The Reading e-Science CentreKeith Haines and Rachel Harrison

Jon BlowerAdit Santokhee

DirectorsTechnical DirectorData Manager

Search and RescueBritish Maritime Technology Ltd. (BMT) have developed an application (SARIS, lower picture) that is used by the Coastguard for predicting the location of a person that has fallen overboard from a vessel at sea.

The software has been very successful in reducing the time to rescue, and the ReSC has worked with BMT and the Met Office to further improve the accuracy of SARIS’s predictions by allowing it to ingest up-to-date Met Office forecasts of ocean currents and surface winds via the GADS Web Service (see “Data Serving”). A new prototype version of SARIS has been produced.

The prototype system will be further developed in the DEWS project (see “New projects”). There are many more uses for real-time met-ocean data such as oil spill mitigation and predicting occurrences of respiratory problems.

New projects and future workWe have recently started, or are about to start, several new projects:

DEWS (Delivering Environmental Web Services): This is a £2.2M DTI Inter-Enterprise Computing project, led by the Met Office and involving the ReSC, BMT, IBM, BADC and Lost Wax. DEWS will produce a functional demonstrator for the secure online delivery of Met Office data via Web Services, initially to clients in the maritime and health sectors.

GCEP (Grid for Coupled Ensemble Prediction): This is a NERC e-Science project, led by the ReSC and involving the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) and CCLRC. GCEP will create and use a Grid of PC clusters to run ensemble climate predictions over decadal timescales, investigating the sensitivity of the predictions to different initial conditions.

GCOM (Global Coastal-Ocean Modelling): This is a NERC e-Science project, led by Proudman Oceanographic Laboratory, that aims to couple high-resolution shelf seas models with global models of ocean circulation in a Grid environment, in order to improve climate modelling.

Grid toolkit for environmental e-Science: The ReSC will develop tools to enable environmental scientists to use Grid technology with little effort. Initially, this will be implemented as extensions to the popular CDAT (Climate Data Analysis Tools) software.

http://www.resc.rdg.ac.ukresc@rdg.ac.uk

Work within The University of Reading As well as working within the wider environmental science community, the ReSC supports and promotes e-Science activities within the University of Reading. These activities have included:

• Promoting use of the Campus Grid and the National Grid Service. We have identified several local groups across many disciplines that we can help to use these facilities.

• Working with the Arts and Humanities Research Council to advise on e-Science methods. The ReSC has a consultancy role on the OGHAM project, which will build a Virtual Research Environment at the Silchester late Roman archaeological dig site near Reading. (http://www.silchester.rdg.ac.uk)

• Providing the Access Grid (below) for use by various groups.

• Working with Deafax, a Reading-based charity for the deaf. Deafax believe that the Access Grid, with its high-quality video capabilities, could be a valuable tool for communication and distance learning for deaf people (the video quality is good enough to support the use of sign language and lip reading).

About the ReSCThe Reading e-Science Centre (ReSC) was formed in November 2003 as a Centre of Excellence for promoting and developing e-Science methods within the environmental sciences. The ReSC is hosted in the NERC Environmental Systems Science Centre (ESSC) at the University of Reading and is a collaboration between ESSC and the School of Systems Engineering. We work with many partners in academia, government agencies and industry and this poster introduces some of our current projects.

We are also very active within the University of Reading and are working to improve the e-Science facilities available to Reading researchers in all disciplines. Central to this effort is the construction of a Campus Grid facility.

GODIVA web interface to data holdings at ReSC (http://www.nerc-essc.ac.uk/godiva) and

sample of extracted data (inset: sea surface temperature from Met Office FOAM model)

Data servingModern computer simulations and satellite observations of the oceans and atmosphere produce very large amounts of data. The ReSC provides access to around 2TB of such datasets through a Web Service, known as GADS (Grid Access Data Service) [1], which was produced as part of the GODIVA project. A Web interface to GADS is available: see picture opposite.

We are investigating [2] how these datasets can be managed more effectively using modern database management systems (DBMSs). Barrodale Computing Services (BCS) have recently developed a software module (the BCS Grid DataBlade), that plugs into IBM’s Informix Dynamic Server (IDS) and PostgreSQL, for storage and efficient retrieval of gridded data.

The DataBlade is capable of subsetting, interpolating, rotating, aggregating and re-projecting data and thus allows users to download data in the format required, without any knowledge of how the data are stored. The picture opposite illustrates how data can be extracted along arbitrary, user-specified paths.

ResearchThe ReSC is involved in research activities in many areas of environmental science, currently including meteorology, oceanography and volcanology. Here are some examples.

References[1] Woolf, A., Haines, K and Liu, C, A Web Service Model for Climate Data Access on the Grid, International Journal of High Performance Computing Applications, 17(3) 281-295 (2003)

[2] A. Santokhee, C.L. Liu, J.D. Blower, K. Haines, I. Barrodale, E.Davies, Managing and serving large volumes of gridded spatial environmental data, Proceedings of the 11th EC GI & GIS Workshop, ESDI: Setting the framework 29 June-1st July 2005

[3] Jon Blower, Keith Haines, Ed Llewellin, Data streaming, workflow and firewall-friendly Grid Services with Styx, Proceedings of the UK e-Science All Hands Meeting, September 2005

Numerical simulations of flow through porous media (E. Llewellin and J. Blower)

The flow of gases through volcanic rock is a major influence on the style of a volcanic eruption. If the rock is highly permeable, gas can escape and the internal pressure of the volcano can dissipate. If gas becomes trapped, the chances of an explosive eruption occurring are increased. Finite element (FEM) and Lattice Boltzmann simulations and will help to understand this process.

FEM model of inviscid gas flow

through a simplified volcanic

rock

Distributed system diagnostics of weather and climate (L. Froude and K. Hodges)

A Web interface has been created to provide access to the TRACK program for identifying and tracking storm systems in meteorological data. The interface allows users to run TRACK on large, distributed datasets (using the OPeNDAP protocol) across a heterogeneous Condor pool of desktop workstations.

Styx Grid Services (J. Blower, K. Haines and E. Llewellin)

The ReSC has created the Styx Grid Service (SGS), a remote service type that allows data to be streamed directly from service to service [3]. It also allows the asynchronous monitoring of progress and status data without requiring clients to open incoming firewall holes. The framework can be used in collaborative visualization and computational steering. See http://jstyx.sf.net.

Water budget analysis (C. Old, C. Liu and K. Haines)

Budgetary analysis of North Atlantic and Arctic waters is being carried out on 100 years of output from the HADCM3 model. The persistence of anomalies of mode water and mass transformation are of particular interest. The calculations are distributed across a network using Web Services from the GODIVA project, reducing typical calculation times from 3-4 hours to 30 minutes.

By wrapping SGSs as Web Services, the Triana environment can be used

to assemble workflows in which data are streamed

from service to service

Plot of storm tracks in the Northern Hemisphere in Winter 1948 from NCEP re-analysis data

“Grid Flight Demo” (www.barrodale.com). This application demonstrates the extraction of temperature data along an irregular flight path.

(plus many more colleagues: http://www.resc.rdg.ac.uk/personnel.php)

Campus GridLed by the School of Systems Engineering and with the support of IT Services, the ReSC is developing a Campus Grid infrastructure at Reading. We currently have a small number of users but are encouraging other groups to get involved. Key features of the Grid include:

• Based on Condor/SRB with Globus interface. Currently ~150 Linux nodes, but expanding.

• Future plans to extend to cluster facilities.

• Use of CoLinux (www.colinux.org) to run emulated version of Linux under Windows allowing use of large number of machines in teaching laboratories and computer rooms.

• Evaluation of Inferno Grid software and comparison with Condor.

The Campus Grid is being designed to be compatible with the National Grid Service and Reading aims to be an NGS partner in future.