Speaker
Describe the scientific/technical community and the scientific/technical activity using (planning to use) the EGEE infrastructure. A high-level description is needed (neither a detailed specialist report nor a list of references).
The INAF community starts to have a great interest in the usage
of grid
facilities. We presents some scientific projects that are using
the EGEE
compliant TriGrid infrastructure. Model of the current Stellar
Perturbations on
the Oort Cloud. Extremly Faint Galaxies in Astronomical Images
extraction from
images. COROT Mission: to search extrasolar planets. Cosmological
Simulations: simulations of the interaction of a Black Hole jet
and evolution of
clusters of galaxies.
With a forward look to future evolution, discuss the issues you have encountered (or that you expect) in using the EGEE infrastructure. Wherever possible, point out the experience limitations (both in terms of existing services or missing functionality)
Cosmological codes require HPC resources in the GRID. Mainly this
requires: the
usage of compilers specially optimized for the CPU and the
platform where the
code will run. Simulations and analysis codes can require to
download several
tens of files each having huge dimension: for example a typical
N-Body
simulation could require up to thirty files each having 15 GBytes.
The last aspects concern big runs that can require from 52 to
128 CPUs for
several days (60 or more days).
Report on the experience (or the proposed activity). It would be very important to mention key services which are essential for the success of your activity on the EGEE infrastructure.
The availability of a platform with hundreds of CPUs make the
usage of the
infrastructure (for applications that not require a particular
performance)
attractive: the COROT experiment and the model for Solar System are
examples of this. Another very useful aspect is the usage of IDL,
one of the
most popular software for image manipulation. IDL license was
installed on a
system of the TriGrid and it makes the system available for
many astronomers
that use IDL to run MACROS (programs) for data analysis. The test we
performed were successful and all the TriGrid nodes will be
provided with an IDL
RUNTIME license. The situation of codes that require HPC
resources is more
complicated. Cosmological simulations are often requiring
resources that are
not immediately available with the middleware and a large disk
space for large
datasets. Moreover the usage of an extended platform to run
highly demanding
codes in terms of number of CPUs and storage make the usage of
the GRID
attractive.
Describe the added value of the Grid for the scientific/technical activity you (plan to) do on the Grid. This should include the scale of the activity and of the potential user community and the relevance for other scientific or business applications
Model of the current Stellar Perturbations: The basic
calculations that were
made for this project do fit very well the grid distributed
calculus: many different
trajectories can be calculated at once.
Faint Galaxies in Astronomical Images: The added value of the
grid is very large
in that we have a problem which can be solved on a typical
workstation for a
single image, but in the long run we need to do that thousands of
times.
Therefore our application is quite suitable to distributed
computing as for the
grid case.
COROT Mission: Thousands of simulated light curves, will be used
to test the
performance of different modeling techniques using a Monte Carlo
approach.
Cosmological Simulations: As AGN are the most brilliant radiation
sources in
the early Universe, their study reveals essential features of
the formation and
evolution of our Universe. Moreover the added value of the grid
is that it allow
us to find the computational resources for medium-size simulations.
