Speakers
Description
Wider impact and conclusions
This contribution successfully addresses the issue of transparently accessing heterogeneous e-Infrastructures, also “on the go”, by large numbers of potential users, including citizen scientists and the general public. Two Earth Science use cases, belonging to two different EU co-funded projects, are presented and discussed. A brief discussion about how to extend the services developed to other communities will also be made in the conclusions.
Description of work
This work will present how the Weather Research and Forecasting Model (www.wrf-model.org) has been integrated into the Africa Grid Science Gateway (http://sgw.africa-grid.org) to seamlessly and successfully execute both on Grid and Cloud-based distributed infrastructures, including the EGI Federated Cloud.
The WRF modelling system is a widely used meso-scale numerical weather prediction system designed to serve both atmospheric research and operational forecasting needs. WRF has a large worldwide community counting more than 20,000 users in 130 countries and it has been specifically designed to be the state-of-the-art atmospheric simulation system being portable and running efficiently on available parallel computing platforms. Although WRF can be executed in many different environments, ranging form the single core inside a stand-alone machine up to the most sophisticated HPC platforms, there are no solutions yet to match the e-Science paradigm where software, data and users are “linked” together by the network as components of distributed computing infrastructures. The topmost component of the typical e-Infrastructure multi-layered model consists of Science Gateways and in this particular case by the CSGF, thus allowing to execute WRF simulations on various kinds of distributed computing infrastructures at the same time, including the EGI Federated Cloud. Some use cases of WRF related to Africa will be included in the presentation.
In the second part of the contribution we will report on the EarthServer Science Gateway Mobile app (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/earthserver-sg-mobile/id740603213?ls=1&mt=8), available both on Google Play and App Store, which allows users to seamlessly access and use some of the EarthServer applications exploiting SAML-based federated authentication, fine-grained authorisation mechanisms and WCS/WCPS-compliant queries.
URL(s) for further info
www.earthserver.eu and www.ei4africa.eu
