Edinburgh Data-Intensive Research - VERCE

Research topics:

Supporting Collaborative Scientific Workflow Development:The Dispel Information Registry

Iraklis.Klampanos — Fri, 21 Jun 2013 16:35:55 +0000

Presentation Type:

talk

Large-scale distributed workflow systems for science are nowadays expected to operate in a consistent, predictable way as well as to promote collaboration between researchers or within groups in a unified way. In this talk we will discuss the VERCE Information Registry, which is designed to provide a consistent view of the VERCE ecosystem for seismology along with related architectural requirements, assumptions and interactions with other components.

Attachment	Size
Registry-OSDC13.pdf	1.65 MB

Date and time:

Thursday, 20 June, 2013 - 11:40

Location:

Open Science Data Cloud Workshop 2013, Edinburgh, UK

Web site:

Projects:

Collaborative environments

Research topics:

Efficient distributed systems

The VERCE Architecture for Data-Intensive Seismology

Iraklis.Klampanos — Fri, 21 Jun 2013 16:32:30 +0000

Speaker(s):

Presentation Type:

talk

Typical of the digital revolution, seismology is changing rapidly: the number of deployed seismometers grows rapidly, their performance and connectivity improve and seismologists employ data from other sources, such as LIDAR, satellite images and GPS. But their computational behavior is also changing: they used to just focus on earthquakes, today the use all of the continuous waveform. Just what does this mean for the science and the computational infrastructure to support it? The VERCE project is pioneering this approach and will provide examples during the talk.

Attachment	Size
osdc-verce.pdf	1.97 MB

Date and time:

Wednesday, 19 June, 2013 - 11:00

Location:

Open Science Data Cloud Workshop 2013, Edinburgh, UK

Projects:

Research topics:

The VERCE Architecture for Data-Intensive Seismology

Iraklis.Klampanos — Mon, 10 Jun 2013 15:16:29 +0000

Speaker(s):

Presentation Type:

talk

One of the main objectives of the VERCE project (Virtual Earthquake and Seismology Research Community in Europe) is to provide scientists with a unified, Europe-wide, computing environment able to support data-intensive scientific computation. This talk will be mainly about our approach to designing and building this infrastructure. More specifically, I will present the current computing environment, the rationale for designing our solutions around the workflow paradigm as well as the basic components of the architecture and their interactions. I will conclude with research challenges we have encountered and how we propose to address them in the short- and longer-term.

Attachment	Size
cisa_2013-06-10.pdf	1.99 MB

Date and time:

Monday, 10 June, 2013 - 14:00

Location:

CISA Seminar, School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, UK

Web site:

Projects:

Collaborative environments

Research topics:

Efficient distributed systems

Towards Supporting Service-Oriented Seismology Research in Europe

Iraklis.Klampanos — Fri, 31 May 2013 15:46:40 +0000

Speaker(s):

Presentation Type:

poster

Modern seismologists are presented with increasing amounts of data that may help them better understand the Earth's structure and systems. However: 1) they have to access these data from globally distributed sites via different transfer protocols and security mechanisms; 2) to analyse these data they need to access remote powerful computing facilities; 3) their experiments result in yet more data that need to be shared with scientific communities around the world.

In the vast majority of cases, the labourious tasks of data management, transfer and execution of scientific codes is handled manually by the scientist and on an ad hoc basis. This hinders seismologists from making full use of the data and tools they have at their disposal for scientific discovery.

The VERCE project is designing and developing a research platform to deliver a seismology community e-Infrastructure, an integrated computational and data environment that presents a coherent virtual environment in which to conduct research.

Actions and deliverables in VERCE are driven by two broad seismology use-cases, selected for being representative of resource usage in the designed infrastructure: 1) ambient noise cross-correlation and 2) forward modelling and inversion. Use-case 1 has inherent data-intensive characteristics, as it requires access to and orchestration of multiple, diverse data sources, combining files, web services, etc. Use-case 2 is less data-intensive but it requires combining data management and signal processing with processing on remote clusters and HPCs.

VERCE solutions are designed around a workflow representation paradigm, employing the stream-oriented Dispel workflow specification language. A VERCE-wide registry will provide specifications of Dispel programming and other research components throughout the infrastructure, while also accommodating research collaborations. Depending on the needs and specifications of the participating sites, VERCE will aim to support different execution engines, such as OGSA-DAI. All of the above will be made available to researchers in a transparent and unified way, through a Science Gateway backed up by data and resource discovery, meta-data and searching functionalities.

In order to meet its goals and objectives, while also creating a sustainable infrastructure that may eventually be part of EPOS - the European Plate Observing System, VERCE is actively collaborating with a number of initiatives and projects. As VERCE spans high-performance and high-throughput computing, represented by PRACE and EGI respectively, as well as it has demanding data management and discovery requirements, addressed by EUDAT, we are participating in a number of pilot case-studies within an EGI-PRACE-EUDAT synergy. In addition, we are collaborating with the SCI-BUS project, in order to analyse and meet our Science Gateway requirements while staying as flexible as possible with regards to middleware interoperability and workflow frameworks.

Attachment	Size
cloudscapeV.pdf	5.94 MB

Date and time:

Wednesday, 27 February, 2013 - 09:00

Location:

CloudscapeV, Brussels, Belgium

Web site:

Projects:

Research topics:

Supporting Large-Scale Data-Intensive Computation for Seismology in VERCE

Iraklis.Klampanos — Fri, 31 May 2013 15:12:56 +0000

Speaker(s):

Presentation Type:

talk

One of the objectives of the VERCE project (Virtual Earthquake and Seismology Research Community in Europe –
http://www.verce.eu/) is to provide scientists with a unified, Europe-wide, computing environment able to support
data-intensive scientific computation. The term “data-intensive” is used to characterise computation that either
requires or generates large volumes of data, or that its data access patterns are complex due to algorithmic or
infrastructural reasons. In this work we will present our approach to designing and building the VERCE data-intensive
infrastructure. [...]

Attachment	Size
egu13_verce_di.pdf	613.3 KB

Date and time:

Tuesday, 9 April, 2013 - 15:30

Location:

EGU'13, Vienna, Austria

Projects:

Research topics:

VERCE WP9-JRA2: Architecture Components and Perspectives

Malcolm.Atkinson — Wed, 01 May 2013 15:13:44 +0000

Speaker(s):

Malcolm.Atkinson

Presentation Type:

invited

An overview of the achievements of the architecture and tools work package in VERCE over the last 12 months:
* the mapping of the major CPU-intensive and data-intensive use cases to he one framework,
* the provision of an integrating framework supporting both discussion and implementation,
* the support of two demonstrators: from CPU & data-intensive use cases.
The plans for the next 12 months:
* scale up and reliability
* completion of the registry and other components needed for a quality beta test of the VERCE platform
* alliances with major sub-infrastructure providers

Attachment	Size
PDF of the talk	8.83 MB

Date and time:

Thursday, 25 April, 2013 - 11:00

Location:

Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris, Paris, France

Web site:

Projects:

Research topics:

Big Data Introduction

Malcolm.Atkinson — Wed, 01 May 2013 14:48:20 +0000

Speaker(s):

Malcolm.Atkinson

Presentation Type:

invited

The lecture covered the following topics, mainly via illustrative examples:

* Providing context - the patchy development of big data use (and preparation) in various sectors across the world.
* Providing a long-term perspective, highlighting that we are just at the beginning of the (uniquely important) digital revolution and that adaptability is crucial to importance.
* Difficulties of 'social' problems in comparison with technical problems.
* Alluding to the fears of 'big brother' and contrasting with experience in Asia.
* Planning - the correct balance of light weight centrally developed framework, and detailed development from below.
* Conceptualising data collection, processing and exploitation as an evolving 'infrastructure'.
* Economic issues - cost benefit analysis of data collection - efficiently predicting utility of data - going the last mile to deliver actionable information.
* Strategy of recognising three categories of expert and supporting all three working together.

Attachment	Size
PDF of talk	26.07 MB

Date and time:

Friday, 19 April, 2013 - 09:20

Location:

Edinburgh, Dynamic Earth

Web site:

Big Data Conference

Projects:

Research topics: