Astrophysics Portal
Cactus Portlets
The Cactus Computational Toolkit is an opensource problem solving environment that originated in the academic research community. It wasinitially designed for computational scientists working with Einsteins equasions in the field ofnumerical relativity. It has since evolved to provide a general parallel programming frameworkwith which researchers from many different disciplines can easily create reusable modules, with welldefined interfaces, to construct powerful and complex problem solving codes and environments.Gridlab is working very closely with developers of Cactus to construct tools and services that willprovide computational scientists with an easy-to-use and stable Grid platform on which they can buildand execute their application codes. The Cactus Portal is one of the most visible software components being developed to support the Cactus project in these efforts.
The Cactus Portal is essentially a collection of Portlets and Portlet Services that worktogether to form a coherent set of functionality that provides the users of Cactus with what theyneed to work on the Grid. It will not only give end-users a standard place to stage, build andexecute their jobs, but will also provide many value-added services such as advanced notificationand content management systems tailored to their application's needs. The Cactus Portal will bebuilt as a Java web application that runs inside the GridSphere Portal framework developed by theGridLab project. The advantages of using GridSphere come not only from the base set of functionalitythat it provides, such as user management and content display, but also from the value-added servicesthat have been built into the GridSphere framework or packaged with it, such as a standard tag library and an array of Portlet Services ranging from credential management to interfacing with information servers and resource brokers.
You can view a running example of GridSphere, with the CactusPortlets deployed under http://portal.gridlab.org/.
Astrophysics Simulation Collaboratory
The ASC provides the collaborative environment for numerous geographically distributed projects indifferent scientific disciplines. It accomplishes this through the ASC Portal, a specializedframework for the Cactus Computational Toolkit, that ties astrophysics and grid computing together.
The ASC portal manages the various aspects of a Cactus simulation (building a configuration,launching a simulation) and also enables the visualization of output data. The collaborative aspectsof the portal derive their power from the communication (XML/SOAP) between the Cactus code and theASC portal. Users can launch jobs on remote resources that announce their existence to the portal,display their resource hostname, data storage directory, current time-step, and the port number ofa web server that provides additional simulation information. Group members can subsequently followthe job's progress and view job details by means of this web server.
The web server enables scientists to control the parameters of their simulation, to view theoutput files, to see the output data using local visualization tools, etc. When the simulation iscompleted the portal can restart the webserver. The portal also provides a web interface forlaunching visualization tools remotely. One of the goals of our project is to make access tosupercomputing simulations and grid resources as easy as access to the web.
The ASC Portal is available as well as additional information at http://wugrav.wustl.edu:8080/gridsphere/gridsphere.
EPhysics Portal Development at the University of Melbourne
Theoretical astrophysics and experimental particle physics are major clients of highperformance computing (HPC) facilities worldwide. They are key application drivers forgrid technology and distributed computing paradigms and the codes are typicallynumerically intensive, and must process, access, or generate massive data sets.Virtual observatories (VOs) are one of the leading applications and early adopters ofcompute and data grid technology. They deliver a new paradigm for doing experimentalastronomy, and in particular offer exciting possibilities for completely integratingobservational astronomy and theoretical astrophysics.Experimental particle physics data analysis is a key application of grids. The BelleAnalysis Data Grid project is developing a global data grid to access and processterabytes of data from the KEK B-meson factory in Japan, searching for the violation of afundamental symmetry known as Charge-Parity, or CP, violation.The ePhysics program at the University of Melbourne has a number of general andspecific goals. As part of which, the GridSphere Framework has a major and crucialrole in its success, including:
- leading the international development of data description (metadata) and resourcedescription standards for theoretical astrophysics.
- developing and extending existing WebApps with GridSphere into a system whichcan configure, submit and monitor a range of important theoretical astrophysicssimulation and particle physics analysis codes on a high-end, production level.
- integrating end-product visualization and analysis tools into the GridSphere portal,including the distributed data volume renderer (DVR); and using the developedsystem to undertake computationally intensive, key, astrophysics and particlephysics science projects that have been identified by partner institutes, both inAustralia and overseas.
For more information:
www.aus-vo.org
| August 28, 2008 |
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