Astrophysics in S.Co.P.E

arXiv:0807.0967v1 [astro-ph] 7 Jul 2008 Mem. S.A.It. Vol. 00, 0 c⃝SAIt 2008 Memorie della Astrophysi s in S.Co.P .E. M. Brescia1, S. Cavuoti2, G. d’Angelo2, R. D’Abrusco2, C. Donalek3 N. Deniskina2, O. Laurino2, Giuseppe Longo2,1,4 1 INAF - Osservatorio Astronomico Capodimonte, via Moiariello 16, 80131, Napoli, Italy 2 Department of Physical Sciences - University Federico II, Naples, Italy 3 Department of Astronomy, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA 4 INFN - Napoli Unit, via Cintia 9, 80126, Napoli, Italy Abstract. S.Co.P.E. is one of the four projects funded by the Italian Government in order to provide Southern Italy with a distributed computing infrastructure for fundamental science. Beside being aimed at building the infrastructure, S.Co.P.E. is also actively pursuing re- search in several areas among which astrophysics and observational cosmology. We shortly summarize the most significant results obtained in the first two years of the project and re- lated to the development of middleware and Data Mining tools for the Virtual Observatory. Key words. distributed computing, cosmology 1. Introduction S.Co.P.E. is a general purpose GRID infras- tructure of the University Federico II in Naples funded through the Italian National Plan (PON) by the Italian Government to support both fundamental research and small/medium size companies. The infrastructure has been conceived as a metropolitan GRID, embedding different (and in some cases pre-existing) and heterogeneous computing centers each with its specific vocation: high energy physics, astro- physics, bioinformatics, chemistry and mate- rial sciences, electric engineering, social sci- ences. Its intrinsically multi-disciplinary na- ture renders the S.Co.P.E. an ideal test bed for innovative middleware solutions and for inter- operable tools and applications finely tuned on the needs of a distributed computing environ- Send offprint requests to: G. Longo, e-mail: longo@na.infn.it ment. In what follows we shall shortly out- line the main activities in the fields of astro- physics and observational cosmology and, in particular, we shall focus on: i) the ongoing ef- forts aimed at integrating the S.Co.P.E. GRID (hereafter SG) with the international Virtual Observatory (Sect.2), and ii) the implementa- tion in the SG of the data mining (DM) VO- Neural package (Sect.3) which is developed in the framework of a collaboration with the Dept. of Astronomy at Caltech. In Sect. 4 we shortly outline a template scientific application and, finally, in Sect. 5, we outline some future developments. 2. The VOb and the GRID The Virtual Observatory (VOb) is an in- ternational effort coordinated through the International Virtual Observatory Alliance (IVOA; URL.1) aimed at: i) federating and M. Brescia & et al.: astrophysics in S.Co.P.E. 1 making interoperable all astronomical data archives produced by both ground based and space borne instruments; ii) deploying a new generation of science applications or tools which use VOb protocols for exploratory data analysis and for the extraction of knowl- edge from massive data sets. The VOb is in- herently distributed: data collections remain with their providers and are accessed through standard interfaces. The access to the data takes place through a registry which con- tains information about data sets, archives, catalogs, surveys, and computational services that can be accessed through VOb interfaces (Hanish & De Young 2008). While the federa- tion and fusion of heterogeneous data archives and the implementation of flexible data reduc- tion and data analysis tools have been widely addressed and, at least in their fundamen- tal aspects, solved, the possibility to access large distributed computing facilities to per- form computing intensive tasks has not yet been satisfactorily answered. One problem to be solved is the conflict ex- isting between the VOb and the GRID secu- rity procedures: most users of a specific Virtual Organization (VO) do not possess the personal certificates which are requested to access the GRID or, even when they do have a personal certificate, the computing GRID which they need does not recognize their own certification authority. In the framework of the VONeural project (Sect. 3) and in order to make our Data Mining (DM) tools accessible to the wider commu- nity, we implemented and tested a general pur- pose interface between the UK-ASTROGRID (hereafter AG; URL.4) and the SG. 2.1. GRID-Launcher v.1.0 The UK based ASTROGRID is one of the most robust astronomical Virtual Organizations so far implemented and represents a good ground for testing innovative solutions. The main problem we had to face was the fact that most users which are recognized by the AG User Authentication Service do not possess a per- sonal GRID certificate and cannot therefore access distributed computing resources. This Fig. 1. Grid Launcher v.1.0 workflows for input and output. UI: user interface; RB: resource broker; SE: storage eleme

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