The projects summarized below are from the eyr-Global 2013 program. A call for research proposals for the EYR-Global 2015 program will open in April 2015. Please subscribe to the EYR-Global Mailing List for further announcements.
International Networking for Climate
Led by Dean Williams of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), USA, this project compliments the Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF), of which Williams also leads. This work offers researchers the ability to access climate data at replication sites around the world. These sites include the Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison, or PCMDI, at LLNL, USA; the Center for Environmental Data Archival, or CEDA, UK; the German Climate Computing Center, or DKRZ, DE; the National Computational Infrastructure, Australia; and the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, or KNMI, NL. The goal is to improve the end-to-end Internet connections between sites to 4 gigabits per second (Gbps) by 2014.
During the Internet2 Global Summit Dean Williams and Mary Hester gave a presentation about this project, you can download the presentations here:
Presentation Dean Williams (LLNL): Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF)
Presentation Mary Hester (ESnet): Data Transfer Performance for the Earth System Grid Federation
Achieving Multidisciplinary High-throughput, Quantitative Behavior Analysis with Advanced Computing and Networking Tools
Led by Stephen Helms of the FOM Institute AMOLF, NL, this project employs modern image analysis techniques. Helms and his team extract data from video files that track the movement of small worms (nematodes) as they perform natural behaviors. This data can then be used to quantitatively define the full behavioral repertoire of animals or empirically build simple models for complex behaviors. Currently researchers are constrained by limited file sharing abilities. They need to share data as it is generated so the team seeks to boost their bandwidth to 10 Gbps, linking AMOLF and the University of Amsterdam in NL with Virginia Commonwealth University in the USA and the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology in Japan.
During the Internet2 Global Summit Stephen Helms and Carl Schulz gave a presentation about this project, you can download the presentations here:
Presentation Stephen Helms (AMOLF): Identifying Behavioral Strategies through Large Scale Phenotyping and Statistical Analysis
Presentation Carl Schulz (AMOLF): AMOLF Project Tech
An Advanced Distributed Computing Approach to High-Resolution Climate Modeling
Led by Henk Dijkstra of the Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Research Utrecht (IMAU) at Utrecht University, NL, the project investigates how changes in ocean circulation affect the Earth’s climate. To do this, the applicants propose running a Community Earth System Model, CESM, across four different supercomputers in four different countries to obtain results that will allow the researchers to view an unprecedented level of detail, which includes the full resolution of ocean eddies. They are asking for three end-to-end network connections to the participating supercomputers, with a combination of 10 Gbps links and lightpaths between Stampede of Texas Advanced Computing Center, USA; SuperMUC of the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre, DE; Cartesius of SURFsara, NL; and Emerald of the Center for Innovation in High Performance Computing, UK. Participating institutions are IMAU and the Netherlands eScience Center, NL; Rutgers University, the National Center for Atmospheric Research and the University of Miami, USA; the Oxford eResearch Center, UK; Ludwig–Maximillians University, DE.
Cross-site VM Operation
Led by David van Enckevort of the University Medical Center Groningen, NL, this project aims to transfer “virtual machines” (VMs) between computing centers to allow researchers to perform analyses that they could not otherwise do locally. With the advances in technologies like those used for genetic sequencing, data output has grown enormously and researchers are trying to adapt to new storage and compute requirements needed for analysis. This project wants to enable researchers to perform analysis via cloud infrastructures and VMs. The applicants need to transfer the VMs in a timely, secure, and fault tolerant manner between computing centers in FI, NL and the UK. This proposal asks for at least 1 Gbps end-to-end lightpaths to transfer VMs within a 10-minute window. Participating institution are the University of Groningen and SURFsara, NL; Cambridge University and the European Molecular Biology Laboratory—European Bioinformatics Institute, UK; and CSC—IT Center for Science, FI.