for translational research, but only if security and privacy concerns can be addressed satisfactorily. A collaboration of clinical and informatics teams, including RENCI, NC TraCS, UNC's School of Information and Library Science, Information Technology Service's Research Computing and other partners at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have developed a system called the Secure Medical Research Workspace (SMRW) that enables researchers to use clinical data securely for research. SMRW significantly minimizes the risk presented when using identified clinical data, thereby protecting patients, researchers, and institutions associated with the data. The SMRW is built on a novel combination of virtualization and data leakage protection and can be combined with other protection methodologies and scaled to production levels. PMID:23751029

CADC and CANFAR: Extending the role of the data centre

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Gaudet, Severin

2015-12-01

Over the past six years, the CADC has moved beyond the astronomy archive data centre to a multi-service system for the community. This evolution is based on two major initiatives. The first is the adoption of International Virtual Observatory Alliance (IVOA) standards in both the system and data architecture of the CADC, including a common characterization data model. The second is the Canadian Advanced Network for Astronomical Research (CANFAR), a digital infrastructure combining the Canadian national research network (CANARIE), cloud processing and storage resources (Compute Canada) and a data centre (Canadian Astronomy Data Centre) into a unified ecosystem for storage and processing for the astronomy community. This talk will describe the architecture and integration of IVOA and CANFAR services into CADC operations, the operational experiences, the lessons learned and future directions

Synergy Between Archives, VO, and the Grid at ESAC

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Arviset, C.; Alvarez, R.; Gabriel, C.; Osuna, P.; Ott, S.

2011-07-01

Over the years, in support to the Science Operations Centers at ESAC, we have set up two Grid infrastructures. These have been built: 1) to facilitate daily research for scientists at ESAC, 2) to provide high computing capabilities for project data processing pipelines (e.g., Herschel), 3) to support science operations activities (e.g., calibration monitoring). Furthermore, closer collaboration between the science archives, the Virtual Observatory (VO) and data processing activities has led to an other Grid use case: the Remote Interface to XMM-Newton SAS Analysis (RISA). This web service-based system allows users to launch SAS tasks transparently to the GRID, save results on http-based storage and visualize them through VO tools. This paper presents real and operational use cases of Grid usages in these contexts

A smarter way to search, share and utilize open-spatial online data for energy R&D - Custom machine learning and GIS tools in U.S. DOE's virtual data library & laboratory, EDX

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Rose, K.; Bauer, J.; Baker, D.; Barkhurst, A.; Bean, A.; DiGiulio, J.; Jones, K.; Jones, T.; Justman, D.; Miller, R., III; Romeo, L.; Sabbatino, M.; Tong, A.

2017-12-01

As spatial datasets are increasingly accessible through open, online systems, the opportunity to use these resources to address a range of Earth system questions grows. Simultaneously, there is a need for better infrastructure and tools to find and utilize these resources. We will present examples of advanced online computing capabilities, hosted in the U.S. DOE's Energy Data eXchange (EDX), that address these needs for earth-energy research and development. In one study the computing team developed a custom, machine learning, big data computing tool designed to parse the web and return priority datasets to appropriate servers to develop an open-source global oil and gas infrastructure database. The results of this spatial smart search approach were validated against expert-driven, manual search results which required a team of seven spatial scientists three months to produce. The custom machine learning tool parsed online, open systems, including zip files, ftp sites and other web-hosted resources, in a matter of days. The resulting resources were integrated into a geodatabase now hosted for open access via EDX. Beyond identifying and accessing authoritative, open spatial data resources, there is also a need for more efficient tools to ingest, perform, and visualize multi-variate, spatial data analyses. Within the EDX framework, there is a growing suite of processing, analytical and visualization capabilities that allow multi-user teams to work more efficiently in private, virtual workspaces. An example of these capabilities are a set of 5 custom spatio-temporal models and data tools that form NETL's Offshore Risk Modeling suite that can be used to quantify oil spill risks and impacts. Coupling the data and advanced functions from EDX with these advanced spatio-temporal models has culminated with an integrated web-based decision-support tool. This platform has capabilities to identify and combine data across scales and disciplines, evaluate potential environmental, social, and economic impacts, highlight knowledge or technology gaps, and reduce uncertainty for a range of `what if' scenarios relevant to oil spill prevention efforts. These examples illustrate EDX's growing capabilities for advanced spatial data search and analysis to support geo-data science needs.

Synchronized Pair Configuration in Virtualization-Based Lab for Learning Computer Networks

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kongcharoen, Chaknarin; Hwang, Wu-Yuin; Ghinea, Gheorghita

2017-01-01

More studies are concentrating on using virtualization-based labs to facilitate computer or network learning concepts. Some benefits are lower hardware costs and greater flexibility in reconfiguring computer and network environments. However, few studies have investigated effective mechanisms for using virtualization fully for collaboration.…

Classrooms Matter: The Design of Virtual Classrooms Influences Gender Disparities in Computer Science Classes

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Cheryan, Sapna; Meltzoff, Andrew N.; Kim, Saenam

2011-01-01

Three experiments examined whether the design of virtual learning environments influences undergraduates' enrollment intentions and anticipated success in introductory computer science courses. Changing the design of a virtual classroom--from one that conveys current computer science stereotypes to one that does not--significantly increased…

Cloud Computing in Support of Applied Learning: A Baseline Study of Infrastructure Design at Southern Polytechnic State University

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Conn, Samuel S.; Reichgelt, Han

2013-01-01

Cloud computing represents an architecture and paradigm of computing designed to deliver infrastructure, platforms, and software as constructible computing resources on demand to networked users. As campuses are challenged to better accommodate academic needs for applications and computing environments, cloud computing can provide an accommodating…

Calibration of LOFAR data on the cloud

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Sabater, J.; Sánchez-Expósito, S.; Best, P.; Garrido, J.; Verdes-Montenegro, L.; Lezzi, D.

2017-04-01

New scientific instruments are starting to generate an unprecedented amount of data. The Low Frequency Array (LOFAR), one of the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) pathfinders, is already producing data on a petabyte scale. The calibration of these data presents a huge challenge for final users: (a) extensive storage and computing resources are required; (b) the installation and maintenance of the software required for the processing is not trivial; and (c) the requirements of calibration pipelines, which are experimental and under development, are quickly evolving. After encountering some limitations in classical infrastructures like dedicated clusters, we investigated the viability of cloud infrastructures as a solution. We found that the installation and operation of LOFAR data calibration pipelines is not only possible, but can also be efficient in cloud infrastructures. The main advantages were: (1) the ease of software installation and maintenance, and the availability of standard APIs and tools, widely used in the industry; this reduces the requirement for significant manual intervention, which can have a highly negative impact in some infrastructures; (2) the flexibility to adapt the infrastructure to the needs of the problem, especially as those demands change over time; (3) the on-demand consumption of (shared) resources. We found that a critical factor (also in other infrastructures) is the availability of scratch storage areas of an appropriate size. We found no significant impediments associated with the speed of data transfer, the use of virtualization, the use of external block storage, or the memory available (provided a minimum threshold is reached). Finally, we considered the cost-effectiveness of a commercial cloud like Amazon Web Services. While a cloud solution is more expensive than the operation of a large, fully-utilized cluster completely dedicated to LOFAR data reduction, we found that its costs are competitive if the number of datasets to be analysed is not high, or if the costs of maintaining a system capable of calibrating LOFAR data become high. Coupled with the advantages discussed above, this suggests that a cloud infrastructure may be favourable for many users.

Building Cyberinfrastructures for Earth and Space Sciences so that they will come: lessons learnt from Australia

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Wyborn, L. A.; Woodcock, R.

2013-12-01

One of the greatest drivers for change in the way scientific research is undertaken in Australia was the development of the Australian eResearch Infrastructure which was coordinated by the then Australian Government Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research. There were two main tranches of funding: the 2007-2013 National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS) and the 2009 Education and Investment Framework (EIF) Super Science Initiative. Investments were in two areas: the Australian e-Research Infrastructure and domain specific capabilities: combined investment in both is 1,452M with at least 456M being invested in eResearch infrastructure. NCRIS was specifically designed as a community-guided process to provide researchers, both academic and government, with major research facilities, supporting infrastructures and networks necessary for world-class research. Extensive community engagement was sought to inform decisions on where Australia could best make strategic infrastructure investments to further develop its research capacity and improve research outcomes over the next 5 to 10years. The current (2007-2014) Australian e-Research Infrastructure has 2 components: 1. The National eResearch physical infrastructure which includes two petascale HPC facilities (one in Canberra and one in Perth), a 10 Gbps national network (National Research Network), a national data storage infrastructure comprising 8 multi petabyte data stores and shared access methods (Australian Access Federation). 2. A second component is focused on research integration infrastructures and includes the Australian National Data Service, which is concerned with better management, description and access to distributed research data in Australia and the National eResearch Collaboration Tools and Resources (NeCTAR) project. NeCTAR is centred on developing problem oriented digital laboratories which provide better and coordinated access to research tools, data environments and workflows. The eResearch Infrastructure Stack is designed to support 12 individual domain-specific capabilities. Four are relevant to the Earth and Space Sciences: (1) AuScope (a national Earth Science Infrastructure Program), (2) the Integrated Marine Observing System (IMOS), (3) the Terrestrial Ecosystems Research Network (TERN) and (4) the Australian Urban Research Infrastructure Network (AURIN). The two main research integration infrastructures, ANDS and NeCTAR, are seen as pivotal to the success of the Australian eResearch Infrastructure. Without them, there was a risk that that the investments in new computers and data storage would provide physical infrastructure, but few would come to use it as the skills barriers to entry were too high. ANDS focused on transforming Australia's research data environment. Its flagship is Research Data Australia, an Internet-based discovery service designed to provide rich connections between data, projects, researchers and institutions, and promote visibility of Australian research data collections in search engines. NeCTAR focused on building eResearch infrastructure in four areas: virtual laboratories, tools, a federated research cloud and a hosting service. Combined, ANDS and NeCTAR are ensuring that people ARE coming and ARE using the physical infrastructures that were built.

Virtual button interface

DOEpatents

Jones, J.S.

1999-01-12

An apparatus and method of issuing commands to a computer by a user interfacing with a virtual reality environment are disclosed. To issue a command, the user directs gaze at a virtual button within the virtual reality environment, causing a perceptible change in the virtual button, which then sends a command corresponding to the virtual button to the computer, optionally after a confirming action is performed by the user, such as depressing a thumb switch. 4 figs.

Resources and costs for microbial sequence analysis evaluated using virtual machines and cloud computing.

PubMed

Angiuoli, Samuel V; White, James R; Matalka, Malcolm; White, Owen; Fricke, W Florian

2011-01-01

The widespread popularity of genomic applications is threatened by the "bioinformatics bottleneck" resulting from uncertainty about the cost and infrastructure needed to meet increasing demands for next-generation sequence analysis. Cloud computing services have been discussed as potential new bioinformatics support systems but have not been evaluated thoroughly. We present benchmark costs and runtimes for common microbial genomics applications, including 16S rRNA analysis, microbial whole-genome shotgun (WGS) sequence assembly and annotation, WGS metagenomics and large-scale BLAST. Sequence dataset types and sizes were selected to correspond to outputs typically generated by small- to midsize facilities equipped with 454 and Illumina platforms, except for WGS metagenomics where sampling of Illumina data was used. Automated analysis pipelines, as implemented in the CloVR virtual machine, were used in order to guarantee transparency, reproducibility and portability across different operating systems, including the commercial Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), which was used to attach real dollar costs to each analysis type. We found considerable differences in computational requirements, runtimes and costs associated with different microbial genomics applications. While all 16S analyses completed on a single-CPU desktop in under three hours, microbial genome and metagenome analyses utilized multi-CPU support of up to 120 CPUs on Amazon EC2, where each analysis completed in under 24 hours for less than $60. Representative datasets were used to estimate maximum data throughput on different cluster sizes and to compare costs between EC2 and comparable local grid servers. Although bioinformatics requirements for microbial genomics depend on dataset characteristics and the analysis protocols applied, our results suggests that smaller sequencing facilities (up to three Roche/454 or one Illumina GAIIx sequencer) invested in 16S rRNA amplicon sequencing, microbial single-genome and metagenomics WGS projects can achieve cost-efficient bioinformatics support using CloVR in combination with Amazon EC2 as an alternative to local computing centers.

Resources and Costs for Microbial Sequence Analysis Evaluated Using Virtual Machines and Cloud Computing

PubMed Central

Angiuoli, Samuel V.; White, James R.; Matalka, Malcolm; White, Owen; Fricke, W. Florian

2011-01-01

Background The widespread popularity of genomic applications is threatened by the “bioinformatics bottleneck” resulting from uncertainty about the cost and infrastructure needed to meet increasing demands for next-generation sequence analysis. Cloud computing services have been discussed as potential new bioinformatics support systems but have not been evaluated thoroughly. Results We present benchmark costs and runtimes for common microbial genomics applications, including 16S rRNA analysis, microbial whole-genome shotgun (WGS) sequence assembly and annotation, WGS metagenomics and large-scale BLAST. Sequence dataset types and sizes were selected to correspond to outputs typically generated by small- to midsize facilities equipped with 454 and Illumina platforms, except for WGS metagenomics where sampling of Illumina data was used. Automated analysis pipelines, as implemented in the CloVR virtual machine, were used in order to guarantee transparency, reproducibility and portability across different operating systems, including the commercial Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), which was used to attach real dollar costs to each analysis type. We found considerable differences in computational requirements, runtimes and costs associated with different microbial genomics applications. While all 16S analyses completed on a single-CPU desktop in under three hours, microbial genome and metagenome analyses utilized multi-CPU support of up to 120 CPUs on Amazon EC2, where each analysis completed in under 24 hours for less than $60. Representative datasets were used to estimate maximum data throughput on different cluster sizes and to compare costs between EC2 and comparable local grid servers. Conclusions Although bioinformatics requirements for microbial genomics depend on dataset characteristics and the analysis protocols applied, our results suggests that smaller sequencing facilities (up to three Roche/454 or one Illumina GAIIx sequencer) invested in 16S rRNA amplicon sequencing, microbial single-genome and metagenomics WGS projects can achieve cost-efficient bioinformatics support using CloVR in combination with Amazon EC2 as an alternative to local computing centers. PMID:22028928

Enhanced networked server management with random remote backups

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Kim, Song-Kyoo

2003-08-01

In this paper, the model is focused on available server management in network environments. The (remote) backup servers are hooked up by VPN (Virtual Private Network) and replace broken main severs immediately. A virtual private network (VPN) is a way to use a public network infrastructure and hooks up long-distance servers within a single network infrastructure. The servers can be represent as "machines" and then the system deals with main unreliable and random auxiliary spare (remote backup) machines. When the system performs a mandatory routine maintenance, auxiliary machines are being used for backups during idle periods. Unlike other existing models, the availability of auxiliary machines is changed for each activation in this enhanced model. Analytically tractable results are obtained by using several mathematical techniques and the results are demonstrated in the framework of optimized networked server allocation problems.

System-Level Virtualization Research at Oak Ridge National Laboratory

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Scott, Stephen L; Vallee, Geoffroy R; Naughton, III, Thomas J

2010-01-01

System-level virtualization is today enjoying a rebirth as a technique to effectively share what were then considered large computing resources to subsequently fade from the spotlight as individual workstations gained in popularity with a one machine - one user approach. One reason for this resurgence is that the simple workstation has grown in capability to rival that of anything available in the past. Thus, computing centers are again looking at the price/performance benefit of sharing that single computing box via server consolidation. However, industry is only concentrating on the benefits of using virtualization for server consolidation (enterprise computing) whereas ourmore » interest is in leveraging virtualization to advance high-performance computing (HPC). While these two interests may appear to be orthogonal, one consolidating multiple applications and users on a single machine while the other requires all the power from many machines to be dedicated solely to its purpose, we propose that virtualization does provide attractive capabilities that may be exploited to the benefit of HPC interests. This does raise the two fundamental questions of: is the concept of virtualization (a machine sharing technology) really suitable for HPC and if so, how does one go about leveraging these virtualization capabilities for the benefit of HPC. To address these questions, this document presents ongoing studies on the usage of system-level virtualization in a HPC context. These studies include an analysis of the benefits of system-level virtualization for HPC, a presentation of research efforts based on virtualization for system availability, and a presentation of research efforts for the management of virtual systems. The basis for this document was material presented by Stephen L. Scott at the Collaborative and Grid Computing Technologies meeting held in Cancun, Mexico on April 12-14, 2007.« less

Liberating Virtual Machines from Physical Boundaries through Execution Knowledge

DTIC Science & Technology

2015-12-01

trivial infrastructures such as VM distribution networks, clients need to wait for an extended period of time before launching a VM. In cloud settings...hardware support. MobiDesk [28] efficiently supports virtual desktops in mobile environments by decou- pling the user’s workload from host systems and...experiment set-up. VMs are migrated between a pair of source and destination hosts, which are connected through a backend 10 Gbps network for

Mapping, Awareness, and Virtualization Network Administrator Training Tool (MAVNATT) Architecture and Framework

DTIC Science & Technology

2015-06-01

unit may setup and teardown the entire tactical infrastructure multiple times per day. This tactical network administrator training is a critical...language and runs on Linux and Unix based systems. All provisioning is based around the Nagios Core application, a powerful backend solution for network...start up a large number of virtual machines quickly. CORE supports the simulation of fixed and mobile networks. CORE is open-source, written in Python

INSA Scientific Activities in the Space Astronomy Area

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Pérez Martínez, Ricardo; Sánchez Portal, Miguel

Support to astronomy operations is an important and long-lived activity within INSA. Probably the best known (and traditional) INSA activities are those related with real-time spacecraft operations: ground station maintenance and operation (ground station engineers and operators); spacecraft and payload real-time operation (spacecraft and instruments controllers); computing infrastructure maintenance (operators, analysts), and general site services. In this paper, we’ll show a different perspective, probably not so well-known, presenting some INSA recent activities at the European Space Astronomy Centre (ESAC) and NASA Madrid Deep Space Communication Complex (MDSCC) directly related to scientific operations. Basic lines of activity involved include: operations support for science operations; system and software support for real time systems; technical administration and IT support; R&D activities, radioastronomy (at MDSCC and ESAC), and scientific research projects. This paper is structured as follows: first, INSA activities in two ESA cornerstone astrophysics missions, XMM-Newton and Herschel, will be outlined. Then, our activities related to scientific infrastructure services, represented by the Virtual Observatory (VO) framework and the Science Archives development facilities, are briefly shown. Radio astronomy activities will be described afterwards, and, finally, a few research topics in which INSA scientists are involved will also be described.

Integration of XRootD into the cloud infrastructure for ALICE data analysis

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Kompaniets, Mikhail; Shadura, Oksana; Svirin, Pavlo; Yurchenko, Volodymyr; Zarochentsev, Andrey

2015-12-01

Cloud technologies allow easy load balancing between different tasks and projects. From the viewpoint of the data analysis in the ALICE experiment, cloud allows to deploy software using Cern Virtual Machine (CernVM) and CernVM File System (CVMFS), to run different (including outdated) versions of software for long term data preservation and to dynamically allocate resources for different computing activities, e.g. grid site, ALICE Analysis Facility (AAF) and possible usage for local projects or other LHC experiments. We present a cloud solution for Tier-3 sites based on OpenStack and Ceph distributed storage with an integrated XRootD based storage element (SE). One of the key features of the solution is based on idea that Ceph has been used as a backend for Cinder Block Storage service for OpenStack, and in the same time as a storage backend for XRootD, with redundancy and availability of data preserved by Ceph settings. For faster and easier OpenStack deployment was applied the Packstack solution, which is based on the Puppet configuration management system. Ceph installation and configuration operations are structured and converted to Puppet manifests describing node configurations and integrated into Packstack. This solution can be easily deployed, maintained and used even in small groups with limited computing resources and small organizations, which usually have lack of IT support. The proposed infrastructure has been tested on two different clouds (SPbSU & BITP) and integrates successfully with the ALICE data analysis model.

Collaborative WorkBench (cwb): Enabling Experiment Execution, Analysis and Visualization with Increased Scientific Productivity

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Maskey, Manil; Ramachandran, Rahul; Kuo, Kwo-Sen

2015-04-01

The Collaborative WorkBench (CWB) has been successfully developed to support collaborative science algorithm development. It incorporates many features that enable and enhance science collaboration, including the support for both asynchronous and synchronous modes of interactions in collaborations. With the former, members in a team can share a full range of research artifacts, e.g. data, code, visualizations, and even virtual machine images. With the latter, they can engage in dynamic interactions such as notification, instant messaging, file exchange, and, most notably, collaborative programming. CWB also implements behind-the-scene provenance capture as well as version control to relieve scientists of these chores. Furthermore, it has achieved a seamless integration between researchers' local compute environments and those of the Cloud. CWB has also been successfully extended to support instrument verification and validation. Adopted by almost every researcher, the current practice of downloading data to local compute resources for analysis results in much duplication and inefficiency. CWB leverages Cloud infrastructure to provide a central location for data used by an entire science team, thereby eliminating much of this duplication and waste. Furthermore, use of CWB in concert with this same Cloud infrastructure enables co-located analysis with data where opportunities of data-parallelism can be better exploited, thereby further improving efficiency. With its collaboration-enabling features apposite to steps throughout the scientific process, we expect CWB to fundamentally transform research collaboration and realize maximum science productivity.

Virtual Computing Laboratories: A Case Study with Comparisons to Physical Computing Laboratories

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Burd, Stephen D.; Seazzu, Alessandro F.; Conway, Christopher

2009-01-01

Current technology enables schools to provide remote or virtual computing labs that can be implemented in multiple ways ranging from remote access to banks of dedicated workstations to sophisticated access to large-scale servers hosting virtualized workstations. This paper reports on the implementation of a specific lab using remote access to…

Creation of a 3-dimensional virtual dental patient for computer-guided surgery and CAD-CAM interim complete removable and fixed dental prostheses: A clinical report.

PubMed

Harris, Bryan T; Montero, Daniel; Grant, Gerald T; Morton, Dean; Llop, Daniel R; Lin, Wei-Shao

2017-02-01

This clinical report proposes a digital workflow using 2-dimensional (2D) digital photographs, a 3D extraoral facial scan, and cone beam computed tomography (CBCT) volumetric data to create a 3D virtual patient with craniofacial hard tissue, remaining dentition (including surrounding intraoral soft tissue), and the realistic appearance of facial soft tissue at an exaggerated smile under static conditions. The 3D virtual patient was used to assist the virtual diagnostic tooth arrangement process, providing patient with a pleasing preoperative virtual smile design that harmonized with facial features. The 3D virtual patient was also used to gain patient's pretreatment approval (as a communication tool), design a prosthetically driven surgical plan for computer-guided implant surgery, and fabricate the computer-aided design and computer-aided manufacturing (CAD-CAM) interim prostheses. Copyright © 2016 Editorial Council for the Journal of Prosthetic Dentistry. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Virtualization of open-source secure web services to support data exchange in a pediatric critical care research network

PubMed Central

Sward, Katherine A; Newth, Christopher JL; Khemani, Robinder G; Cryer, Martin E; Thelen, Julie L; Enriquez, Rene; Shaoyu, Su; Pollack, Murray M; Harrison, Rick E; Meert, Kathleen L; Berg, Robert A; Wessel, David L; Shanley, Thomas P; Dalton, Heidi; Carcillo, Joseph; Jenkins, Tammara L; Dean, J Michael

2015-01-01

Objectives To examine the feasibility of deploying a virtual web service for sharing data within a research network, and to evaluate the impact on data consistency and quality. Material and Methods Virtual machines (VMs) encapsulated an open-source, semantically and syntactically interoperable secure web service infrastructure along with a shadow database. The VMs were deployed to 8 Collaborative Pediatric Critical Care Research Network Clinical Centers. Results Virtual web services could be deployed in hours. The interoperability of the web services reduced format misalignment from 56% to 1% and demonstrated that 99% of the data consistently transferred using the data dictionary and 1% needed human curation. Conclusions Use of virtualized open-source secure web service technology could enable direct electronic abstraction of data from hospital databases for research purposes. PMID:25796596

The DYNES Instrument: A Description and Overview

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Zurawski, Jason; Ball, Robert; Barczyk, Artur; Binkley, Mathew; Boote, Jeff; Boyd, Eric; Brown, Aaron; Brown, Robert; Lehman, Tom; McKee, Shawn; Meekhof, Benjeman; Mughal, Azher; Newman, Harvey; Rozsa, Sandor; Sheldon, Paul; Tackett, Alan; Voicu, Ramiro; Wolff, Stephen; Yang, Xi

2012-12-01

Scientific innovation continues to increase requirements for the computing and networking infrastructures of the world. Collaborative partners, instrumentation, storage, and processing facilities are often geographically and topologically separated, as is the case with LHC virtual organizations. These separations challenge the technology used to interconnect available resources, often delivered by Research and Education (R&E) networking providers, and leads to complications in the overall process of end-to-end data management. Capacity and traffic management are key concerns of R&E network operators; a delicate balance is required to serve both long-lived, high capacity network flows, as well as more traditional end-user activities. The advent of dynamic circuit services, a technology that enables the creation of variable duration, guaranteed bandwidth networking channels, allows for the efficient use of common network infrastructures. These gains are seen particularly in locations where overall capacity is scarce compared to the (sustained peak) needs of user communities. Related efforts, including those of the LHCOPN [3] operations group and the emerging LHCONE [4] project, may take advantage of available resources by designating specific network activities as a “high priority”, allowing reservation of dedicated bandwidth or optimizing for deadline scheduling and predicable delivery patterns. This paper presents the DYNES instrument, an NSF funded cyberinfrastructure project designed to facilitate end-to-end dynamic circuit services [2]. This combination of hardware and software innovation is being deployed across R&E networks in the United States at selected end-sites located on University Campuses. DYNES is peering with international efforts in other countries using similar solutions, and is increasing the reach of this emerging technology. This global data movement solution could be integrated into computing paradigms such as cloud and grid computing platforms, and through the use of APIs can be integrated into existing data movement software.

Research on elastic resource management for multi-queue under cloud computing environment

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

CHENG, Zhenjing; LI, Haibo; HUANG, Qiulan; Cheng, Yaodong; CHEN, Gang

2017-10-01

As a new approach to manage computing resource, virtualization technology is more and more widely applied in the high-energy physics field. A virtual computing cluster based on Openstack was built at IHEP, using HTCondor as the job queue management system. In a traditional static cluster, a fixed number of virtual machines are pre-allocated to the job queue of different experiments. However this method cannot be well adapted to the volatility of computing resource requirements. To solve this problem, an elastic computing resource management system under cloud computing environment has been designed. This system performs unified management of virtual computing nodes on the basis of job queue in HTCondor based on dual resource thresholds as well as the quota service. A two-stage pool is designed to improve the efficiency of resource pool expansion. This paper will present several use cases of the elastic resource management system in IHEPCloud. The practical run shows virtual computing resource dynamically expanded or shrunk while computing requirements change. Additionally, the CPU utilization ratio of computing resource was significantly increased when compared with traditional resource management. The system also has good performance when there are multiple condor schedulers and multiple job queues.

Sustainability of transport structures - some aspects of the nonlinear reliability assessment

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Pukl, Radomír; Sajdlová, Tereza; Strauss, Alfred; Lehký, David; Novák, Drahomír

2017-09-01

Efficient techniques for both nonlinear numerical analysis of concrete structures and advanced stochastic simulation methods have been combined in order to offer an advanced tool for assessment of realistic behaviour, failure and safety assessment of transport structures. The utilized approach is based on randomization of the non-linear finite element analysis of the structural models. Degradation aspects such as carbonation of concrete can be accounted in order predict durability of the investigated structure and its sustainability. Results can serve as a rational basis for the performance and sustainability assessment based on advanced nonlinear computer analysis of the structures of transport infrastructure such as bridges or tunnels. In the stochastic simulation the input material parameters obtained from material tests including their randomness and uncertainty are represented as random variables or fields. Appropriate identification of material parameters is crucial for the virtual failure modelling of structures and structural elements. Inverse analysis using artificial neural networks and virtual stochastic simulations approach is applied to determine the fracture mechanical parameters of the structural material and its numerical model. Structural response, reliability and sustainability have been investigated on different types of transport structures made from various materials using the above mentioned methodology and tools.

Lowering the Barriers to Using Data: Enabling Desktop-based HPD Science through Virtual Environments and Web Data Services

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Druken, K. A.; Trenham, C. E.; Steer, A.; Evans, B. J. K.; Richards, C. J.; Smillie, J.; Allen, C.; Pringle, S.; Wang, J.; Wyborn, L. A.

2016-12-01

The Australian National Computational Infrastructure (NCI) provides access to petascale data in climate, weather, Earth observations, and genomics, and terascale data in astronomy, geophysics, ecology and land use, as well as social sciences. The data is centralized in a closely integrated High Performance Computing (HPC), High Performance Data (HPD) and cloud facility. Despite this, there remain significant barriers for many users to find and access the data: simply hosting a large volume of data is not helpful if researchers are unable to find, access, and use the data for their particular need. Use cases demonstrate we need to support a diverse range of users who are increasingly crossing traditional research discipline boundaries. To support their varying experience, access needs and research workflows, NCI has implemented an integrated data platform providing a range of services that enable users to interact with our data holdings. These services include: - A GeoNetwork catalog built on standardized Data Management Plans to search collection metadata, and find relevant datasets; - Web data services to download or remotely access data via OPeNDAP, WMS, WCS and other protocols; - Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) built on a highly integrated on-site cloud with access to both the HPC peak machine and research data collections. The VDI is a fully featured environment allowing visualization, code development and analysis to take place in an interactive desktop environment; and - A Learning Management System (LMS) containing User Guides, Use Case examples and Jupyter Notebooks structured into courses, so that users can self-teach how to use these facilities with examples from our system across a range of disciplines. We will briefly present these components, and discuss how we engage with data custodians and consumers to develop standardized data structures and services that support the range of needs. We will also highlight some key developments that have improved user experience in utilizing the services, particularly enabling transdisciplinary science. This work combines with other developments at NCI to increase the confidence of scientists from any field to undertake research and analysis on these important data collections regardless of their preferred work environment or level of skill.

Sustaining a Community Computing Infrastructure for Online Teacher Professional Development: A Case Study of Designing Tapped In

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Farooq, Umer; Schank, Patricia; Harris, Alexandra; Fusco, Judith; Schlager, Mark

Community computing has recently grown to become a major research area in human-computer interaction. One of the objectives of community computing is to support computer-supported cooperative work among distributed collaborators working toward shared professional goals in online communities of practice. A core issue in designing and developing community computing infrastructures — the underlying sociotechnical layer that supports communitarian activities — is sustainability. Many community computing initiatives fail because the underlying infrastructure does not meet end user requirements; the community is unable to maintain a critical mass of users consistently over time; it generates insufficient social capital to support significant contributions by members of the community; or, as typically happens with funded initiatives, financial and human capital resource become unavailable to further maintain the infrastructure. On the basis of more than 9 years of design experience with Tapped In-an online community of practice for education professionals — we present a case study that discusses four design interventions that have sustained the Tapped In infrastructure and its community to date. These interventions represent broader design strategies for developing online environments for professional communities of practice.

California's state oral health infrastructure: opportunities for improvement and funding.

PubMed

Diringer, Joel; Phipps, Kathy R

2012-01-01

California has virtually no statewide dental public health infrastructure leaving the state without leadership, a surveillance program, an oral health plan, oral health promotion and disease prevention programs, and federal funding. Based on a literature review and interviews with 15 oral health officials nationally, the paper recommends hiring a state dental director with public health experience, developing a state oral health plan, and seeking federal and private funding to support an office of oral health.

Computer Vision Assisted Virtual Reality Calibration

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Kim, W.

1999-01-01

A computer vision assisted semi-automatic virtual reality (VR) calibration technology has been developed that can accurately match a virtual environment of graphically simulated three-dimensional (3-D) models to the video images of the real task environment.

The Effectiveness of Using Virtual Laboratories to Teach Computer Networking Skills in Zambia

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Lampi, Evans

2013-01-01

The effectiveness of using virtual labs to train students in computer networking skills, when real equipment is limited or unavailable, is uncertain. The purpose of this study was to determine the effectiveness of using virtual labs to train students in the acquisition of computer network configuration and troubleshooting skills. The study was…

Unidata cyberinfrastructure in the cloud: A progress report

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Ramamurthy, Mohan

2016-04-01

Data services, software, and committed support are critical components of geosciences cyber-infrastructure that can help scientists address problems of unprecedented complexity, scale, and scope. Unidata is currently working on innovative ideas, new paradigms, and novel techniques to complement and extend its offerings. Our goal is to empower users so that they can tackle major, heretofore difficult problems. Unidata recognizes that its products and services must evolve to support new approaches to research and education. After years of hype and ambiguity, cloud computing is maturing in usability in many areas of science and education, bringing the benefits of virtualized and elastic remote services to infrastructure, software, computation, and data. Cloud environments reduce the amount of time and money spent to procure, install, and maintain new hardware and software, and reduce costs through resource pooling and shared infrastructure. Cloud services aimed at providing any resource, at any time, from any place, using any device are increasingly being embraced by all types of organizations. Given this trend and the enormous potential of cloud-based services, Unidata is moving to augment its products, services, data delivery mechanisms and applications to align with the cloud-computing paradigm. To realize the above vision, Unidata is working toward: * Providing access to many types of data from a cloud (e.g., TDS, RAMADDA and EDEX); * Deploying data-proximate tools to easily process, analyze and visualize those data in a cloud environment cloud for consumption by any one, by any device, from anywhere, at any time; * Developing and providing a range of pre-configured and well-integrated tools and services that can be deployed by any university in their own private or public cloud settings. Specifically, Unidata has developed Docker for "containerized applications", making them easy to deploy. Docker helps to create "disposable" installs and eliminates many configuration challenges. Containerized applications include tools for data transport, access, analysis, and visualization: THREDDS Data Server, Integrated Data Viewer, GEMPAK, Local Data Manager, RAMADDA Data Server, and Python tools; * Fostering partnerships with NOAA and public cloud vendors (e.g., Amazon) to harness their capabilities and resources for the benefit of the academic community.

A knowledge infrastructure for occupational safety and health.

PubMed

van Dijk, Frank J H; Verbeek, Jos H; Hoving, Jan L; Hulshof, Carel T J

2010-12-01

Occupational Safety and Health (OSH) professionals should use scientific evidence to support their decisions in policy and practice. Although examples from practice show that progress has been made in evidence-based decision making, there is a challenge to improve and extend the facilities that support knowledge translation in practice. A knowledge infrastructure that supports OSH practice should include scientific research, systematic reviews, practice guidelines, and other tools for professionals such as well accessible virtual libraries and databases providing knowledge, quality tools, and good learning materials. A good infrastructure connects facilities with each other and with practice. Training and education is needed for OSH professionals in the use of evidence to improve effectiveness and efficiency. New initiatives show that occupational health can profit from intensified international collaboration to establish a good functioning knowledge infrastructure.

Toward a web-based real-time radiation treatment planning system in a cloud computing environment.

PubMed

Na, Yong Hum; Suh, Tae-Suk; Kapp, Daniel S; Xing, Lei

2013-09-21

To exploit the potential dosimetric advantages of intensity modulated radiation therapy (IMRT) and volumetric modulated arc therapy (VMAT), an in-depth approach is required to provide efficient computing methods. This needs to incorporate clinically related organ specific constraints, Monte Carlo (MC) dose calculations, and large-scale plan optimization. This paper describes our first steps toward a web-based real-time radiation treatment planning system in a cloud computing environment (CCE). The Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) with a master node (named m2.xlarge containing 17.1 GB of memory, two virtual cores with 3.25 EC2 Compute Units each, 420 GB of instance storage, 64-bit platform) is used as the backbone of cloud computing for dose calculation and plan optimization. The master node is able to scale the workers on an 'on-demand' basis. MC dose calculation is employed to generate accurate beamlet dose kernels by parallel tasks. The intensity modulation optimization uses total-variation regularization (TVR) and generates piecewise constant fluence maps for each initial beam direction in a distributed manner over the CCE. The optimized fluence maps are segmented into deliverable apertures. The shape of each aperture is iteratively rectified to be a sequence of arcs using the manufacture's constraints. The output plan file from the EC2 is sent to the simple storage service. Three de-identified clinical cancer treatment plans have been studied for evaluating the performance of the new planning platform with 6 MV flattening filter free beams (40 × 40 cm(2)) from the Varian TrueBeam(TM) STx linear accelerator. A CCE leads to speed-ups of up to 14-fold for both dose kernel calculations and plan optimizations in the head and neck, lung, and prostate cancer cases considered in this study. The proposed system relies on a CCE that is able to provide an infrastructure for parallel and distributed computing. The resultant plans from the cloud computing are identical to PC-based IMRT and VMAT plans, confirming the reliability of the cloud computing platform. This cloud computing infrastructure has been established for a radiation treatment planning. It substantially improves the speed of inverse planning and makes future on-treatment adaptive re-planning possible.

Toward a web-based real-time radiation treatment planning system in a cloud computing environment

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Hum Na, Yong; Suh, Tae-Suk; Kapp, Daniel S.; Xing, Lei

2013-09-01

To exploit the potential dosimetric advantages of intensity modulated radiation therapy (IMRT) and volumetric modulated arc therapy (VMAT), an in-depth approach is required to provide efficient computing methods. This needs to incorporate clinically related organ specific constraints, Monte Carlo (MC) dose calculations, and large-scale plan optimization. This paper describes our first steps toward a web-based real-time radiation treatment planning system in a cloud computing environment (CCE). The Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) with a master node (named m2.xlarge containing 17.1 GB of memory, two virtual cores with 3.25 EC2 Compute Units each, 420 GB of instance storage, 64-bit platform) is used as the backbone of cloud computing for dose calculation and plan optimization. The master node is able to scale the workers on an ‘on-demand’ basis. MC dose calculation is employed to generate accurate beamlet dose kernels by parallel tasks. The intensity modulation optimization uses total-variation regularization (TVR) and generates piecewise constant fluence maps for each initial beam direction in a distributed manner over the CCE. The optimized fluence maps are segmented into deliverable apertures. The shape of each aperture is iteratively rectified to be a sequence of arcs using the manufacture’s constraints. The output plan file from the EC2 is sent to the simple storage service. Three de-identified clinical cancer treatment plans have been studied for evaluating the performance of the new planning platform with 6 MV flattening filter free beams (40 × 40 cm2) from the Varian TrueBeamTM STx linear accelerator. A CCE leads to speed-ups of up to 14-fold for both dose kernel calculations and plan optimizations in the head and neck, lung, and prostate cancer cases considered in this study. The proposed system relies on a CCE that is able to provide an infrastructure for parallel and distributed computing. The resultant plans from the cloud computing are identical to PC-based IMRT and VMAT plans, confirming the reliability of the cloud computing platform. This cloud computing infrastructure has been established for a radiation treatment planning. It substantially improves the speed of inverse planning and makes future on-treatment adaptive re-planning possible.

UkrVO astronomical WEB services

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Mazhaev, A.

2017-02-01

Ukraine Virtual Observatory (UkrVO) has been a member of the International Virtual Observatory Alliance (IVOA) since 2011. The virtual observatory (VO) is not a magic solution to all problems of data storing and processing, but it provides certain standards for building infrastructure of astronomical data center. The astronomical databases help data mining and offer to users an easy access to observation metadata, images within celestial sphere and results of image processing. The astronomical web services (AWS) of UkrVO give to users handy tools for data selection from large astronomical catalogues for a relatively small region of interest in the sky. Examples of the AWS usage are showed.

Machine learning patterns for neuroimaging-genetic studies in the cloud.

PubMed

Da Mota, Benoit; Tudoran, Radu; Costan, Alexandru; Varoquaux, Gaël; Brasche, Goetz; Conrod, Patricia; Lemaitre, Herve; Paus, Tomas; Rietschel, Marcella; Frouin, Vincent; Poline, Jean-Baptiste; Antoniu, Gabriel; Thirion, Bertrand

2014-01-01

Brain imaging is a natural intermediate phenotype to understand the link between genetic information and behavior or brain pathologies risk factors. Massive efforts have been made in the last few years to acquire high-dimensional neuroimaging and genetic data on large cohorts of subjects. The statistical analysis of such data is carried out with increasingly sophisticated techniques and represents a great computational challenge. Fortunately, increasing computational power in distributed architectures can be harnessed, if new neuroinformatics infrastructures are designed and training to use these new tools is provided. Combining a MapReduce framework (TomusBLOB) with machine learning algorithms (Scikit-learn library), we design a scalable analysis tool that can deal with non-parametric statistics on high-dimensional data. End-users describe the statistical procedure to perform and can then test the model on their own computers before running the very same code in the cloud at a larger scale. We illustrate the potential of our approach on real data with an experiment showing how the functional signal in subcortical brain regions can be significantly fit with genome-wide genotypes. This experiment demonstrates the scalability and the reliability of our framework in the cloud with a 2 weeks deployment on hundreds of virtual machines.

International practices on climate adaptation in transportation : findings from a virtual review

DOT National Transportation Integrated Search

2015-01-01

The Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) conducted an international review to study how international transportation agencies are addressing issues related to adapting highway infrastructure to the impacts of climate change. The review involved tran...

Audited credential delegation: a usable security solution for the virtual physiological human toolkit.

PubMed

Haidar, Ali N; Zasada, Stefan J; Coveney, Peter V; Abdallah, Ali E; Beckles, Bruce; Jones, Mike A S

2011-06-06

We present applications of audited credential delegation (ACD), a usable security solution for authentication, authorization and auditing in distributed virtual physiological human (VPH) project environments that removes the use of digital certificates from end-users' experience. Current security solutions are based on public key infrastructure (PKI). While PKI offers strong security for VPH projects, it suffers from serious usability shortcomings in terms of end-user acquisition and management of credentials which deter scientists from exploiting distributed VPH environments. By contrast, ACD supports the use of local credentials. Currently, a local ACD username-password combination can be used to access grid-based resources while Shibboleth support is underway. Moreover, ACD provides seamless and secure access to shared patient data, tools and infrastructure, thus supporting the provision of personalized medicine for patients, scientists and clinicians participating in e-health projects from a local to the widest international scale.

Audited credential delegation: a usable security solution for the virtual physiological human toolkit

PubMed Central

Haidar, Ali N.; Zasada, Stefan J.; Coveney, Peter V.; Abdallah, Ali E.; Beckles, Bruce; Jones, Mike A. S.

2011-01-01

We present applications of audited credential delegation (ACD), a usable security solution for authentication, authorization and auditing in distributed virtual physiological human (VPH) project environments that removes the use of digital certificates from end-users' experience. Current security solutions are based on public key infrastructure (PKI). While PKI offers strong security for VPH projects, it suffers from serious usability shortcomings in terms of end-user acquisition and management of credentials which deter scientists from exploiting distributed VPH environments. By contrast, ACD supports the use of local credentials. Currently, a local ACD username–password combination can be used to access grid-based resources while Shibboleth support is underway. Moreover, ACD provides seamless and secure access to shared patient data, tools and infrastructure, thus supporting the provision of personalized medicine for patients, scientists and clinicians participating in e-health projects from a local to the widest international scale. PMID:22670214

A synthetic computational environment: To control the spread of respiratory infections in a virtual university

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Ge, Yuanzheng; Chen, Bin; liu, Liang; Qiu, Xiaogang; Song, Hongbin; Wang, Yong

2018-02-01

Individual-based computational environment provides an effective solution to study complex social events by reconstructing scenarios. Challenges remain in reconstructing the virtual scenarios and reproducing the complex evolution. In this paper, we propose a framework to reconstruct a synthetic computational environment, reproduce the epidemic outbreak, and evaluate management interventions in a virtual university. The reconstructed computational environment includes 4 fundamental components: the synthetic population, behavior algorithms, multiple social networks, and geographic campus environment. In the virtual university, influenza H1N1 transmission experiments are conducted, and gradually enhanced interventions are evaluated and compared quantitatively. The experiment results indicate that the reconstructed virtual environment provides a solution to reproduce complex emergencies and evaluate policies to be executed in the real world.

Application of advanced virtual reality and 3D computer assisted technologies in tele-3D-computer assisted surgery in rhinology.

PubMed

Klapan, Ivica; Vranjes, Zeljko; Prgomet, Drago; Lukinović, Juraj

2008-03-01

The real-time requirement means that the simulation should be able to follow the actions of the user that may be moving in the virtual environment. The computer system should also store in its memory a three-dimensional (3D) model of the virtual environment. In that case a real-time virtual reality system will update the 3D graphic visualization as the user moves, so that up-to-date visualization is always shown on the computer screen. Upon completion of the tele-operation, the surgeon compares the preoperative and postoperative images and models of the operative field, and studies video records of the procedure itself Using intraoperative records, animated images of the real tele-procedure performed can be designed. Virtual surgery offers the possibility of preoperative planning in rhinology. The intraoperative use of computer in real time requires development of appropriate hardware and software to connect medical instrumentarium with the computer and to operate the computer by thus connected instrumentarium and sophisticated multimedia interfaces.

Usability Studies in Virtual and Traditional Computer Aided Design Environments for Fault Identification

DTIC Science & Technology

2017-08-08

Usability Studies In Virtual And Traditional Computer Aided Design Environments For Fault Identification Dr. Syed Adeel Ahmed, Xavier University...virtual environment with wand interfaces compared directly with a workstation non-stereoscopic traditional CAD interface with keyboard and mouse. In...the differences in interaction when compared with traditional human computer interfaces. This paper provides analysis via usability study methods

Virtual memory

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Denning, P. J.

1986-01-01

Virtual memory was conceived as a way to automate overlaying of program segments. Modern computers have very large main memories, but need automatic solutions to the relocation and protection problems. Virtual memory serves this need as well and is thus useful in computers of all sizes. The history of the idea is traced, showing how it has become a widespread, little noticed feature of computers today.

Role of virtual bronchoscopy in children with a vegetable foreign body in the tracheobronchial tree.

PubMed

Behera, G; Tripathy, N; Maru, Y K; Mundra, R K; Gupta, Y; Lodha, M

2014-12-01

Multidetector computed tomography virtual bronchoscopy is a non-invasive diagnostic tool which provides a three-dimensional view of the tracheobronchial airway. This study aimed to evaluate the usefulness of virtual bronchoscopy in cases of vegetable foreign body aspiration in children. The medical records of patients with a history of foreign body aspiration from August 2006 to August 2010 were reviewed. Data were collected regarding their clinical presentation and chest X-ray, virtual bronchoscopy and rigid bronchoscopy findings. Cases of metallic and other non-vegetable foreign bodies were excluded from the analysis. Patients with multidetector computed tomography virtual bronchoscopy showing features of vegetable foreign body were included in the analysis. For each patient, virtual bronchoscopy findings were reviewed and compared with those of rigid bronchoscopy. A total of 60 patients; all children ranging from 1 month to 8 years of age, were included. The mean age at presentation was 2.01 years. Rigid bronchoscopy confirmed the results of multidetector computed tomography virtual bronchoscopy (i.e. presence of foreign body, site of lodgement, and size and shape) in 59 patients. In the remaining case, a vegetable foreign body identified by virtual bronchoscopy was revealed by rigid bronchoscopy to be a thick mucus plug. Thus, the positive predictive value of virtual bronchoscopy was 98.3 per cent. Multidetector computed tomography virtual bronchoscopy is a sensitive and specific diagnostic tool for identifying radiolucent vegetable foreign bodies in the tracheobronchial tree. It can also provide a useful pre-operative road map for rigid bronchoscopy. Patients suspected of having an airway foreign body or chronic unexplained respiratory symptoms should undergo multidetector computed tomography virtual bronchoscopy to rule out a vegetable foreign body in the tracheobronchial tree and avoid general anaesthesia and invasive rigid bronchoscopy.

Using Virtual Pets to Increase Fruit and Vegetable Consumption in Children: A Technology-Assisted Social Cognitive Theory Approach.

PubMed

Ahn, Sun Joo Grace; Johnsen, Kyle; Moore, James; Brown, Scott; Biersmith, Melanie; Ball, Catherine

2016-02-01

A virtual pet in the form of a mid-sized dog was developed based on the framework of social cognitive theory and tested as a vehicle for promoting fruit and vegetable (F&V) consumption in children. Three groups of children (N = 68) between the ages of 7 and 13 years were studied: baseline (no treatment), computer only, and virtual dog. Children in the virtual dog condition interacted with the virtual dog for 3 days, setting F&V consumption goals and receiving evaluation and reinforcement based on whether they met their self-set goals. Children vicariously experienced future health outcomes of F&V consumption by seeing, hearing, and feeling their virtual dog's physical and mental health improve or deteriorate based on their F&V consumption in the physical world. Children in the computer only condition interacted with a computer system that presented equivalent features, but without the virtual dog. Children in the baseline condition did not receive any experimental treatment. Results indicated that children in the virtual dog condition chose to be served significantly more F&V than those in the computer only or baseline conditions did. However, children in the virtual dog condition were unable to consume significantly more F&V than those in the computer only condition, although children in those two conditions consumed more F&V than the baseline condition. Food preferences did not differ significantly across the three conditions before and after the experimental treatments. Theoretical and practical potentials of using a virtual pet to promote F&V consumption systematically in children are discussed.

Dynamic Virtual Credit Card Numbers

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Molloy, Ian; Li, Jiangtao; Li, Ninghui

Theft of stored credit card information is an increasing threat to e-commerce. We propose a dynamic virtual credit card number scheme that reduces the damage caused by stolen credit card numbers. A user can use an existing credit card account to generate multiple virtual credit card numbers that are either usable for a single transaction or are tied with a particular merchant. We call the scheme dynamic because the virtual credit card numbers can be generated without online contact with the credit card issuers. These numbers can be processed without changing any of the infrastructure currently in place; the only changes will be at the end points, namely, the card users and the card issuers. We analyze the security requirements for dynamic virtual credit card numbers, discuss the design space, propose a scheme using HMAC, and prove its security under the assumption the underlying function is a PRF.

A pilot Virtual Observatory (pVO) for integrated catchment science - Demonstration of national scale modelling of hydrology and biogeochemistry (Invited)

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Freer, J. E.; Bloomfield, J. P.; Johnes, P. J.; MacLeod, C.; Reaney, S.

2010-12-01

There are many challenges in developing effective and integrated catchment management solutions for hydrology and water quality issues. Such solutions should ideally build on current scientific evidence to inform policy makers and regulators and additionally allow stakeholders to take ownership of local and/or national issues, in effect bringing together ‘communities of practice’. A strategy being piloted in the UK as the Pilot Virtual Observatory (pVO), funded by NERC, is to demonstrate the use of cyber-infrastructure and cloud computing resources to investigate better methods of linking data and models and to demonstrate scenario analysis for research, policy and operational needs. The research will provide new ways the scientific and stakeholder communities come together to exploit current environmental information, knowledge and experience in an open framework. This poster presents the project scope and methodologies for the pVO work dealing with national modelling of hydrology and macro-nutrient biogeochemistry. We evaluate the strategies needed to robustly benchmark our current predictive capability of these resources through ensemble modelling. We explore the use of catchment similarity concepts to understand if national monitoring programs can inform us about the behaviour of catchments. We discuss the challenges to applying these strategies in an open access and integrated framework and finally we consider the future for such virtual observatory platforms for improving the way we iteratively improve our understanding of catchment science.

Research on an IP disaster recovery storage system

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Zeng, Dong; Wang, Yusheng; Zhu, Jianfeng

2008-12-01

According to both the Fibre Channel (FC) Storage Area Network (SAN) switch and Fabric Application Interface Standard (FAIS) mechanism, an iSCSI storage controller is put forward and based upon it, an internet Small Computer System Interface (iSCSI) SAN construction strategy for disaster recovery (DR) is proposed and some multiple sites replication models and a closed queue performance analysis method are also discussed in this paper. The iSCSI storage controller lies in the fabric level of the networked storage infrastructure, and it can be used to connect to both the hybrid storage applications and storage subsystems, besides, it can provide virtualized storage environment and support logical volume access control, and by cooperating with the remote peerparts, a disaster recovery storage system can be built on the basis of the data replication, block-level snapshot and Internet Protocol (IP) take-over functions.

The EPOS ICT Architecture

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Jeffery, Keith; Harrison, Matt; Bailo, Daniele

2016-04-01

The EPOS-PP Project 2010-2014 proposed an architecture and demonstrated feasibility with a prototype. Requirements based on use cases were collected and an inventory of assets (e.g. datasets, software, users, computing resources, equipment/detectors, laboratory services) (RIDE) was developed. The architecture evolved through three stages of refinement with much consultation both with the EPOS community representing EPOS users and participants in geoscience and with the overall ICT community especially those working on research such as the RDA (Research Data Alliance) community. The architecture consists of a central ICS (Integrated Core Services) consisting of a portal and catalog, the latter providing to end-users a 'map' of all EPOS resources (datasets, software, users, computing, equipment/detectors etc.). ICS is extended to ICS-d (distributed ICS) for certain services (such as visualisation software services or Cloud computing resources) and CES (Computational Earth Science) for specific simulation or analytical processing. ICS also communicates with TCS (Thematic Core Services) which represent European-wide portals to national and local assets, resources and services in the various specific domains (e.g. seismology, volcanology, geodesy) of EPOS. The EPOS-IP project 2015-2019 started October 2015. Two work-packages cover the ICT aspects; WP6 involves interaction with the TCS while WP7 concentrates on ICS including interoperation with ICS-d and CES offerings: in short the ICT architecture. Based on the experience and results of EPOS-PP the ICT team held a pre-meeting in July 2015 and set out a project plan. The first major activity involved requirements (re-)collection with use cases and also updating the inventory of assets held by the various TCS in EPOS. The RIDE database of assets is currently being converted to CERIF (Common European Research Information Format - an EU Recommendation to Member States) to provide the basis for the EPOS-IP ICS Catalog. In parallel the ICT team is tracking developments in ICT for relevance to EPOS-IP. In particular, the potential utilisation of e-Is (e-Infrastructures) such as GEANT(network), AARC (security), EGI (GRID computing), EUDAT (data curation), PRACE (High Performance Computing), HELIX-Nebula / Open Science Cloud (Cloud computing) are being assessed. Similarly relationships to other e-RIs (e-Research Infrastructures) such as ENVRI+, EXCELERATE and other ESFRI (European Strategic Forum for Research Infrastructures) projects are developed to share experience and technology and to promote interoperability. EPOS ICT team members are also involved in VRE4EIC, a project developing a reference architecture and component software services for a Virtual Research Environment to be superimposed on EPOS-ICS. The challenge which is being tackled now is therefore to keep consistency and interoperability among the different modules, initiatives and actors which participate to the process of running the EPOS platform. It implies both a continuous update about IT aspects of mentioned initiatives and a refinement of the e-architecture designed so far. One major aspect of EPOS-IP is the ICT support for legalistic, financial and governance aspects of the EPOS ERIC to be initiated during EPOS-IP. This implies a sophisticated AAAI (Authentication, authorization, accounting infrastructure) with consistency throughout the software, communications and data stack.

Improving National Capability in Biogeochemical Flux Modelling: the UK Environmental Virtual Observatory (EVOp)

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Johnes, P.; Greene, S.; Freer, J. E.; Bloomfield, J.; Macleod, K.; Reaney, S. M.; Odoni, N. A.

2012-12-01

The best outcomes from watershed management arise where policy and mitigation efforts are underpinned by strong science evidence, but there are major resourcing problems associated with the scale of monitoring needed to effectively characterise the sources rates and impacts of nutrient enrichment nationally. The challenge is to increase national capability in predictive modelling of nutrient flux to waters, securing an effective mechanism for transferring knowledge and management tools from data-rich to data-poor regions. The inadequacy of existing tools and approaches to address these challenges provided the motivation for the Environmental Virtual Observatory programme (EVOp), an innovation from the UK Natural Environment Research Council (NERC). EVOp is exploring the use of a cloud-based infrastructure in catchment science, developing an exemplar to explore N and P fluxes to inland and coastal waters in the UK from grid to catchment and national scale. EVOp is bringing together for the first time national data sets, models and uncertainty analysis into cloud computing environments to explore and benchmark current predictive capability for national scale biogeochemical modelling. The objective is to develop national biogeochemical modelling capability, capitalising on extensive national investment in the development of science understanding and modelling tools to support integrated catchment management, and supporting knowledge transfer from data rich to data poor regions, The AERC export coefficient model (Johnes et al., 2007) has been adapted to function within the EVOp cloud environment, and on a geoclimatic basis, using a range of high resolution, geo-referenced digital datasets as an initial demonstration of the enhanced national capacity for N and P flux modelling using cloud computing infrastructure. Geoclimatic regions are landscape units displaying homogenous or quasi-homogenous functional behaviour in terms of process controls on N and P cycling, underpin this approach (Johnes & Butterfield, 2002). Ten regions have been defined across the UK using GIS manipulation of spatial data describing hydrogeology, runoff, topographical slope and soil parent material. The export coefficient model operates within this regional modelling framework, providing mapped, tabulated and statistical outputs at scales from 1km2 grid scale to river catchment, WFD river basin district, major coastal drainage units to the North Sea, North Atlantic and English Channel, to the international reporting units defined under OSPAR, the International Convention for the protection of the marine environment of the North-East Atlantic. Here the geoclimatic modelling framework is presented together with modelled fluxes for N and P for each scale of reporting unit, together with scenario analysis applied at regional scale and mapped at national scale. The ways in which the results can be used to further explore the primary drivers for spatial variation and identify waterbodies at risk, especially in unmonitored and data-poor catchments are discussed, and the technical and computational support of a cloud-based infrastructure is evaluated as a mechanism to explore potential water quality impacts of future mitigation strategies applied at catchment to national scale.

Development of Armenian-Georgian Virtual Observatory

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Mickaelian, Areg; Kochiashvili, Nino; Astsatryan, Hrach; Harutyunian, Haik; Magakyan, Tigran; Chargeishvili, Ketevan; Natsvlishvili, Rezo; Kukhianidze, Vasil; Ramishvili, Giorgi; Sargsyan, Lusine; Sinamyan, Parandzem; Kochiashvili, Ia; Mikayelyan, Gor

2009-10-01

The Armenian-Georgian Virtual Observatory (ArGVO) project is the first initiative in the world to create a regional VO infrastructure based on national VO projects and regional Grid. The Byurakan and Abastumani Astrophysical Observatories are scientific partners since 1946, after establishment of the Byurakan observatory . The Armenian VO project (ArVO) is being developed since 2005 and is a part of the International Virtual Observatory Alliance (IVOA). It is based on the Digitized First Byurakan Survey (DFBS, the digitized version of famous Markarian survey) and other Armenian archival data. Similarly, the Georgian VO will be created to serve as a research environment to utilize the digitized Georgian plate archives. Therefore, one of the main goals for creation of the regional VO is the digitization of large amounts of plates preserved at the plate stacks of these two observatories. The total amount of plates is more than 100,000 units. Observational programs of high importance have been selected and some 3000 plates will be digitized during the next two years; the priority is being defined by the usefulness of the material for future science projects, like search for new objects, optical identifications of radio, IR, and X-ray sources, study of variability and proper motions, etc. Having the digitized material in VO standards, a VO database through the regional Grid infrastructure will be active. This partnership is being carried out in the framework of the ISTC project A-1606 "Development of Armenian-Georgian Grid Infrastructure and Applications in the Fields of High Energy Physics, Astrophysics and Quantum Physics".

Unidata's Vision for Transforming Geoscience by Moving Data Services and Software to the Cloud

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Ramamurthy, M. K.; Fisher, W.; Yoksas, T.

2014-12-01

Universities are facing many challenges: shrinking budgets, rapidly evolving information technologies, exploding data volumes, multidisciplinary science requirements, and high student expectations. These changes are upending traditional approaches to accessing and using data and software. It is clear that Unidata's products and services must evolve to support new approaches to research and education. After years of hype and ambiguity, cloud computing is maturing in usability in many areas of science and education, bringing the benefits of virtualized and elastic remote services to infrastructure, software, computation, and data. Cloud environments reduce the amount of time and money spent to procure, install, and maintain new hardware and software, and reduce costs through resource pooling and shared infrastructure. Cloud services aimed at providing any resource, at any time, from any place, using any device are increasingly being embraced by all types of organizations. Given this trend and the enormous potential of cloud-based services, Unidata is taking moving to augment its products, services, data delivery mechanisms and applications to align with the cloud-computing paradigm. Specifically, Unidata is working toward establishing a community-based development environment that supports the creation and use of software services to build end-to-end data workflows. The design encourages the creation of services that can be broken into small, independent chunks that provide simple capabilities. Chunks could be used individually to perform a task, or chained into simple or elaborate workflows. The services will also be portable, allowing their use in researchers' own cloud-based computing environments. In this talk, we present a vision for Unidata's future in a cloud-enabled data services and discuss our initial efforts to deploy a subset of Unidata data services and tools in the Amazon EC2 and Microsoft Azure cloud environments, including the transfer of real-time meteorological data into its cloud instances, product generation using those data, and the deployment of TDS, McIDAS ADDE and AWIPS II data servers and the Integrated Data Server visualization tool.

Flexible services for the support of research.

PubMed

Turilli, Matteo; Wallom, David; Williams, Chris; Gough, Steve; Curran, Neal; Tarrant, Richard; Bretherton, Dan; Powell, Andy; Johnson, Matt; Harmer, Terry; Wright, Peter; Gordon, John

2013-01-28

Cloud computing has been increasingly adopted by users and providers to promote a flexible, scalable and tailored access to computing resources. Nonetheless, the consolidation of this paradigm has uncovered some of its limitations. Initially devised by corporations with direct control over large amounts of computational resources, cloud computing is now being endorsed by organizations with limited resources or with a more articulated, less direct control over these resources. The challenge for these organizations is to leverage the benefits of cloud computing while dealing with limited and often widely distributed computing resources. This study focuses on the adoption of cloud computing by higher education institutions and addresses two main issues: flexible and on-demand access to a large amount of storage resources, and scalability across a heterogeneous set of cloud infrastructures. The proposed solutions leverage a federated approach to cloud resources in which users access multiple and largely independent cloud infrastructures through a highly customizable broker layer. This approach allows for a uniform authentication and authorization infrastructure, a fine-grained policy specification and the aggregation of accounting and monitoring. Within a loosely coupled federation of cloud infrastructures, users can access vast amount of data without copying them across cloud infrastructures and can scale their resource provisions when the local cloud resources become insufficient.

A Comprehensive Availability Modeling and Analysis of a Virtualized Servers System Using Stochastic Reward Nets

PubMed Central

Kim, Dong Seong; Park, Jong Sou

2014-01-01

It is important to assess availability of virtualized systems in IT business infrastructures. Previous work on availability modeling and analysis of the virtualized systems used a simplified configuration and assumption in which only one virtual machine (VM) runs on a virtual machine monitor (VMM) hosted on a physical server. In this paper, we show a comprehensive availability model using stochastic reward nets (SRN). The model takes into account (i) the detailed failures and recovery behaviors of multiple VMs, (ii) various other failure modes and corresponding recovery behaviors (e.g., hardware faults, failure and recovery due to Mandelbugs and aging-related bugs), and (iii) dependency between different subcomponents (e.g., between physical host failure and VMM, etc.) in a virtualized servers system. We also show numerical analysis on steady state availability, downtime in hours per year, transaction loss, and sensitivity analysis. This model provides a new finding on how to increase system availability by combining both software rejuvenations at VM and VMM in a wise manner. PMID:25165732

Implementing Computer-Aided Instruction in Distance Education: An Infrastructure. RR/89-06.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kotze, Paula

The infrastructure required for the implementation of computer aided instruction is described with particular reference to the distance education environment at the University of South Africa. A review of the state of the art of online distance education in the United States and Europe is followed by an outline of the proposed infrastructure for…

Neuroimaging Study Designs, Computational Analyses and Data Provenance Using the LONI Pipeline

PubMed Central

Dinov, Ivo; Lozev, Kamen; Petrosyan, Petros; Liu, Zhizhong; Eggert, Paul; Pierce, Jonathan; Zamanyan, Alen; Chakrapani, Shruthi; Van Horn, John; Parker, D. Stott; Magsipoc, Rico; Leung, Kelvin; Gutman, Boris; Woods, Roger; Toga, Arthur

2010-01-01

Modern computational neuroscience employs diverse software tools and multidisciplinary expertise to analyze heterogeneous brain data. The classical problems of gathering meaningful data, fitting specific models, and discovering appropriate analysis and visualization tools give way to a new class of computational challenges—management of large and incongruous data, integration and interoperability of computational resources, and data provenance. We designed, implemented and validated a new paradigm for addressing these challenges in the neuroimaging field. Our solution is based on the LONI Pipeline environment [3], [4], a graphical workflow environment for constructing and executing complex data processing protocols. We developed study-design, database and visual language programming functionalities within the LONI Pipeline that enable the construction of complete, elaborate and robust graphical workflows for analyzing neuroimaging and other data. These workflows facilitate open sharing and communication of data and metadata, concrete processing protocols, result validation, and study replication among different investigators and research groups. The LONI Pipeline features include distributed grid-enabled infrastructure, virtualized execution environment, efficient integration, data provenance, validation and distribution of new computational tools, automated data format conversion, and an intuitive graphical user interface. We demonstrate the new LONI Pipeline features using large scale neuroimaging studies based on data from the International Consortium for Brain Mapping [5] and the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative [6]. User guides, forums, instructions and downloads of the LONI Pipeline environment are available at http://pipeline.loni.ucla.edu. PMID:20927408

ViPAR: a software platform for the Virtual Pooling and Analysis of Research Data.

PubMed

Carter, Kim W; Francis, Richard W; Carter, K W; Francis, R W; Bresnahan, M; Gissler, M; Grønborg, T K; Gross, R; Gunnes, N; Hammond, G; Hornig, M; Hultman, C M; Huttunen, J; Langridge, A; Leonard, H; Newman, S; Parner, E T; Petersson, G; Reichenberg, A; Sandin, S; Schendel, D E; Schalkwyk, L; Sourander, A; Steadman, C; Stoltenberg, C; Suominen, A; Surén, P; Susser, E; Sylvester Vethanayagam, A; Yusof, Z

2016-04-01

Research studies exploring the determinants of disease require sufficient statistical power to detect meaningful effects. Sample size is often increased through centralized pooling of disparately located datasets, though ethical, privacy and data ownership issues can often hamper this process. Methods that facilitate the sharing of research data that are sympathetic with these issues and which allow flexible and detailed statistical analyses are therefore in critical need. We have created a software platform for the Virtual Pooling and Analysis of Research data (ViPAR), which employs free and open source methods to provide researchers with a web-based platform to analyse datasets housed in disparate locations. Database federation permits controlled access to remotely located datasets from a central location. The Secure Shell protocol allows data to be securely exchanged between devices over an insecure network. ViPAR combines these free technologies into a solution that facilitates 'virtual pooling' where data can be temporarily pooled into computer memory and made available for analysis without the need for permanent central storage. Within the ViPAR infrastructure, remote sites manage their own harmonized research dataset in a database hosted at their site, while a central server hosts the data federation component and a secure analysis portal. When an analysis is initiated, requested data are retrieved from each remote site and virtually pooled at the central site. The data are then analysed by statistical software and, on completion, results of the analysis are returned to the user and the virtually pooled data are removed from memory. ViPAR is a secure, flexible and powerful analysis platform built on open source technology that is currently in use by large international consortia, and is made publicly available at [http://bioinformatics.childhealthresearch.org.au/software/vipar/]. © The Author 2015. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the International Epidemiological Association.

AstroCloud, a Cyber-Infrastructure for Astronomy Research: Data Archiving and Quality Control

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

He, B.; Cui, C.; Fan, D.; Li, C.; Xiao, J.; Yu, C.; Wang, C.; Cao, Z.; Chen, J.; Yi, W.; Li, S.; Mi, L.; Yang, S.

2015-09-01

AstroCloud is a cyber-Infrastructure for Astronomy Research initiated by Chinese Virtual Observatory (China-VO) under funding support from NDRC (National Development and Reform commission) and CAS (Chinese Academy of Sciences)1(Cui et al. 2014). To archive the astronomical data in China, we present the implementation of the astronomical data archiving system (ADAS). Data archiving and quality control are the infrastructure for the AstroCloud. Throughout the data of the entire life cycle, data archiving system standardized data, transferring data, logging observational data, archiving ambient data, And storing these data and metadata in database. Quality control covers the whole process and all aspects of data archiving.

Why Virtual, Why Environments? Implementing Virtual Reality Concepts in Computer-Assisted Language Learning.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Schwienhorst, Klaus

2002-01-01

Discussion of computer-assisted language learning focuses on the benefits of virtual reality environments, particularly for foreign language contexts. Topics include three approaches to learner autonomy; supporting reflection, including self-awareness; supporting interaction, including collaboration; and supporting experimentation, including…

Data Center Consolidation: A Step towards Infrastructure Clouds

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Winter, Markus

Application service providers face enormous challenges and rising costs in managing and operating a growing number of heterogeneous system and computing landscapes. Limitations of traditional computing environments force IT decision-makers to reorganize computing resources within the data center, as continuous growth leads to an inefficient utilization of the underlying hardware infrastructure. This paper discusses a way for infrastructure providers to improve data center operations based on the findings of a case study on resource utilization of very large business applications and presents an outlook beyond server consolidation endeavors, transforming corporate data centers into compute clouds.

Elastic Cloud Computing Infrastructures in the Open Cirrus Testbed Implemented via Eucalyptus

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Baun, Christian; Kunze, Marcel

Cloud computing realizes the advantages and overcomes some restrictionsof the grid computing paradigm. Elastic infrastructures can easily be createdand managed by cloud users. In order to accelerate the research ondata center management and cloud services the OpenCirrusTM researchtestbed has been started by HP, Intel and Yahoo!. Although commercialcloud offerings are proprietary, Open Source solutions exist in the field ofIaaS with Eucalyptus, PaaS with AppScale and at the applications layerwith Hadoop MapReduce. This paper examines the I/O performance ofcloud computing infrastructures implemented with Eucalyptus in contrastto Amazon S3.

Network and computing infrastructure for scientific applications in Georgia

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Kvatadze, R.; Modebadze, Z.

2016-09-01

Status of network and computing infrastructure and available services for research and education community of Georgia are presented. Research and Educational Networking Association - GRENA provides the following network services: Internet connectivity, network services, cyber security, technical support, etc. Computing resources used by the research teams are located at GRENA and at major state universities. GE-01-GRENA site is included in European Grid infrastructure. Paper also contains information about programs of Learning Center and research and development projects in which GRENA is participating.

Usability Studies In Virtual And Traditional Computer Aided Design Environments For Spatial Awareness

DTIC Science & Technology

2017-08-08

Usability Studies In Virtual And Traditional Computer Aided Design Environments For Spatial Awareness Dr. Syed Adeel Ahmed, Xavier University of...virtual environment with wand interfaces compared directly with a workstation non-stereoscopic traditional CAD interface with keyboard and mouse. In...navigate through a virtual environment. The wand interface provides a significantly improved means of interaction. This study quantitatively measures the

VECTR: Virtual Environment Computational Training Resource

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Little, William L.

2018-01-01

The Westridge Middle School Curriculum and Community Night is an annual event designed to introduce students and parents to potential employers in the Central Florida area. NASA participated in the event in 2017, and has been asked to come back for the 2018 event on January 25. We will be demonstrating our Microsoft Hololens Virtual Rovers project, and the Virtual Environment Computational Training Resource (VECTR) virtual reality tool.

Virtual endoscopic imaging of the spine.

PubMed

Kotani, Toshiaki; Nagaya, Shigeyuki; Sonoda, Masaru; Akazawa, Tsutomu; Lumawig, Jose Miguel T; Nemoto, Tetsuharu; Koshi, Takana; Kamiya, Koshiro; Hirosawa, Naoya; Minami, Shohei

2012-05-20

Prospective trial of virtual endoscopy in spinal surgery. To investigate the utility of virtual endoscopy of the spine in conjunction with spinal surgery. Several studies have described clinical applications of virtual endoscopy to visualize the inside of the bronchi, paranasal sinus, stomach, small intestine, pancreatic duct, and bile duct, but, to date, no study has described the use of virtual endoscopy in the spine. Virtual endoscopy is a realistic 3-dimensional intraluminal simulation of tubular structures that is generated by postprocessing of computed tomographic data sets. Five patients with spinal disease were selected: 2 patients with degenerative disease, 2 patients with spinal deformity, and 1 patient with spinal injury. Virtual endoscopy software allows an observer to explore the spinal canal with a mouse, using multislice computed tomographic data. Our study found that virtual endoscopy of the spine has advantages compared with standard imaging methods because surgeons can noninvasively explore the spinal canal in all directions. Virtual endoscopy of the spine may be useful to surgeons for diagnosis, preoperative planning, and postoperative assessment by obviating the need to mentally construct a 3-dimensional picture of the spinal canal from 2-dimensional computed tomographic scans.

LHCb experience with running jobs in virtual machines

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

McNab, A.; Stagni, F.; Luzzi, C.

2015-12-01

The LHCb experiment has been running production jobs in virtual machines since 2013 as part of its DIRAC-based infrastructure. We describe the architecture of these virtual machines and the steps taken to replicate the WLCG worker node environment expected by user and production jobs. This relies on the uCernVM system for providing root images for virtual machines. We use the CernVM-FS distributed filesystem to supply the root partition files, the LHCb software stack, and the bootstrapping scripts necessary to configure the virtual machines for us. Using this approach, we have been able to minimise the amount of contextualisation which must be provided by the virtual machine managers. We explain the process by which the virtual machine is able to receive payload jobs submitted to DIRAC by users and production managers, and how this differs from payloads executed within conventional DIRAC pilot jobs on batch queue based sites. We describe our operational experiences in running production on VM based sites managed using Vcycle/OpenStack, Vac, and HTCondor Vacuum. Finally we show how our use of these resources is monitored using Ganglia and DIRAC.

A game based virtual campus tour

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Razia Sulthana, A.; Arokiaraj Jovith, A.; Saveetha, D.; Jaithunbi, A. K.

2018-04-01

The aim of the application is to create a virtual reality game, whose purpose is to showcase the facilities of SRM University, while doing so in an entertaining manner. The virtual prototype of the institution is deployed in a game engine which eases the students to look over the infrastructure, thereby reducing the resources utilization. Time and money are the resources in concern today. The virtual campus application assists the end user even from a remote location. The virtual world simulates the exact location and hence the effect is created. Thus, it virtually transports the user to the university, with the help of a VR Headset. This is a dynamic application wherein the user can move in any direction. The VR headset provides an interface to get gyro input and this is used to start and stop the movement. Virtual Campus is size efficient and occupies minimal space. It is scalable against mobile gadgets. This gaming application helps the end user to explore the campus, while having fun too. It is a user friendly application that supports users worldwide.

Digital Immersive Virtual Environments and Instructional Computing

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Blascovich, Jim; Beall, Andrew C.

2010-01-01

This article reviews theory and research relevant to the development of digital immersive virtual environment-based instructional computing systems. The review is organized within the context of a multidimensional model of social influence and interaction within virtual environments that models the interaction of four theoretical factors: theory…

ICCE/ICCAI 2000 Full & Short Papers (Virtual Lab/Classroom/School).

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

2000

This document contains the following full and short papers on virtual laboratories, classrooms, and schools from ICCE/ICCAI 2000 (International Conference on Computers in Education/International Conference on Computer-Assisted Instruction): (1) "A Collaborative Learning Support System Based on Virtual Environment Server for Multiple…

Mexican Space Weather Service (SCIESMEX)

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Gonzalez-Esparza, A.; De la Luz, V.; Mejia-Ambriz, J. C.; Aguilar-Rodriguez, E.; Corona-Romero, P.; Gonzalez, L. X.

2015-12-01

Recent modifications of the Civil Protection Law in Mexico include now specific mentions to space hazards and space weather phenomena. During the last few years, the UN has promoted international cooperation on Space Weather awareness, studies and monitoring. Internal and external conditions motivated the creation of a Space Weather Service in Mexico (SCIESMEX). The SCIESMEX (www.sciesmex.unam.mx) is operated by the Geophysics Institute at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). The UNAM has the experience of operating several critical national services, including the National Seismological Service (SSN); besides that has a well established scientific group with expertise in space physics and solar- terrestrial phenomena. The SCIESMEX is also related with the recent creation of the Mexican Space Agency (AEM). The project combines a network of different ground instruments covering solar, interplanetary, geomagnetic, and ionospheric observations. The SCIESMEX has already in operation computing infrastructure running the web application, a virtual observatory and a high performance computing server to run numerical models. SCIESMEX participates in the International Space Environment Services (ISES) and in the Inter-progamme Coordination Team on Space Weather (ICTSW) of the Word Meteorological Organization (WMO).

Towards a Multi-Mission, Airborne Science Data System Environment

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Crichton, D. J.; Hardman, S.; Law, E.; Freeborn, D.; Kay-Im, E.; Lau, G.; Oswald, J.

2011-12-01

NASA earth science instruments are increasingly relying on airborne missions. However, traditionally, there has been limited common infrastructure support available to principal investigators in the area of science data systems. As a result, each investigator has been required to develop their own computing infrastructures for the science data system. Typically there is little software reuse and many projects lack sufficient resources to provide a robust infrastructure to capture, process, distribute and archive the observations acquired from airborne flights. At NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), we have been developing a multi-mission data system infrastructure for airborne instruments called the Airborne Cloud Computing Environment (ACCE). ACCE encompasses the end-to-end lifecycle covering planning, provisioning of data system capabilities, and support for scientific analysis in order to improve the quality, cost effectiveness, and capabilities to enable new scientific discovery and research in earth observation. This includes improving data system interoperability across each instrument. A principal characteristic is being able to provide an agile infrastructure that is architected to allow for a variety of configurations of the infrastructure from locally installed compute and storage services to provisioning those services via the "cloud" from cloud computer vendors such as Amazon.com. Investigators often have different needs that require a flexible configuration. The data system infrastructure is built on the Apache's Object Oriented Data Technology (OODT) suite of components which has been used for a number of spaceborne missions and provides a rich set of open source software components and services for constructing science processing and data management systems. In 2010, a partnership was formed between the ACCE team and the Carbon in Arctic Reservoirs Vulnerability Experiment (CARVE) mission to support the data processing and data management needs. A principal goal is to provide support for the Fourier Transform Spectrometer (FTS) instrument which will produce over 700,000 soundings over the life of their three-year mission. The cost to purchase and operate a cluster-based system in order to generate Level 2 Full Physics products from this data was prohibitive. Through an evaluation of cloud computing solutions, Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) was selected for the CARVE deployment. As the ACCE infrastructure is developed and extended to form an infrastructure for airborne missions, the experience of working with CARVE has provided a number of lessons learned and has proven to be important in reinforcing the unique aspects of airborne missions and the importance of the ACCE infrastructure in developing a cost effective, flexible multi-mission capability that leverages emerging capabilities in cloud computing, workflow management, and distributed computing.

Flexible Description and Adaptive Processing of Earth Observation Data through the BigEarth Platform

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Gorgan, Dorian; Bacu, Victor; Stefanut, Teodor; Nandra, Cosmin; Mihon, Danut

2016-04-01

The Earth Observation data repositories extending periodically by several terabytes become a critical issue for organizations. The management of the storage capacity of such big datasets, accessing policy, data protection, searching, and complex processing require high costs that impose efficient solutions to balance the cost and value of data. Data can create value only when it is used, and the data protection has to be oriented toward allowing innovation that sometimes depends on creative people, which achieve unexpected valuable results through a flexible and adaptive manner. The users need to describe and experiment themselves different complex algorithms through analytics in order to valorize data. The analytics uses descriptive and predictive models to gain valuable knowledge and information from data analysis. Possible solutions for advanced processing of big Earth Observation data are given by the HPC platforms such as cloud. With platforms becoming more complex and heterogeneous, the developing of applications is even harder and the efficient mapping of these applications to a suitable and optimum platform, working on huge distributed data repositories, is challenging and complex as well, even by using specialized software services. From the user point of view, an optimum environment gives acceptable execution times, offers a high level of usability by hiding the complexity of computing infrastructure, and supports an open accessibility and control to application entities and functionality. The BigEarth platform [1] supports the entire flow of flexible description of processing by basic operators and adaptive execution over cloud infrastructure [2]. The basic modules of the pipeline such as the KEOPS [3] set of basic operators, the WorDeL language [4], the Planner for sequential and parallel processing, and the Executor through virtual machines, are detailed as the main components of the BigEarth platform [5]. The presentation exemplifies the development of some Earth Observation oriented applications based on flexible description of processing, and adaptive and portable execution over Cloud infrastructure. Main references for further information: [1] BigEarth project, http://cgis.utcluj.ro/projects/bigearth [2] Gorgan, D., "Flexible and Adaptive Processing of Earth Observation Data over High Performance Computation Architectures", International Conference and Exhibition Satellite 2015, August 17-19, Houston, Texas, USA. [3] Mihon, D., Bacu, V., Colceriu, V., Gorgan, D., "Modeling of Earth Observation Use Cases through the KEOPS System", Proceedings of the Intelligent Computer Communication and Processing (ICCP), IEEE-Press, pp. 455-460, (2015). [4] Nandra, C., Gorgan, D., "Workflow Description Language for Defining Big Earth Data Processing Tasks", Proceedings of the Intelligent Computer Communication and Processing (ICCP), IEEE-Press, pp. 461-468, (2015). [5] Bacu, V., Stefan, T., Gorgan, D., "Adaptive Processing of Earth Observation Data on Cloud Infrastructures Based on Workflow Description", Proceedings of the Intelligent Computer Communication and Processing (ICCP), IEEE-Press, pp.444-454, (2015).

Proof of concept : examining characteristics of roadway infrastructure in various 3D visualization modes.

DOT National Transportation Integrated Search

2015-02-01

Utilizing enhanced visualization in transportation planning and design gained popularity in the last decade. This work aimed at : demonstrating the concept of utilizing a highly immersive, virtual reality simulation engine for creating dynamic, inter...

Cost-effective cloud computing: a case study using the comparative genomics tool, roundup.

PubMed

Kudtarkar, Parul; Deluca, Todd F; Fusaro, Vincent A; Tonellato, Peter J; Wall, Dennis P

2010-12-22

Comparative genomics resources, such as ortholog detection tools and repositories are rapidly increasing in scale and complexity. Cloud computing is an emerging technological paradigm that enables researchers to dynamically build a dedicated virtual cluster and may represent a valuable alternative for large computational tools in bioinformatics. In the present manuscript, we optimize the computation of a large-scale comparative genomics resource-Roundup-using cloud computing, describe the proper operating principles required to achieve computational efficiency on the cloud, and detail important procedures for improving cost-effectiveness to ensure maximal computation at minimal costs. Utilizing the comparative genomics tool, Roundup, as a case study, we computed orthologs among 902 fully sequenced genomes on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud. For managing the ortholog processes, we designed a strategy to deploy the web service, Elastic MapReduce, and maximize the use of the cloud while simultaneously minimizing costs. Specifically, we created a model to estimate cloud runtime based on the size and complexity of the genomes being compared that determines in advance the optimal order of the jobs to be submitted. We computed orthologous relationships for 245,323 genome-to-genome comparisons on Amazon's computing cloud, a computation that required just over 200 hours and cost $8,000 USD, at least 40% less than expected under a strategy in which genome comparisons were submitted to the cloud randomly with respect to runtime. Our cost savings projections were based on a model that not only demonstrates the optimal strategy for deploying RSD to the cloud, but also finds the optimal cluster size to minimize waste and maximize usage. Our cost-reduction model is readily adaptable for other comparative genomics tools and potentially of significant benefit to labs seeking to take advantage of the cloud as an alternative to local computing infrastructure.

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization - KVM-based infrastructure services at BNL

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Cortijo, D.

2011-06-14

Over the past 18 months, BNL has moved a large percentage of its Linux-based servers and services into a Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) environment. This presentation will address our approach to virtualization, critical decision points, and a discussion of our implementation. Specific topics will include an overview of hardware and software requirements, networking, and storage; discussion of the decision of Red Hat solution over competing products (VMWare, Xen, etc); details on some of the features of RHEV - both current and on their roadmap; Review of performance and reliability gains since deployment completion; path forward for RHEV at BNLmore » and caveats and potential problems.« less

Educating Avatars: On Virtual Worlds and Pedagogical Intent

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Wang, Tsung Juang

2011-01-01

Virtual world technology is now being incorporated into various higher education programs, often with enthusiastic claims about the improvement of students' abilities to experience learning problems and tasks in computer-mediated virtual reality through the use of computer-generated personal agents or avatars. The interactivity of the avatars with…

A New Continent of Ideas

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

1990-01-01

While a new technology called 'virtual reality' is still at the 'ground floor' level, one of its basic components, 3D computer graphics is already in wide commercial use and expanding. Other components that permit a human operator to 'virtually' explore an artificial environment and to interact with it are being demonstrated routinely at Ames and elsewhere. Virtual reality might be defined as an environment capable of being virtually entered - telepresence, it is called - or interacted with by a human. The Virtual Interface Environment Workstation (VIEW) is a head-mounted stereoscopic display system in which the display may be an artificial computer-generated environment or a real environment relayed from remote video cameras. Operator can 'step into' this environment and interact with it. The DataGlove has a series of fiber optic cables and sensors that detect any movement of the wearer's fingers and transmit the information to a host computer; a computer generated image of the hand will move exactly as the operator is moving his gloved hand. With appropriate software, the operator can use the glove to interact with the computer scene by grasping an object. The DataSuit is a sensor equipped full body garment that greatly increases the sphere of performance for virtual reality simulations.

The virtual windtunnel: Visualizing modern CFD datasets with a virtual environment

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Bryson, Steve

1993-01-01

This paper describes work in progress on a virtual environment designed for the visualization of pre-computed fluid flows. The overall problems involved in the visualization of fluid flow are summarized, including computational, data management, and interface issues. Requirements for a flow visualization are summarized. Many aspects of the implementation of the virtual windtunnel were uniquely determined by these requirements. The user interface is described in detail.

Virtual worlds to support patient group communication? A questionnaire study investigating potential for virtual world focus group use by respiratory patients.

PubMed

Taylor, Michael J; Taylor, Dave; Vlaev, Ivo; Elkin, Sarah

2017-01-01

Recent advances in communication technologies enable potential provision of remote education for patients using computer-generated environments known as virtual worlds. Previous research has revealed highly variable levels of patient receptiveness to using information technologies for healthcare-related purposes. This preliminary study involved implementing a questionnaire investigating attitudes and access to computer technologies of respiratory outpatients, in order to assess potential for use of virtual worlds to facilitate health-related education for this sample. Ninety-four patients with a chronic respiratory condition completed surveys, which were distributed at a Chest Clinic. In accordance with our prediction, younger participants were more likely to be able to use, and have access to a computer and some patients were keen to explore use virtual worlds for healthcare-related purposes: Of those with access to computer facilities, 14.50% expressed a willingness to attend a virtual world focus group. Results indicate future virtual world health education facilities should be designed to cater for younger patients, because this group are most likely to accept and use such facilities. Within the study sample, this is likely to comprise of people diagnosed with asthma. Future work could investigate the potential of creating a virtual world asthma education facility.

Virtual worlds to support patient group communication? A questionnaire study investigating potential for virtual world focus group use by respiratory patients

PubMed Central

Taylor, Michael J.; Taylor, Dave; Vlaev, Ivo; Elkin, Sarah

2015-01-01

Recent advances in communication technologies enable potential provision of remote education for patients using computer-generated environments known as virtual worlds. Previous research has revealed highly variable levels of patient receptiveness to using information technologies for healthcare-related purposes. This preliminary study involved implementing a questionnaire investigating attitudes and access to computer technologies of respiratory outpatients, in order to assess potential for use of virtual worlds to facilitate health-related education for this sample. Ninety-four patients with a chronic respiratory condition completed surveys, which were distributed at a Chest Clinic. In accordance with our prediction, younger participants were more likely to be able to use, and have access to a computer and some patients were keen to explore use virtual worlds for healthcare-related purposes: Of those with access to computer facilities, 14.50% expressed a willingness to attend a virtual world focus group. Results indicate future virtual world health education facilities should be designed to cater for younger patients, because this group are most likely to accept and use such facilities. Within the study sample, this is likely to comprise of people diagnosed with asthma. Future work could investigate the potential of creating a virtual world asthma education facility. PMID:28239187

Modeling the Cloud to Enhance Capabilities for Crises and Catastrophe Management

DTIC Science & Technology

2016-11-16

order for cloud computing infrastructures to be successfully deployed in real world scenarios as tools for crisis and catastrophe management, where...Statement of the Problem Studied As cloud computing becomes the dominant computational infrastructure[1] and cloud technologies make a transition to hosting...1. Formulate rigorous mathematical models representing technological capabilities and resources in cloud computing for performance modeling and

Infrastructure Systems for Advanced Computing in E-science applications

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Terzo, Olivier

2013-04-01

In the e-science field are growing needs for having computing infrastructure more dynamic and customizable with a model of use "on demand" that follow the exact request in term of resources and storage capacities. The integration of grid and cloud infrastructure solutions allows us to offer services that can adapt the availability in terms of up scaling and downscaling resources. The main challenges for e-sciences domains will on implement infrastructure solutions for scientific computing that allow to adapt dynamically the demands of computing resources with a strong emphasis on optimizing the use of computing resources for reducing costs of investments. Instrumentation, data volumes, algorithms, analysis contribute to increase the complexity for applications who require high processing power and storage for a limited time and often exceeds the computational resources that equip the majority of laboratories, research Unit in an organization. Very often it is necessary to adapt or even tweak rethink tools, algorithms, and consolidate existing applications through a phase of reverse engineering in order to adapt them to a deployment on Cloud infrastructure. For example, in areas such as rainfall monitoring, meteorological analysis, Hydrometeorology, Climatology Bioinformatics Next Generation Sequencing, Computational Electromagnetic, Radio occultation, the complexity of the analysis raises several issues such as the processing time, the scheduling of tasks of processing, storage of results, a multi users environment. For these reasons, it is necessary to rethink the writing model of E-Science applications in order to be already adapted to exploit the potentiality of cloud computing services through the uses of IaaS, PaaS and SaaS layer. An other important focus is on create/use hybrid infrastructure typically a federation between Private and public cloud, in fact in this way when all resources owned by the organization are all used it will be easy with a federate cloud infrastructure to add some additional resources form the Public cloud for following the needs in term of computational and storage resources and release them where process are finished. Following the hybrid model, the scheduling approach is important for managing both cloud models. Thanks to this model infrastructure every time resources are available for additional request in term of IT capacities that can used "on demand" for a limited time without having to proceed to purchase additional servers.

Proceedings of the 1993 Conference on Intelligent Computer-Aided Training and Virtual Environment Technology

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Hyde, Patricia R.; Loftin, R. Bowen

1993-01-01

The volume 2 proceedings from the 1993 Conference on Intelligent Computer-Aided Training and Virtual Environment Technology are presented. Topics discussed include intelligent computer assisted training (ICAT) systems architectures, ICAT educational and medical applications, virtual environment (VE) training and assessment, human factors engineering and VE, ICAT theory and natural language processing, ICAT military applications, VE engineering applications, ICAT knowledge acquisition processes and applications, and ICAT aerospace applications.

Educational Uses of Virtual Reality Technology.

DTIC Science & Technology

1998-01-01

technology. It is affordable in that a basic level of technology can be achieved on most existing personal computers at either no cost or some minimal...actually present in a virtual environment is termed "presence" and is an artifact of being visually immersed in the computer -generated virtual world...Carolina University, VREL Teachers 1996 onward £ CO ■3 u VR in Education University of Illinois, National Center for Super- computing Applications

Secure data exchange between intelligent devices and computing centers

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Naqvi, Syed; Riguidel, Michel

2005-03-01

The advent of reliable spontaneous networking technologies (commonly known as wireless ad-hoc networks) has ostensibly raised stakes for the conception of computing intensive environments using intelligent devices as their interface with the external world. These smart devices are used as data gateways for the computing units. These devices are employed in highly volatile environments where the secure exchange of data between these devices and their computing centers is of paramount importance. Moreover, their mission critical applications require dependable measures against the attacks like denial of service (DoS), eavesdropping, masquerading, etc. In this paper, we propose a mechanism to assure reliable data exchange between an intelligent environment composed of smart devices and distributed computing units collectively called 'computational grid'. The notion of infosphere is used to define a digital space made up of a persistent and a volatile asset in an often indefinite geographical space. We study different infospheres and present general evolutions and issues in the security of such technology-rich and intelligent environments. It is beyond any doubt that these environments will likely face a proliferation of users, applications, networked devices, and their interactions on a scale never experienced before. It would be better to build in the ability to uniformly deal with these systems. As a solution, we propose a concept of virtualization of security services. We try to solve the difficult problems of implementation and maintenance of trust on the one hand, and those of security management in heterogeneous infrastructure on the other hand.

Social Protocols for Agile Virtual Teams

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Picard, Willy

Despite many works on collaborative networked organizations (CNOs), CSCW, groupware, workflow systems and social networks, computer support for virtual teams is still insufficient, especially support for agility, i.e. the capability of virtual team members to rapidly and cost efficiently adapt the way they interact to changes. In this paper, requirements for computer support for agile virtual teams are presented. Next, an extension of the concept of social protocol is proposed as a novel model supporting agile interactions within virtual teams. The extended concept of social protocol consists of an extended social network and a workflow model.

Cloud access to interoperable IVOA-compliant VOSpace storage

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Bertocco, S.; Dowler, P.; Gaudet, S.; Major, B.; Pasian, F.; Taffoni, G.

2018-07-01

Handling, processing and archiving the huge amount of data produced by the new generation of experiments and instruments in Astronomy and Astrophysics are among the more exciting challenges to address in designing the future data management infrastructures and computing services. We investigated the feasibility of a data management and computation infrastructure, available world-wide, with the aim of merging the FAIR data management provided by IVOA standards with the efficiency and reliability of a cloud approach. Our work involved the Canadian Advanced Network for Astronomy Research (CANFAR) infrastructure and the European EGI federated cloud (EFC). We designed and deployed a pilot data management and computation infrastructure that provides IVOA-compliant VOSpace storage resources and wide access to interoperable federated clouds. In this paper, we detail the main user requirements covered, the technical choices and the implemented solutions and we describe the resulting Hybrid cloud Worldwide infrastructure, its benefits and limitations.

The virtual environment display system

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Mcgreevy, Michael W.

1991-01-01

Virtual environment technology is a display and control technology that can surround a person in an interactive computer generated or computer mediated virtual environment. It has evolved at NASA-Ames since 1984 to serve NASA's missions and goals. The exciting potential of this technology, sometimes called Virtual Reality, Artificial Reality, or Cyberspace, has been recognized recently by the popular media, industry, academia, and government organizations. Much research and development will be necessary to bring it to fruition.

Taking the Plunge: Districts Leap into Virtualization

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Demski, Jennifer

2010-01-01

Moving from a traditional desktop computing environment to a virtualized solution is a daunting task. In this article, the author presents case histories of three districts that have made the conversion to virtual computing to learn about their experiences: What prompted them to make the move, and what were their objectives? Which obstacles prove…

Toward real-time Monte Carlo simulation using a commercial cloud computing infrastructure.

PubMed

Wang, Henry; Ma, Yunzhi; Pratx, Guillem; Xing, Lei

2011-09-07

Monte Carlo (MC) methods are the gold standard for modeling photon and electron transport in a heterogeneous medium; however, their computational cost prohibits their routine use in the clinic. Cloud computing, wherein computing resources are allocated on-demand from a third party, is a new approach for high performance computing and is implemented to perform ultra-fast MC calculation in radiation therapy. We deployed the EGS5 MC package in a commercial cloud environment. Launched from a single local computer with Internet access, a Python script allocates a remote virtual cluster. A handshaking protocol designates master and worker nodes. The EGS5 binaries and the simulation data are initially loaded onto the master node. The simulation is then distributed among independent worker nodes via the message passing interface, and the results aggregated on the local computer for display and data analysis. The described approach is evaluated for pencil beams and broad beams of high-energy electrons and photons. The output of cloud-based MC simulation is identical to that produced by single-threaded implementation. For 1 million electrons, a simulation that takes 2.58 h on a local computer can be executed in 3.3 min on the cloud with 100 nodes, a 47× speed-up. Simulation time scales inversely with the number of parallel nodes. The parallelization overhead is also negligible for large simulations. Cloud computing represents one of the most important recent advances in supercomputing technology and provides a promising platform for substantially improved MC simulation. In addition to the significant speed up, cloud computing builds a layer of abstraction for high performance parallel computing, which may change the way dose calculations are performed and radiation treatment plans are completed.

So ware-Defined Network Solutions for Science Scenarios: Performance Testing Framework and Measurements

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Settlemyer, Bradley; Kettimuthu, R.; Boley, Josh

High-performance scientific work flows utilize supercomputers, scientific instruments, and large storage systems. Their executions require fast setup of a small number of dedicated network connections across the geographically distributed facility sites. We present Software-Defined Network (SDN) solutions consisting of site daemons that use dpctl, Floodlight, ONOS, or OpenDaylight controllers to set up these connections. The development of these SDN solutions could be quite disruptive to the infrastructure, while requiring a close coordination among multiple sites; in addition, the large number of possible controller and device combinations to investigate could make the infrastructure unavailable to regular users for extended periods ofmore » time. In response, we develop a Virtual Science Network Environment (VSNE) using virtual machines, Mininet, and custom scripts that support the development, testing, and evaluation of SDN solutions, without the constraints and expenses of multi-site physical infrastructures; furthermore, the chosen solutions can be directly transferred to production deployments. By complementing VSNE with a physical testbed, we conduct targeted performance tests of various SDN solutions to help choose the best candidates. In addition, we propose a switching response method to assess the setup times and throughput performances of different SDN solutions, and present experimental results that show their advantages and limitations.« less

Evaluating virtual hosted desktops for graphics-intensive astronomy

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Meade, B. F.; Fluke, C. J.

2018-04-01

Visualisation of data is critical to understanding astronomical phenomena. Today, many instruments produce datasets that are too big to be downloaded to a local computer, yet many of the visualisation tools used by astronomers are deployed only on desktop computers. Cloud computing is increasingly used to provide a computation and simulation platform in astronomy, but it also offers great potential as a visualisation platform. Virtual hosted desktops, with graphics processing unit (GPU) acceleration, allow interactive, graphics-intensive desktop applications to operate co-located with astronomy datasets stored in remote data centres. By combining benchmarking and user experience testing, with a cohort of 20 astronomers, we investigate the viability of replacing physical desktop computers with virtual hosted desktops. In our work, we compare two Apple MacBook computers (one old and one new, representing hardware and opposite ends of the useful lifetime) with two virtual hosted desktops: one commercial (Amazon Web Services) and one in a private research cloud (the Australian NeCTAR Research Cloud). For two-dimensional image-based tasks and graphics-intensive three-dimensional operations - typical of astronomy visualisation workflows - we found that benchmarks do not necessarily provide the best indication of performance. When compared to typical laptop computers, virtual hosted desktops can provide a better user experience, even with lower performing graphics cards. We also found that virtual hosted desktops are equally simple to use, provide greater flexibility in choice of configuration, and may actually be a more cost-effective option for typical usage profiles.

Computational Virtual Reality (VR) as a human-computer interface in the operation of telerobotic systems

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Bejczy, Antal K.

1995-01-01

This presentation focuses on the application of computer graphics or 'virtual reality' (VR) techniques as a human-computer interface tool in the operation of telerobotic systems. VR techniques offer very valuable task realization aids for planning, previewing and predicting robotic actions, operator training, and for visual perception of non-visible events like contact forces in robotic tasks. The utility of computer graphics in telerobotic operation can be significantly enhanced by high-fidelity calibration of virtual reality images to actual TV camera images. This calibration will even permit the creation of artificial (synthetic) views of task scenes for which no TV camera views are available.

Virtual Reality versus Computer-Aided Exposure Treatments for Fear of Flying

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Tortella-Feliu, Miquel; Botella, Cristina; Llabres, Jordi; Breton-Lopez, Juana Maria; del Amo, Antonio Riera; Banos, Rosa M.; Gelabert, Joan M.

2011-01-01

Evidence is growing that two modalities of computer-based exposure therapies--virtual reality and computer-aided psychotherapy--are effective in treating anxiety disorders, including fear of flying. However, they have not yet been directly compared. The aim of this study was to analyze the efficacy of three computer-based exposure treatments for…

Future Naval Use of COTS Networking Infrastructure

DTIC Science & Technology

2009-07-01

user to benefit from Google’s vast databases and computational resources. Obviously, the ability to harness the full power of the Cloud could be... Computing Impact Findings Action Items Take-Aways Appendices: Pages 54-68 A. Terms of Reference Document B. Sample Definitions of Cloud ...and definition of Cloud Computing . While Cloud Computing is developing in many variations – including Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as

Software for Building Models of 3D Objects via the Internet

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Schramer, Tim; Jensen, Jeff

2003-01-01

The Virtual EDF Builder (where EDF signifies Electronic Development Fixture) is a computer program that facilitates the use of the Internet for building and displaying digital models of three-dimensional (3D) objects that ordinarily comprise assemblies of solid models created previously by use of computer-aided-design (CAD) programs. The Virtual EDF Builder resides on a Unix-based server computer. It is used in conjunction with a commercially available Web-based plug-in viewer program that runs on a client computer. The Virtual EDF Builder acts as a translator between the viewer program and a database stored on the server. The translation function includes the provision of uniform resource locator (URL) links to other Web-based computer systems and databases. The Virtual EDF builder can be used in two ways: (1) If the client computer is Unix-based, then it can assemble a model locally; the computational load is transferred from the server to the client computer. (2) Alternatively, the server can be made to build the model, in which case the server bears the computational load and the results are downloaded to the client computer or workstation upon completion.

Modeling and computational simulation and the potential of virtual and augmented reality associated to the teaching of nanoscience and nanotechnology

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Ribeiro, Allan; Santos, Helen

With the advent of new information and communication technologies (ICTs), the communicative interaction changes the way of being and acting of people, at the same time that changes the way of work activities related to education. In this range of possibilities provided by the advancement of computational resources include virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR), are highlighted as new forms of information visualization in computer applications. While the RV allows user interaction with a virtual environment totally computer generated; in RA the virtual images are inserted in real environment, but both create new opportunities to support teaching and learning in formal and informal contexts. Such technologies are able to express representations of reality or of the imagination, as systems in nanoscale and low dimensionality, being imperative to explore, in the most diverse areas of knowledge, the potential offered by ICT and emerging technologies. In this sense, this work presents computer applications of virtual and augmented reality developed with the use of modeling and simulation in computational approaches to topics related to nanoscience and nanotechnology, and articulated with innovative pedagogical practices.

Inertial Motion-Tracking Technology for Virtual 3-D

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

2005-01-01

In the 1990s, NASA pioneered virtual reality research. The concept was present long before, but, prior to this, the technology did not exist to make a viable virtual reality system. Scientists had theories and ideas they knew that the concept had potential, but the computers of the 1970s and 1980s were not fast enough, sensors were heavy and cumbersome, and people had difficulty blending fluidly with the machines. Scientists at Ames Research Center built upon the research of previous decades and put the necessary technology behind them, making the theories of virtual reality a reality. Virtual reality systems depend on complex motion-tracking sensors to convey information between the user and the computer to give the user the feeling that he is operating in the real world. These motion-tracking sensors measure and report an object s position and orientation as it changes. A simple example of motion tracking would be the cursor on a computer screen moving in correspondence to the shifting of the mouse. Tracking in 3-D, necessary to create virtual reality, however, is much more complex. To be successful, the perspective of the virtual image seen on the computer must be an accurate representation of what is seen in the real world. As the user s head or camera moves, turns, or tilts, the computer-generated environment must change accordingly with no noticeable lag, jitter, or distortion. Historically, the lack of smooth and rapid tracking of the user s motion has thwarted the widespread use of immersive 3-D computer graphics. NASA uses virtual reality technology for a variety of purposes, mostly training of astronauts. The actual missions are costly and dangerous, so any opportunity the crews have to practice their maneuvering in accurate situations before the mission is valuable and instructive. For that purpose, NASA has funded a great deal of virtual reality research, and benefited from the results.

Secure Large-Scale Airport Simulations Using Distributed Computational Resources

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

McDermott, William J.; Maluf, David A.; Gawdiak, Yuri; Tran, Peter; Clancy, Dan (Technical Monitor)

2001-01-01

To fully conduct research that will support the far-term concepts, technologies and methods required to improve the safety of Air Transportation a simulation environment of the requisite degree of fidelity must first be in place. The Virtual National Airspace Simulation (VNAS) will provide the underlying infrastructure necessary for such a simulation system. Aerospace-specific knowledge management services such as intelligent data-integration middleware will support the management of information associated with this complex and critically important operational environment. This simulation environment, in conjunction with a distributed network of supercomputers, and high-speed network connections to aircraft, and to Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), airline and other data-sources will provide the capability to continuously monitor and measure operational performance against expected performance. The VNAS will also provide the tools to use this performance baseline to obtain a perspective of what is happening today and of the potential impact of proposed changes before they are introduced into the system.

Leveraging the national cyberinfrastructure for biomedical research.

PubMed

LeDuc, Richard; Vaughn, Matthew; Fonner, John M; Sullivan, Michael; Williams, James G; Blood, Philip D; Taylor, James; Barnett, William

2014-01-01

In the USA, the national cyberinfrastructure refers to a system of research supercomputer and other IT facilities and the high speed networks that connect them. These resources have been heavily leveraged by scientists in disciplines such as high energy physics, astronomy, and climatology, but until recently they have been little used by biomedical researchers. We suggest that many of the 'Big Data' challenges facing the medical informatics community can be efficiently handled using national-scale cyberinfrastructure. Resources such as the Extreme Science and Discovery Environment, the Open Science Grid, and Internet2 provide economical and proven infrastructures for Big Data challenges, but these resources can be difficult to approach. Specialized web portals, support centers, and virtual organizations can be constructed on these resources to meet defined computational challenges, specifically for genomics. We provide examples of how this has been done in basic biology as an illustration for the biomedical informatics community.

Leveraging the national cyberinfrastructure for biomedical research

PubMed Central

LeDuc, Richard; Vaughn, Matthew; Fonner, John M; Sullivan, Michael; Williams, James G; Blood, Philip D; Taylor, James; Barnett, William

2014-01-01

In the USA, the national cyberinfrastructure refers to a system of research supercomputer and other IT facilities and the high speed networks that connect them. These resources have been heavily leveraged by scientists in disciplines such as high energy physics, astronomy, and climatology, but until recently they have been little used by biomedical researchers. We suggest that many of the ‘Big Data’ challenges facing the medical informatics community can be efficiently handled using national-scale cyberinfrastructure. Resources such as the Extreme Science and Discovery Environment, the Open Science Grid, and Internet2 provide economical and proven infrastructures for Big Data challenges, but these resources can be difficult to approach. Specialized web portals, support centers, and virtual organizations can be constructed on these resources to meet defined computational challenges, specifically for genomics. We provide examples of how this has been done in basic biology as an illustration for the biomedical informatics community. PMID:23964072

Reflections on biomedical informatics: from cybernetics to genomic medicine and nanomedicine.

PubMed

Maojo, Victor; Kulikowski, Casimir A

2006-01-01

Expanding on our previous analysis of Biomedical Informatics (BMI), the present perspective ranges from cybernetics to nanomedicine, based on its scientific, historical, philosophical, theoretical, experimental, and technological aspects as they affect systems developments, simulation and modelling, education, and the impact on healthcare. We then suggest that BMI is still searching for strong basic scientific principles around which it can crystallize. As -omic biological knowledge increasingly impacts the future of medicine, ubiquitous computing and informatics become even more essential, not only for the technological infrastructure, but as a part of the scientific enterprise itself. The Virtual Physiological Human and investigations into nanomedicine will surely produce yet more unpredictable opportunities, leading to significant changes in biomedical research and practice. As a discipline involved in making such advances possible, BMI is likely to need to re-define itself and extend its research horizons to meet the new challenges.

First field trial of Virtual Network Operator oriented network on demand (NoD) service provisioning over software defined multi-vendor OTN networks

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Li, Yajie; Zhao, Yongli; Zhang, Jie; Yu, Xiaosong; Chen, Haoran; Zhu, Ruijie; Zhou, Quanwei; Yu, Chenbei; Cui, Rui

2017-01-01

A Virtual Network Operator (VNO) is a provider and reseller of network services from other telecommunications suppliers. These network providers are categorized as virtual because they do not own the underlying telecommunication infrastructure. In terms of business operation, VNO can provide customers with personalized services by leasing network infrastructure from traditional network providers. The unique business modes of VNO lead to the emergence of network on demand (NoD) services. The conventional network provisioning involves a series of manual operation and configuration, which leads to high cost in time. Considering the advantages of Software Defined Networking (SDN), this paper proposes a novel NoD service provisioning solution to satisfy the private network need of VNOs. The solution is first verified in the real software defined multi-domain optical networks with multi-vendor OTN equipment. With the proposed solution, NoD service can be deployed via online web portals in near-real time. It reinvents the customer experience and redefines how network services are delivered to customers via an online self-service portal. Ultimately, this means a customer will be able to simply go online, click a few buttons and have new services almost instantaneously.

Security model for VM in cloud

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Kanaparti, Venkataramana; Naveen K., R.; Rajani, S.; Padmvathamma, M.; Anitha, C.

2013-03-01

Cloud computing is a new approach emerged to meet ever-increasing demand for computing resources and to reduce operational costs and Capital Expenditure for IT services. As this new way of computation allows data and applications to be stored away from own corporate server, it brings more issues in security such as virtualization security, distributed computing, application security, identity management, access control and authentication. Even though Virtualization forms the basis for cloud computing it poses many threats in securing cloud. As most of Security threats lies at Virtualization layer in cloud we proposed this new Security Model for Virtual Machine in Cloud (SMVC) in which every process is authenticated by Trusted-Agent (TA) in Hypervisor as well as in VM. Our proposed model is designed to with-stand attacks by unauthorized process that pose threat to applications related to Data Mining, OLAP systems, Image processing which requires huge resources in cloud deployed on one or more VM's.

The HEPiX Virtualisation Working Group: Towards a Grid of Clouds

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Cass, Tony

2012-12-01

The use of virtual machine images, as for example with Cloud services such as Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud, is attractive for users as they have a guaranteed execution environment, something that cannot today be provided across sites participating in computing grids such as the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid. However, Grid sites often operate within computer security frameworks which preclude the use of remotely generated images. The HEPiX Virtualisation Working Group was setup with the objective to enable use of remotely generated virtual machine images at Grid sites and, to this end, has introduced the idea of trusted virtual machine images which are guaranteed to be secure and configurable by sites such that security policy commitments can be met. This paper describes the requirements and details of these trusted virtual machine images and presents a model for their use to facilitate the integration of Grid- and Cloud-based computing environments for High Energy Physics.

Virtually compliant: Immersive video gaming increases conformity to false computer judgments.

PubMed

Weger, Ulrich W; Loughnan, Stephen; Sharma, Dinkar; Gonidis, Lazaros

2015-08-01

Real-life encounters with face-to-face contact are on the decline in a world in which many routine tasks are delegated to virtual characters-a development that bears both opportunities and risks. Interacting with such virtual-reality beings is particularly common during role-playing videogames, in which we incarnate into the virtual reality of an avatar. Video gaming is known to lead to the training and development of real-life skills and behaviors; hence, in the present study we sought to explore whether role-playing video gaming primes individuals' identification with a computer enough to increase computer-related social conformity. Following immersive video gaming, individuals were indeed more likely to give up their own best judgment and to follow the vote of computers, especially when the stimulus context was ambiguous. Implications for human-computer interactions and for our understanding of the formation of identity and self-concept are discussed.

Integrating a facial scan, virtual smile design, and 3D virtual patient for treatment with CAD-CAM ceramic veneers: A clinical report.

PubMed

Lin, Wei-Shao; Harris, Bryan T; Phasuk, Kamolphob; Llop, Daniel R; Morton, Dean

2018-02-01

This clinical report describes a digital workflow using the virtual smile design approach augmented with a static 3-dimensional (3D) virtual patient with photorealistic appearance to restore maxillary central incisors by using computer-aided design and computer-aided manufacturing (CAD-CAM) monolithic lithium disilicate ceramic veneers. Copyright © 2017 Editorial Council for the Journal of Prosthetic Dentistry. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Feasibility of Virtual Machine and Cloud Computing Technologies for High Performance Computing

DTIC Science & Technology

2014-05-01

Hat Enterprise Linux SaaS software as a service VM virtual machine vNUMA virtual non-uniform memory access WRF weather research and forecasting...previously mentioned in Chapter I Section B1 of this paper, which is used to run the weather research and forecasting ( WRF ) model in their experiments...against a VMware virtualization solution of WRF . The experiment consisted of running WRF in a standard configuration between the D-VTM and VMware while

Scientific Use Cases for the Virtual Atomic and Molecular Data Center

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Dubernet, M. L.; Aboudarham, J.; Ba, Y. A.; Boiziot, M.; Bottinelli, S.; Caux, E.; Endres, C.; Glorian, J. M.; Henry, F.; Lamy, L.; Le Sidaner, P.; Møller, T.; Moreau, N.; Rénié, C.; Roueff, E.; Schilke, P.; Vastel, C.; Zwoelf, C. M.

2014-12-01

VAMDC Consortium is a worldwide consortium which federates interoperable Atomic and Molecular databases through an e-science infrastructure. The contained data are of the highest scientific quality and are crucial for many applications: astrophysics, atmospheric physics, fusion, plasma and lighting technologies, health, etc. In this paper we present astrophysical scientific use cases in relation to the use of the VAMDC e-infrastructure. Those will cover very different applications such as: (i) modeling the spectra of interstellar objects using the myXCLASS software tool implemented in the Common Astronomy Software Applications package (CASA) or using the CASSIS software tool, in its stand-alone version or implemented in the Herschel Interactive Processing Environment (HIPE); (ii) the use of Virtual Observatory tools accessing VAMDC databases; (iii) the access of VAMDC from the Paris solar BASS2000 portal; (iv) the combination of tools and database from the APIS service (Auroral Planetary Imaging and Spectroscopy); (v) combination of heterogeneous data for the application to the interstellar medium from the SPECTCOL tool.

Virtualization of open-source secure web services to support data exchange in a pediatric critical care research network.

PubMed

Frey, Lewis J; Sward, Katherine A; Newth, Christopher J L; Khemani, Robinder G; Cryer, Martin E; Thelen, Julie L; Enriquez, Rene; Shaoyu, Su; Pollack, Murray M; Harrison, Rick E; Meert, Kathleen L; Berg, Robert A; Wessel, David L; Shanley, Thomas P; Dalton, Heidi; Carcillo, Joseph; Jenkins, Tammara L; Dean, J Michael

2015-11-01

To examine the feasibility of deploying a virtual web service for sharing data within a research network, and to evaluate the impact on data consistency and quality. Virtual machines (VMs) encapsulated an open-source, semantically and syntactically interoperable secure web service infrastructure along with a shadow database. The VMs were deployed to 8 Collaborative Pediatric Critical Care Research Network Clinical Centers. Virtual web services could be deployed in hours. The interoperability of the web services reduced format misalignment from 56% to 1% and demonstrated that 99% of the data consistently transferred using the data dictionary and 1% needed human curation. Use of virtualized open-source secure web service technology could enable direct electronic abstraction of data from hospital databases for research purposes. © The Author 2015. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Medical Informatics Association. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com.

Running GUI Applications on Peregrine from OSX | High-Performance Computing

Science.gov Websites

Learn how to use Virtual Network Computing to access a Linux graphical desktop environment on Peregrine local port (on, e.g., your laptop), starts a VNC server process that manages a virtual desktop on your virtual desktop. This is persistent, so remember it-you will use this password whenever accessing

Understanding Virtual Epidemics: Children's Folk Conceptions of a Computer Virus

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kafai, Yasmin B.

2008-01-01

Our work investigates the annual outbreak of Whypox, a virtual epidemic in Whyville.net, a virtual world with over 1.2 million registered players ages 8-16. We examined online and classroom participants' understanding of a computer virus using surveys and design activities. Our analyses reveal that students have a mostly naive understanding of a…

Computational Scientific Inquiry with Virtual Worlds and Agent-Based Models: New Ways of Doing Science to Learn Science

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Jacobson, Michael J.; Taylor, Charlotte E.; Richards, Deborah

2016-01-01

In this paper, we propose computational scientific inquiry (CSI) as an innovative model for learning important scientific knowledge and new practices for "doing" science. This approach involves the use of a "game-like" virtual world for students to experience virtual biological fieldwork in conjunction with using an agent-based…

Computer-Assisted Virtual Planning for Surgical Guide Manufacturing and Internal Distractor Adaptation in the Management of Midface Hypoplasia in Cleft Patients.

PubMed

Scolozzi, Paolo; Herzog, Georges

2017-07-01

We are reporting the treatment of severe maxillary hypoplasia in two patients with unilateral cleft lip and palate by using a specific approach combining the Le Fort I distraction osteogenesis technique coupled with computer-aided design/computer-aided manufacturing customized surgical guides and internal distractors based on virtual computational planning. This technology allows for the transfer of the virtual planned reconstruction to the operating room by using custom patient-specific implants, surgical splints, surgical cutting guides, and surgical guides to plate or distractor adaptation.

Automated flight path planning for virtual endoscopy.

PubMed

Paik, D S; Beaulieu, C F; Jeffrey, R B; Rubin, G D; Napel, S

1998-05-01

In this paper, a novel technique for rapid and automatic computation of flight paths for guiding virtual endoscopic exploration of three-dimensional medical images is described. While manually planning flight paths is a tedious and time consuming task, our algorithm is automated and fast. Our method for positioning the virtual camera is based on the medial axis transform but is much more computationally efficient. By iteratively correcting a path toward the medial axis, the necessity of evaluating simple point criteria during morphological thinning is eliminated. The virtual camera is also oriented in a stable viewing direction, avoiding sudden twists and turns. We tested our algorithm on volumetric data sets of eight colons, one aorta and one bronchial tree. The algorithm computed the flight paths in several minutes per volume on an inexpensive workstation with minimal computation time added for multiple paths through branching structures (10%-13% per extra path). The results of our algorithm are smooth, centralized paths that aid in the task of navigation in virtual endoscopic exploration of three-dimensional medical images.

Monitoring and Discovery for Self-Organized Network Management in Virtualized and Software Defined Networks

PubMed Central

Valdivieso Caraguay, Ángel Leonardo; García Villalba, Luis Javier

2017-01-01

This paper presents the Monitoring and Discovery Framework of the Self-Organized Network Management in Virtualized and Software Defined Networks SELFNET project. This design takes into account the scalability and flexibility requirements needed by 5G infrastructures. In this context, the present framework focuses on gathering and storing the information (low-level metrics) related to physical and virtual devices, cloud environments, flow metrics, SDN traffic and sensors. Similarly, it provides the monitoring data as a generic information source in order to allow the correlation and aggregation tasks. Our design enables the collection and storing of information provided by all the underlying SELFNET sublayers, including the dynamically onboarded and instantiated SDN/NFV Apps, also known as SELFNET sensors. PMID:28362346

Monitoring and Discovery for Self-Organized Network Management in Virtualized and Software Defined Networks.

PubMed

Caraguay, Ángel Leonardo Valdivieso; Villalba, Luis Javier García

2017-03-31

This paper presents the Monitoring and Discovery Framework of the Self-Organized Network Management in Virtualized and Software Defined Networks SELFNET project. This design takes into account the scalability and flexibility requirements needed by 5G infrastructures. In this context, the present framework focuses on gathering and storing the information (low-level metrics) related to physical and virtual devices, cloud environments, flow metrics, SDN traffic and sensors. Similarly, it provides the monitoring data as a generic information source in order to allow the correlation and aggregation tasks. Our design enables the collection and storing of information provided by all the underlying SELFNET sublayers, including the dynamically onboarded and instantiated SDN/NFV Apps, also known as SELFNET sensors.

Consolidation and development roadmap of the EMI middleware

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Kónya, B.; Aiftimiei, C.; Cecchi, M.; Field, L.; Fuhrmann, P.; Nilsen, J. K.; White, J.

2012-12-01

Scientific research communities have benefited recently from the increasing availability of computing and data infrastructures with unprecedented capabilities for large scale distributed initiatives. These infrastructures are largely defined and enabled by the middleware they deploy. One of the major issues in the current usage of research infrastructures is the need to use similar but often incompatible middleware solutions. The European Middleware Initiative (EMI) is a collaboration of the major European middleware providers ARC, dCache, gLite and UNICORE. EMI aims to: deliver a consolidated set of middleware components for deployment in EGI, PRACE and other Distributed Computing Infrastructures; extend the interoperability between grids and other computing infrastructures; strengthen the reliability of the services; establish a sustainable model to maintain and evolve the middleware; fulfil the requirements of the user communities. This paper presents the consolidation and development objectives of the EMI software stack covering the last two years. The EMI development roadmap is introduced along the four technical areas of compute, data, security and infrastructure. The compute area plan focuses on consolidation of standards and agreements through a unified interface for job submission and management, a common format for accounting, the wide adoption of GLUE schema version 2.0 and the provision of a common framework for the execution of parallel jobs. The security area is working towards a unified security model and lowering the barriers to Grid usage by allowing users to gain access with their own credentials. The data area is focusing on implementing standards to ensure interoperability with other grids and industry components and to reuse already existing clients in operating systems and open source distributions. One of the highlights of the infrastructure area is the consolidation of the information system services via the creation of a common information backbone.

CLIMB (the Cloud Infrastructure for Microbial Bioinformatics): an online resource for the medical microbiology community

PubMed Central

Smith, Andy; Southgate, Joel; Poplawski, Radoslaw; Bull, Matthew J.; Richardson, Emily; Ismail, Matthew; Thompson, Simon Elwood-; Kitchen, Christine; Guest, Martyn; Bakke, Marius

2016-01-01

The increasing availability and decreasing cost of high-throughput sequencing has transformed academic medical microbiology, delivering an explosion in available genomes while also driving advances in bioinformatics. However, many microbiologists are unable to exploit the resulting large genomics datasets because they do not have access to relevant computational resources and to an appropriate bioinformatics infrastructure. Here, we present the Cloud Infrastructure for Microbial Bioinformatics (CLIMB) facility, a shared computing infrastructure that has been designed from the ground up to provide an environment where microbiologists can share and reuse methods and data. PMID:28785418

CLIMB (the Cloud Infrastructure for Microbial Bioinformatics): an online resource for the medical microbiology community.

PubMed

Connor, Thomas R; Loman, Nicholas J; Thompson, Simon; Smith, Andy; Southgate, Joel; Poplawski, Radoslaw; Bull, Matthew J; Richardson, Emily; Ismail, Matthew; Thompson, Simon Elwood-; Kitchen, Christine; Guest, Martyn; Bakke, Marius; Sheppard, Samuel K; Pallen, Mark J

2016-09-01

The increasing availability and decreasing cost of high-throughput sequencing has transformed academic medical microbiology, delivering an explosion in available genomes while also driving advances in bioinformatics. However, many microbiologists are unable to exploit the resulting large genomics datasets because they do not have access to relevant computational resources and to an appropriate bioinformatics infrastructure. Here, we present the Cloud Infrastructure for Microbial Bioinformatics (CLIMB) facility, a shared computing infrastructure that has been designed from the ground up to provide an environment where microbiologists can share and reuse methods and data.

"Tactic": Traffic Aware Cloud for Tiered Infrastructure Consolidation

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Sangpetch, Akkarit

2013-01-01

Large-scale enterprise applications are deployed as distributed applications. These applications consist of many inter-connected components with heterogeneous roles and complex dependencies. Each component typically consumes 5-15% of the server capacity. Deploying each component as a separate virtual machine (VM) allows us to consolidate the…

STEM Progress in Katrina's Wake

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Gonzales, Dana

2008-01-01

When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005, it caused a devastating impact on the Crescent City's public education system. The devastating storm and its aftermath completely wiped out the educational infrastructure of the New Orleans Public Schools, making one of the country's largest metropolitan school districts virtually disappear. Two…

Minimizing Overhead for Secure Computation and Fully Homomorphic Encryption: Overhead

DTIC Science & Technology

2015-11-01

many inputs. We also improved our compiler infrastructure to handle very large circuits in a more scalable way. In Jan’13, we employed the AESNI and...Amazon’s elastic compute infrastructure , and is running under a Xen hypervisor. Since we do not have direct access to the bare metal, we cannot...creating novel opportunities for compressing au- thentication overhead. It is especially compelling that existing public key infrastructures can be used

ChemScreener: A Distributed Computing Tool for Scaffold based Virtual Screening.

PubMed

Karthikeyan, Muthukumarasamy; Pandit, Deepak; Vyas, Renu

2015-01-01

In this work we present ChemScreener, a Java-based application to perform virtual library generation combined with virtual screening in a platform-independent distributed computing environment. ChemScreener comprises a scaffold identifier, a distinct scaffold extractor, an interactive virtual library generator as well as a virtual screening module for subsequently selecting putative bioactive molecules. The virtual libraries are annotated with chemophore-, pharmacophore- and toxicophore-based information for compound prioritization. The hits selected can then be further processed using QSAR, docking and other in silico approaches which can all be interfaced within the ChemScreener framework. As a sample application, in this work scaffold selectivity, diversity, connectivity and promiscuity towards six important therapeutic classes have been studied. In order to illustrate the computational power of the application, 55 scaffolds extracted from 161 anti-psychotic compounds were enumerated to produce a virtual library comprising 118 million compounds (17 GB) and annotated with chemophore, pharmacophore and toxicophore based features in a single step which would be non-trivial to perform with many standard software tools today on libraries of this size.

Reproducible Earth observation analytics: challenges, ideas, and a study case on containerized land use change detection

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Appel, Marius; Nüst, Daniel; Pebesma, Edzer

2017-04-01

Geoscientific analyses of Earth observation data typically involve a long path from data acquisition to scientific results and conclusions. Before starting the actual processing, scenes must be downloaded from the providers' platforms and the computing infrastructure needs to be prepared. The computing environment often requires specialized software, which in turn might have lots of dependencies. The software is often highly customized and provided without commercial support, which leads to rather ad-hoc systems and irreproducible results. To let other scientists reproduce the analyses, the full workspace including data, code, the computing environment, and documentation must be bundled and shared. Technologies such as virtualization or containerization allow for the creation of identical computing environments with relatively little effort. Challenges, however, arise when the volume of the data is too large, when computations are done in a cluster environment, or when complex software components such as databases are used. We discuss these challenges for the example of scalable Land use change detection on Landsat imagery. We present a reproducible implementation that runs R and the scalable data management and analytical system SciDB within a Docker container. Thanks to an explicit container recipe (the Dockerfile), this enables the all-in-one reproduction including the installation of software components, the ingestion of the data, and the execution of the analysis in a well-defined environment. We furthermore discuss possibilities how the implementation could be transferred to multi-container environments in order to support reproducibility on large cluster environments.

Resilient and Robust High Performance Computing Platforms for Scientific Computing Integrity

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Jin, Yier

As technology advances, computer systems are subject to increasingly sophisticated cyber-attacks that compromise both their security and integrity. High performance computing platforms used in commercial and scientific applications involving sensitive, or even classified data, are frequently targeted by powerful adversaries. This situation is made worse by a lack of fundamental security solutions that both perform efficiently and are effective at preventing threats. Current security solutions fail to address the threat landscape and ensure the integrity of sensitive data. As challenges rise, both private and public sectors will require robust technologies to protect its computing infrastructure. The research outcomes from thismore » project try to address all these challenges. For example, we present LAZARUS, a novel technique to harden kernel Address Space Layout Randomization (KASLR) against paging-based side-channel attacks. In particular, our scheme allows for fine-grained protection of the virtual memory mappings that implement the randomization. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by hardening a recent Linux kernel with LAZARUS, mitigating all of the previously presented side-channel attacks on KASLR. Our extensive evaluation shows that LAZARUS incurs only 0.943% overhead for standard benchmarks, and is therefore highly practical. We also introduced HA2lloc, a hardware-assisted allocator that is capable of leveraging an extended memory management unit to detect memory errors in the heap. We also perform testing using HA2lloc in a simulation environment and find that the approach is capable of preventing common memory vulnerabilities.« less

Exploring Virtual Reality for Classroom Use: The Virtual Reality and Education Lab at East Carolina University.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Auld, Lawrence W. S.; Pantelidis, Veronica S.

1994-01-01

Describes the Virtual Reality and Education Lab (VREL) established at East Carolina University to study the implications of virtual reality for elementary and secondary education. Highlights include virtual reality software evaluation; hardware evaluation; computer-based curriculum objectives which could use virtual reality; and keeping current…

THE INTEGRATED USE OF COMPUTATIONAL CHEMISTRY, SCANNING PROBE MICROSCOPY, AND VIRTUAL REALITY TO PREDICT THE CHEMICAL REACTIVITY OF ENVIRONMENTAL SURFACES

EPA Science Inventory

In the last decade three new techniques scanning probe microscopy (SPM), virtual reality (YR) and computational chemistry ave emerged with the combined capability of a priori predicting the chemically reactivity of environmental surfaces. Computational chemistry provides the cap...

EVER-EST: European Virtual Environment for Research in Earth Science Themes

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Glaves, H.; Albani, M.

2016-12-01

EVER-EST is an EC Horizon 2020 project having the goal to develop a Virtual Research Environment (VRE) providing a state-of-the-art solution to allow Earth Scientists to preserve their work and publications for reference and future reuse, and to share with others. The availability of such a solution, based on an innovative concept and state of art technology infrastructure, will considerably enhance the quality of how Earth Scientists work together within their own institution and also across other organizations, regions and countries. The concept of Research Objects (ROs), used in the Earth Sciences for the first time, will form the backbone of the EVER-EST VRE infrastructure. ROs will enhance the ability to preserve, re-use and share entire or individual parts of scientific workflows and all the resources related to a specific scientific investigation. These ROs will also potentially be used as part of the scholarly publication process. EVER-EST is building on technologies developed during almost 15 years of research on Earth Science data management infrastructures. The EVER-EST VRE Service Oriented Architecture is being meticulously designed to accommodate at best the requirements of a wide range of Earth Science communities and use cases: focus is put on common requirements and on minimising the level of complexity in the EVER-EST VRE to ensure future sustainability within the user communities beyond the end of the project. The EVER-EST VRE will be validated through its customisation and deployment by four Virtual Research Communities (VRCs) from different Earth Science disciplines and will support enhanced interaction between data providers and scientists in the Earth Science domain. User community will range from bio-marine researchers (Sea Monitoring use case), to common foreign and security policy institutions and stakeholders (Land Monitoring for Security use case), natural hazards forecasting systems (Natural Hazards use case), and disaster and risk management teams (Supersites use case). The EVER-EST project will coordinate and collaborate with other relevant initiatives worldwide mainly through the Research Data Alliance (RDA) Virtual Research Environments interest group (VRE-IG).

Vicarious Learning: Effects of Overhearing Dialog and Monologue-Like Discourse in a Virtual Tutoring Session

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Driscoll, David M.; Craig, Scotty D.; Gholson, Barry; Ventura, Matthew; Hu, Xiangen; Graesser, Arthur C.

2003-01-01

In two experiments, students overheard two computer-controlled virtual agents discussing four computer literacy topics in dialog discourse and four in monologue discourse. In Experiment 1, the virtual tutee asked a series of deep questions in the dialog condition, but only one per topic in the monologue condition in both studies. In the dialog…