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Welcome to the AstroVRC twiki web

...the twiki web site of the A&A (Astronomy & Astrophysics) VRC (Virtual Research Community) set up in EGI, the European Grid Infrastructure.

Virtual Research Communities (VRCs) are like-minded individuals grouped together by discipline or computational model. VRCs typically have an established presence in their field (for example an ESFRI project, EIROFORUM laboratory or national research structure) and represent a specific its scientific or other research community.

The European A&A Community and DCIs (Distributed Computing Infrastructures)

EGI

International scientific communities can draw many benefits from a strong partnership with EGI. EGI offers grid-ready applications, training resources, workshops and forums, help and support, as well as involvement in an open development process. In turn, VRCs provide EGI with their technical and service requirements, which are then fed into the overall development of the infrastructure as a true user-driven resource.

  • EGI Home Page
    The European Grid Infrastructure enables access to computing resources for European researchers from all fields of science, from High Energy Physics to Humanities.
  • EGI Central Operations Portal
  • User Community Support in EGI
    Whether you are an individual researcher, a small research group or an international community this page will offer directions to resources and services that you might need. The User Community Support page of the EGI web site allows to access information on the following topics:
    • VRC Gateways: They allow to connect with the European Grid Infrastructure and other related Distributed Computing Infrastructures.
    • NGI Support Teams: Each individual National Grid Initiative (NGIs) has a team dedicated to User and Community Support that can help existing and prospective users to connect with e-Infrastructure resources.
    • Applications Database: The EGI Applications Database (AppDB) stores information about grid-based computing tools for scientists to use.
    • Services and Tools: The EGI VO Services team supports the processes of starting-up, managing, operating and monitoring VOs, pointing out to tools, services, documentation and procedural guidelines to maximize the usage of resources.
    • Training marketplace: The EGI Training Marketplace exists as a service to coordinate training across communities, projects and national teams.
    • EGI Helpdesk system (GGUS): the most suitable option for problems experienced with the production infrastructure.

The Role of A&A VRC

The Astronomy and Astrophysics VRC is the lightweight coordination for astronomers and astronomical projects that want to use the EGI e-Infrastructure.

In particular our activity is to support the A&A community and to provide an interface to EGI general services (Training and dissemination, operation, and so on).

We also actively work on service development and implementation in particular:

  • visualization tools. VisIVO is a suite of software tools aimed at creating customized views of 3D renderings from many type of dataset. Their peculiar characteristic is that there is no limit for what concerns the size of input tables containing data to be processed, thus they are able to support very large scale datasets (tens of Terabytes and more). VisIVO can be easily used to visualize and monitor data simultaneously, as they are produced by the jobs running on the grid; data under production can also be used to create movies. VisIVO has been integrated with the Grid resources and in particular with the data management service in order to visualize data stored on the Grid.
  • Data and metadata management. Interactions and interoperability aspects between Grid infrastructures and databases are one of the hot topics for A&A applications. The main goal of this activity aims at evaluating the current state of the art of database integration in the Grid; the tools currently in production (OGSA-DAI, Spitfire, GRelC, AMGA) will be analyzed to understand the effort requested to adapt them to A&A applications.
  • Use of GPU and HPC resources. A&A VRC participates at the EGI-Inspire WGs and initiatives dedicated to HPC, HTC and Cloud computing. The main target of this collaboration is to contribute to the development of those grid services that can meet A&A application requirements using HPC and parallel systems.
  • Grid Portals and Desktop Grid. A&A VRC is evaluating the state of the art of grid portals and Desktop grids to provide a simplified access to e-Infrastructure for astronomers
  • Workflows. The use of workflows that integrate different kind of resources, HPC, Cloud and Grid, is a core activity to provide a full view to e-Infrastructure to Astronomers.

The Requirements Gathering Process in EGI

The Requirements Gathering Process is currently one of the most important hot topics in EGI. The evolution of the European Grid Infrastructure is driven by the users. Therefore capturing and communicating feedback from users to the infrastructure as well as technology operators and providers is a key goal for NA3 and for the project as a whole. This EGI web page describes the channels, processes and bodies that the User Community Coordination activity established and runs in order to collect, capture, process, and report requirements and recommendations of users. Input from users are collected by NA3 through various electronic channels and face-to-face communication mechanisms.
The Requirements Tracking System (RT) is used to capture, analyse and prioritise requirements coming from the EGI communities. RT allows users, NGIs, technology providers and other partners to interact with the system to speed up the delivery of solutions.

Contributions from the A&A community to the requirements gathering process are of utmost importance. This ensures that features and functionalities requested by A&A applications to properly work when ported to Grid infrastructure are taken into account and met by the future releases of the EGI middleware and by its related tools and services. The A&A community therefore should participate more proactively to this process.

Areas in which A&A contributions could be brought (in terms of requirements, use-cases and test-beds) are:

  • Interactions between DCIs based on different technologies (Grid, HPC and Cloud)
  • Grid support to MPI
  • Accessing and controlling databases from Grid

VOs (Virtual Organizations)

Here you can find information about VRCs and VOs in EGI.
This is the place where you can find all information to deal with your personal certificates and to register VOs.
This wiki page gives detailed information about VOs and related services.
See the list of all currently active A&A-related VOs.

Past events

Important forthcoming events

Mailing Lists

Click on the name of the mailing list to post a message.
Access the web page to interact with the mailing list (subscription, unsubscription, etc.).

astro-vrc The global mailing list of the A&A VRC astro-vrc web page

Meetings Archive

AstroVRC Web Utilities

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Topic revision: r16 - 2011-12-23 - ClaudioVuerli
 
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