Solar Terrestrial Physics: ESA SpaceGRID Chris Perry, Rutherford Appleton Laboratory

1
Solar Terrestrial PhysicsESA SpaceGRIDChris
Perry, Rutherford Appleton Laboratory

• 21st March 2003

2
STP SpaceGRID

• Introduction
• Existing Activities
• Community Consultation
• AstroGrid Phase A - STP Pilot
• ESA SpaceGRID - Solar System Research
• Related activities
• e-Science and other opportunities

3
Introduction

• Solar System Research is a multi-disciplinary
  science
• Solar Physics, Solar Terrestrial Physics,
  Planetary
• Complex 3-D environment
• Phenomena occur over a range of temporal and
  spatial scales
• In general observations are not object based.
• Complex set of instrumentation, data and formats
• Particles, fields, waves and imagers
• Scalers, vectors, tensors, images,
  multi-dimensional arrays
• Data processing is often responsibility of PI
• Heterogeneous data handling systems
• Researchers need to combine and manipulate
  multiple data sets

4
Community Consultation

• Community consultation via online questionnaire
• Results and discussions held at MIST, EGS and at
  project meetings
• 113 responses from 20 countries (38 from the UK)
• 55 Solar, 36 STP and 9 Planetary
• Broad spread of interests including
• planetary interiors surfaces, planetary and
  terrestrial atmospheres, ionosphere, aurora,
  magnetosphere, solar wind, solar terrestrial,
  interaction, solar flares, corona, solar
  atmosphere and helioseismology.
• Most people who responded are working on data
  analysis though significant minorities involved
  in modelling, operations and software
  development.

5
Community Consultation

• A few of the difficulties highlighted in data
  access-- Locating sources of data or models-
  Ascertaining data availability for multiple data
  sets- Limited search capabilities- Multiple
  requests to different archives, interfaces,
  access control
• Main problems combining data from instrumentation
  and models-- Lack of standardisation in data
  specification.- Inadequate, incompatible or
  unreliable metadata.- Need for re-sampling
  temporal or spatial data.- Lack of documentation
  -gt incorrect use of available data.

6
Community Consultation

• User prioritisation of baseline requirements

7
AstroGrid Phase A STP Pilot

• Simple test-bed to help assess requirements
• About 10 data sets from each of CDHF for STP (ACE
  and GOES KP) and WDC (geomagnetic indices, Dst,
  aa).
• Hybrid solution using a combination of existing
  CGI based software and newer SOAP based
  technology.
• Not web/grid service based (I.e. no WSDL).
• STPDF toolkit used to provide uniform view of
  heterogeneous data sets.

8
AStroGrid Phase A STP Pilot

• Allows selection of system or user datasets.
• I/F dynamically updated to show available fields
  and number of records for selected data set.
• User datasets are the result of previous
  operations allowing compound queries to be
  built.
• Four basic operations supported
• 1) Select/Output fields
• 2) Query data set
• 3) Find/Select time intervals
• 4) Time series join (nearest neighbour).

9
AstroGrid Phase A STP Pilot
Simple UI to select parameters to be plotted and
the time range. In this case a joined data set
consisting of ACE MFI from CDC and Dst from WDC
(one years worth of data). Clicking on resulting
plot, re-plots with a shorter time range. Simple
ASCII output of selected range that can easily be
loaded into a spreadsheet.
10
ESA SpaceGRID Study

• SpaceGRID is an ESA study aimed at identifying
  the potential benefits of Grids" to the ESA
  community and defining a road map for the
  implementation of this technology within ESA.
• The SpaceGRID study spans a broad range of
  domains.
• Earth Observation
• Various aspects of spacecraft engineering
• Space Weather
• Solar System research (solar, STP and planetary).

11
ESA SpaceGRID Study
SSR Baseline Requirements
Evaluate Options
Plan Prototype Implementation
Started Oct 2001 PDT 20th March 2003 Final
presentation May 2003
Prototyping (led by SSL)
Dissemination Activities
12
ESA SpaceGRID SSR Prototype

• Implemented by SciSys and RAL
• Grid Services using OGSA (GT3 Alpha 2)
• Standard XML VOTable used to hold query
  specification and returned results
• XML based metadata catalogue, using XSLT to
  search/transform to VOTable result.
• Federated several Solar event catalogues, Cluster
  Summary Parameter data and World Data Centre
  parameters.

13
ESA SpaceGRID SSR Prototype

• Prototype Demonstration Test held at ESTEC
  yesterday
• Three data archive hubs (two at RAL and one at
  ESTEC)
• Each hub provides a set of simple services
• Catalogue Service
• Data Mining Service
• Query Service
• Storage Service
• The Query Service interacts with legacy archives
  using a simple file based interface (data centres
  dont need to learn OGSA).
• Useful technical test-bed for future work

14
Related Activities

• SPASE - Space Physcis Archive Search and Exchange
• Working group involving international Space
  Physics data centres (GSFC, JPL, APL, SWRI in the
  US, CDPP and RAL in Europe)
• Developing standards (e.g. a metadata dictionary)
  for the Space Physics Research domain.
• Standards are provide the basis for system
  interoperability and are critical to the success
  of e-science/Grids.

15
PPARC e-Science

• STP Data Centres
• World Data Centre (UKSSDC) - Solar System Data
  Warehouse
• UK Double Star Data Centre
• UK SPASE/ UK SPASE Portal
• Formal/funded participation in the development of
  international Space Physics interoperability
  standard.
• Portal into national and international Space
  Physics Data Centres (e.g.. UKSSDC (WDC), ESA
  Cluster Archive, ESA Planetary Archive, CDPP, US
  SPASE compatible archives)
• UKEEDC
• A UK Data centre for the ESA Eddington mission.
  (within the AstroGrid consortium? )

16
Other related e-Science activities

• ESA Cluster Active Archive
• ESA SPC approval on 25th Feb 2003
• Interoperability (in particular with ILWS)
  included in initial design and may be Grid
  based.
• Possible follow-up to ESA SpaceGRID to be
  announced in Autumn
• EU Framework 6