Services for AA C Vuerli INAF Italy Services

Services for A&A C. Vuerli INAF, Italy

Services for A&A • The A&A community will Grid enable visualization tools (e. g. Vis. IVO) to show data, that will in future be collected from projects such as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, the Low Frequency Array (LOFAR), the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) and others, will be analyzed using the production infrastructure to rapidly provide visual representations of this data. HPC (e. g. DEISA/PRACE) and HTC resources will be integrated in this task as part of this proof of concept.

Visualization • The Vis. IVO server has got a good level of maturity and reliability, and a dedicates network of portals allow the user to access and make use of Vis. IVO directly via website (http: //visivoweb. oact. inaf. it). The server is currently able to run both on HPC platforms as well as on Windows and MAC operating systems. Moreover it is Grid-enabled. • Recently the Vis. IVO server has been successfully ported on the EDGe. S infrastructure as well.

Visualization • Integration with MPI and CUDA – The MPI parallelized version of Vis. IVO plays a fundamental role; it will be deployed on nodes where MPI is made available. The concept of conditional compilation represents the basis for this activity (runs on serial nodes and also in parallel) – Because Vis. IVO is developed in C++, the environment of CUDA is used to integrate some heavy modules of Vis. IVO. This activity will enable the use of GPUs (Graphical Processing Units) whenever they are available on worker nodes.

Visualization • Integration with the Grid Catalogue – Vis. IVO I/O operations are mainly based on the local filesystem; for this reason an I/O system, based on existing tools, will be developed allowing Vis. IVO to directly read/write data in the Grid catalogue. • Portals for Vis. IVO on the Grid – One of the targets to evaluate is also the possibility to access and use Vis. IVO through portals (e. g. Genius) allowing users to transparently use it on the Grid, everywhere it is available.

Grid and Supercomputing • One of the main goals is also the accomplishment of a good level of interactivity among different technologies related to supercomputing, i. e. HPC/HTC, Grid and Cloud and test different operational environments

Grid and Supercomputing • The main target of this activity will consist in collecting and identifying the most important requirements of A&A applications (most of them use HPC systems) to make the Grid able to meet them and this is a mandatory precondition for a more efficient penetration of the Grid in Astrophysics. • At the same time this activity aims also at identifying some general and significant A&A use-cases that imply massive runs using HPC on the Grid. Cosmological simulations represent the most important class of A&A applications requiring HPC resources. • Preparation and implementation of test/validation plans.

Databases • Since early Grid projects, interactions and interoperability aspects between Grid infrastructures and databases are one of the hot topics for A&A applications; starting from this consideration the participation to EGI-Inspire is another excellent chance to go ahead in this direction. • Several options will be evaluated and all of them include custom specializations of tools already in production (e. g. AMGA, GRel. C, etc. ) possibly expanded and tailored according to the needs of A&A applications.

Databases • Subtasks – Status of database/related tools and services – Customization of identified tools – User-dedicated front-ends and APIs

Parametric Applications • Parametric applications represent an important class of A&A applications (e. g. those related to simulations). • A&A colleagues at II-SAS make use of DIANE to study the parametric space application. • They have got some funds in EGI-Inspire to collaborate with CERN to develop and maintain the package in EGI-Inspire in terms of: – User support – Identification of new features to improve/extend the tools – Test bed to validate new releases

Other tools/services • • Dashboards GANGA Taverna (and other Workflow managers) Integration of instruments in Grid