Astronomy and Astrophysics

The Astronomy and Astrophysics (A&A) community that could join the EGEE infrastructure right now is potentially wide. This community is sparse all around Europe and counts a remarkable number of users and institutes. The creation of an A&A cluster in EGEE, therefore, could mean first of all more users that join the EGEE infrastructure bringing a rich variety of applications that run on the Grid and make use of available shared resources.

Many A&A applications moreover are quite challenging from the point of view of resources, both in terms of computation and of data storage, so they are an excellent test-bed for Grid infrastructures hosting them. Until now each A&A institute usually acquired the necessary resources to make applications able to run on local computing facilities (mainframes and/or local clusters of PCs). Quite often institutes also contracted the access to a pool of resources with some supercomputing centres. In Italy for instance many Universities and also INAF (the National Institute of Astrophysics) established conventions with national supercomputing centres. As A&A applications grow in complexity, however, single institutes cannot afford application demands on their own. Supercomputing centres in turn tend to establish partnerships in the framework of trans-national projects and use the Grid to share their own resources.

An additional consideration that plays in favour of the activation of the new A&A cluster is the fact that quite often A&A applications do not only need computational power and conventional data storage but require also advanced functionalities, namely access to astronomical databases and remote monitoring/control of astrophysical applications. It would be important, in particular, to make the EGEE infrastructure able to support interactive applications and this might open new chances to profitably use the Grid not only for A&A but also for other communities interested in exploiting the remote monitoring/control capabilities. For EGEE this could mean further communities of users and applications interested to join the project. A&A is heavily engaged in the process of modifying some components of the Grid middleware to add these new functionalities and EGEE is the main target infrastructure for this enhanced middleware.

Last but not least, some classes of A&A applications are very suitable to be run on Grid infrastructures but very often A&A users don't know how to approach the gridification process for their applications. The creation of an A&A cluster has the great advantage of creating a community of users who exchange information and expertise in successfully approaching this task. Support is expected by EGEE in this training activity.

In conclusion, through the approval of the A&A cluster, EGEE could include a wide and motivated community of users, a rich variety of applications running on its Grid infrastructure and a set of new functionalities that could make EGEE attractive also for users of other disciplines.

Transition to EGI

Click here to access the page dedicated to the transition to EGI.

Mailing Lists

• The official mailing list gathers all people who contribute to the cluster.
• The list of reference people collects the coordinators of the groups operating at the various Institutes being part of the cluster.

Related Teams

The Astronomy and Astrophysics cluster is coordinated by Claudio Vuerli of INAF, the Italian National Institute of Astrophysics. Dr. Fabio Pasian (INAF) is the Deputy coordinator. These Institutes host teams that contribute to A&A cluster:

Funded teams in EGEE-III

• IFAE/PIC (Institut de Física d'Altes Energies/Port d'Informació Científica, ES)
• IFCA (Instituto de Física de Cantabria, ES)
• II-SAS (Institute of Informatics - Slovak Academy of Sciences, SK)
• INAF (Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica, IT)
• RUG (University of Groningen, NL)

Unfunded teams in EGEE-III

• AIP (Astrophysical Institute of Potsdam, DE)
• ARI (Astronomisches Rechen-Institut, DE)
• ESA/ESAC (European Space Agency/European Space Astronomy Centre, ES)
• CESNET (Czech Republic's National Research and Education Network (NREN), CZ)
• OBSG (Observatoire de Grenoble, FR)
• OBSL (Observatoire de Lyon, FR)
• OBSPM (Observatoire de Paris Meudon, FR)
• OBSS (Observatoire de Strasbourg, FR)
• OCA (Observatoire de la Côte d'Azur, FR)
• UIBK (University of Innsbruck, AT)

Forthcoming Events

• 5^th (final) EGEE User Forum, Uppsala (Sweden), 12-16 April 2010.

Past Events

• EGEE 08 Conference, Istanbul, 22-26 September 2008.
• Joint 4^th EGEE User Forum and OGF 25, Catania (Italy), 2-6 March 2009. Enter the A&A session (part 1/2) and (part 2/2) to see related presentations.
  
• EGEE 09 Conference, Barcelona (Spain), 21-25 September 2009.

Technical Notes

Support for MPI

Wiki page illustrating how to configure a Grid site in order to support MPI

Release notes of the new WMS Resource Broker

Documentation concerning use cases primarily thought for users will also be made available very soon under the NA4 wiki as well.

Contacts

• Dr. Claudio Vuerli - Coordinator
• Dr. Fabio Pasian - Deputy Coordinator

-- ClaudioVuerli - 11 August 2009