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 Programme - Splinter meeting ESC
eScience: New Tools for Research in Astronomy as of July 30, 2010
ESC - "eScience: new tools for research in astronomy"
F. Breitling, H. Enke
XML2RDF a new tool from AstroGrid-D for semantic computing (Poster)
The grid project of the German astronomy community (AstroGrid-D) uses the Resource Description Framework (RDF) for metadata management, since RDF is an important specification for semantic computing. For many AstroGrid-D use cases, this requires the transformation of XML data into RDF. Here a first general transformation is presented for converting arbitrary XML data into RDF. It is exemplified by its application to the AstroGrid-D grid integration project for robotic telescopes.
ESC - "eScience: new tools for research in astronomy"
T. Bretz
High performance data centers in astronomy (Talk, registered after deadline)
With todays instruments in astronomy, the amount of data increases from year to year. To maximize the scientific output, a dedicated data center taking care of storage, processing and archiving of data is required. At the example of the data center in W\"urzburg dedicated to the MAGIC telescope and future projects, the capabilities of a high performance data center is astrophysics will be shown. The presented data center easily copes with data rates of tens of Terabytes per month and can re-process the more than 250 TB of raw data taken in the past years within less than three weeks. The automated data processing chain and feature rich web interface to the data itself and all analysis results gives the scientists the possibility to concentrate their efforts on the scientific outcome and interpretation. A GRID integration of the data center is under progress.
ESC - "eScience: new tools for research in astronomy"
M. Demleitner, F. Freistetter
Implementing VO standards: the GAVO Data Center (Talk)
The Virtual Observatory (VO) is, in effect, a set of servers and client programs held together by common protocols and data representations. These are defined by the International Virtual Observatory Alliance IVOA. To be part of the VO, a data center has to support these protocols, from registry interfaces to the Table Access Protocol, and to conform to the data representations, from units to space-time coordinates. In this talk we will discuss the support of the various standards in the GAVO data center as well as implementation considerations. We place special emphasis on the impact IVOA's work on the data providers and users of the VO.
ESC - "eScience: new tools for research in astronomy"
H. Enke
Virtual Data Center (Talk)
New hardware architectures and management concepts for making astronomical data in the Petabyte range available to the astronomical community are developed. An approach to some of the problems and solutions in the frame of the Virtual Data Center will be discussed.
ESC - "eScience: new tools for research in astronomy"
F. Freistetter
Teaching with the Virtual Observatory (Poster)
The Virtual Observatory (VO) does not only offer valuable tools for scientists. VO-tools and data also are an excellent resource for teachers in schools and at universities. The students can learn the basic principles of astronomy/physics by using original data directly from the VO. In the framework of the AIDA (Astronomical Infrastructure for Data Access) project and in cooperation with school teachers, we have developed several examples that demonstrate various features of the VO-tools. Tests at different schools show, that the Virtual Observatory can be integrated in physics lessons without problems.
ESC - "eScience: new tools for research in astronomy"
T. Granzer, F. Breitling, J. Bartus, M. Weber
Towards grids of robotic telescopes (Talk)
Linking robotic telescopes to a world-wide network offers considerable advantages even well ahead of joining computer resources, simply due to the fact that new fields of ground-based observations become possible: 24 hours continuous observation and weather independency, otherwise only known from space. This talk summarizes current projects and progress.
ESC - "eScience: new tools for research in astronomy"
B. Gufler, J. Müller, T. Scholl, A. Reiser, A. Kemper
Scalable scientific data analysis in the Cloud (Talk)
Fast analysis of very large data sets plays a central role in astrophysics as well as in many other e-science disciplines. Moreover, these data sets often do not just consist of a set of unrelated tuples, but contain structures like trees or graphs. Distributing data analysis, e.g. data mining tasks to clusters, Grid or Cloud environments seems to be a promising approach for accommodating interactive data exploration. Inspired by Google's MapReduce approach, we are developing the Pipelined MapReduce framework for Cloud scale data mining, and a scripting language allowing for easy development of distributed applications. In this talk, we will introduce our framework and discuss its impact on scientific data analysis based on a sample application: frequent subtree mining on the Millennium merger trees.
ESC - "eScience: new tools for research in astronomy"
F. Hessman (representing the IVOA Semantics Working Group)
The IVOA vocabulary effort - moving beyond unified content descriptors (Talk)
As the astronomical information processed within the Virtual Observatory becomes more complex, there is an increasing need for a more formal means of identifying quantities, concepts, and processes not confined to things easily placed in a FITS image, or expressed in a catalogue or a table. The IVOA semantics working group has proposed a standard format for vocabularies based on the W3C's Resource Description Framework (RDF) and Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS). By adopting a standard and simple format, the IVOA will permit different groups to create and maintain their own specialised vocabularies while letting the rest of the astronomical community access, use, and combine them. The use of current, open standards ensures that VO applications will be able to tap into resources of the growing semantic web. Several examples of useful astronomical vocabularies are described, including work on a common IVOA thesaurus intended to provide a semantic common base for VO applications.
ESC - "eScience: new tools for research in astronomy"
P. Jofre Pfeil, B. Panter, A. Weiss, C. Hansen, Jennifer Sobeck
MAX: A MAssive compression of chi2 for stellar spectra (Talk)
We have developed new tool to estimate stellar atmosphere parameters from stellar spectra. The method is based on a compression algorithm in which the information of the parameters stored in the spectral fluxes is lossless. This compression allows to make extremely rapid maximum likelihood analyzes without the need of any additional information. MAX has been tested in low resolution SEGUE and in high resolution UVES spectra obtaining results in agreement with the literature
ESC - "eScience: new tools for research in astronomy"
G. Lemson
German Astrophysical Virtual Observatory (GAVO): Mining the (real and virtual) Universe (Talk)
The German Astrophysical Virtual Observatory (GAVO) coordinates the activities of the German astronomical community in the world wide Virtual Observatory (VO) effort and is its national representative to the International Virtual Observatory Alliance (IVOA). The idea of the VO is to investigate how best to disseminate astronomical data and services to the community, and to assist astronomers and astrophysicists worldwide in participating in this effort. In this presentation I will give a short overview of GAVO's activities and results to date.
ESC - "eScience: new tools for research in astronomy"
I. Nickelt, M. Demleitner
Digitising Astronomical Historical Data (Talk)
We use the GAVO Data Center to publish historic photographic plates, observed almost a hundred years ago as part of the "Carte du Ciel" project. We describe the process of digitisation of data and metadata and the different steps to achieve a VO compatible publication, starting with simple fits files and ending with cone search dicovery and retrieval by VO tools.
ESC - "eScience: new tools for research in astronomy"
K. Rieger
Green Grid: High Speed with Low Power Consumption (Talk)
Computing performance has grown and with it the power consumption. A way out of this dilemma are clusters with specialised hardware as GPUs and FPGAs. For astrophysical codes like NBODY6++ such clusters even outperform Blue Gene and other supercomputers. Sharing these clusters via modern grid based infrastructure using open technologies like Globus and GridWay allows many communities to use the new green hardware.
ESC - "eScience: new tools for research in astronomy"
T. Scholl, J. Müller, B. Gufler, A. Reiser, A. Kemper
Scalable community-driven Data Grids (Talk)
E-science communities and especially the astronomy community have put tremendous efforts to provide global access to their distributed scientific datasets. Beyond already existing huge data volumes, the collaborative researchers face major challenges in managing the anticipated data deluge of forthcoming projects with expected data rates of several terabytes a day and petabytes a year such as the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System (Pan-STARRS), the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), or the Low Frequency Array (LOFAR). Community-driven data grids target at domain-specific federations and provide a distributed, collaborative data management by employing dominant data characteristics (e.g., data skew) and query patterns to optimize the overall throughput. By combining well-established techniques for data partitioning and replication with Peer-to-Peer (P2P) technologies we can address several challenging problems: data load balancing, handling of query hot spots, and the adaption to short-term burst as well as long-term load redistributions. In our talk we provide an overview of HiSbase, our prototype for the proposed data management infrastructure developed within the AstroGrid-D project.
ESC - "eScience: new tools for research in astronomy"
B. Vollmer
The CDS and the VO (Talk)
Astronomers all over the world form an open community within which data is routinely shared and distributed by observatory archives, data centres, and bibliographic services. The VO is a natural framework for the astronomers' desire of free data exchange. The aim is to provide seamless and transparent access to data and services with the possibility for the users to publish their own data or services. I will review the CDS activities and services and place them within the context of the VO.
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Gesellschaft
