1. GRIDS Community Workshop
LTER Grid Pilot Study
GRIDS Community Workshop
23 June 2005
Mark Servilla
LTER Network Office
University of New Mexico

2. LTER Background Established 1980 (25 years)
26 Research Sites & 1 Support Site (LNO)
North America
Artic/Antarctica
Puerto Rico/Tahiti
Five Core Areas of Study
Primary Plant Production
Organism Population Studies
Movement of Organic Matter
Movement of Inorganic Matter
Disturbance Patterns
CORE AREAS: 1) Primary Production Plant growth in most ecosystems forms the base or “primary” component of the food web. The amount and type of plant growth in an ecosystem helps to determine the amount and kind of animals (or “secondary” productivity) that can survive there.
2) Population Studies A population is a group of organisms of the same species. Like canaries in the coalmine, changes in populations of organisms can be important indicators of environmental changes.
3) Movement of Organic Matter The entire ecosystem relies on the recycling of organic matter (and the nutrients it contains), including dead plants, animals, and other organisms. Decomposition of organic matter and its movement through the ecosystem is an important component of the food web.
4) Movement of Inorganic Matter Nitrogen, phosphorus and other mineral nutrients are cycled through the ecosystem by way of decay and disturbances such as fire and flood. In excessive quantities nitrogen and other nutrients can have far-reaching and harmful effects on the environment.
5) Disturbance Patterns Disturbances often shape ecosystems by periodically reorganizing or destroying them, allowing for significant changes in plant and animal populations and communities.

3. LTER Site Locations LTER Network Office University of New Mexico
Kellogg Biological Station
Michigan State University

4. Problem Statement 26 geospatially distributed sites
26 different governing agencies
26 different hardware models
26 different software models
26 different data models
Questions are being asked at the Regional, National, and Global scale
GLOBAL ? ?
NATION ? ?
POLAR
URBAN
DESERT
This slide provides an opportunity to set the stage for the problem to be solved. Need to explain about the synthetic science: how data and products at the site level propagate up to the regional, national, and global level. That is, questions can now be asked at a global level with answers partly generated from site level science. How do two different ecosystems respond to a common human event – pollution.
This problem is not unique to only LTER; all organizations that are made up of field stations/observatories/research sites will experience similar problems. ? ? ? ? ? ?
ARC
SEV
BES
PAL
JRN
CAP

5. Network Information System
The reason we are doing this is…

6. ecoinformatics.org Science Environment for Ecological Knowledge (SEEK)
EcoGrid
Knowledge Representation and Semantic Mediation
Knowledge Network for Biocomplexity (KNB)
Ecological Metadata Language (EML)
Morpho
Metacat
Kepler – “a scientific workflow system”

7. LTER Requirements LTER Portal/Single Sign-on Security Audit Logging
Authentication
Access Control
Audit Logging
Data Access
Intellectual Rights Protection
Data Use Policy
Resource Access
High Performance Computing Resources
Data Storage Resources
Collaboration Tools

8. LTER Grid Pilot Study LTER Network Office NCSA ISI
University of New Mexico
NCSA
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
ISI
University of Southern California
KBS LTER (Dr. Stuart Gage)
Michigan State University
SEEK
NCEAS at the University of California, Santa Barbara

9. Pilot Study Goals
Demonstrate the vision of the LTER Grid to the LTER community
Demonstrate how grid and middleware technologies might be applied to enhance collaboration and sharing within and external to the LTER community
Demonstrate an effective working relationship with the LTER Network office, NCSA, and GRIDS Center staff
Collect requirements for a detailed design of the LTER Grid

10. Strategies
Contrived scientific experiment; document data with metadata
Short duration (6-month) for quick feedback
Demonstration of final product
Directly involve stake-holders (scientists and information managers)
Identify key and usable Grid infrastructure

11. Pilot Study Experiment “Acoustic Pattern Matching”
Environmental Acoustic Monitoring
Embedded microphone
Sampling every 30 minutes for 30 seconds
Conversion to *.wav file format

12. Pilot Study Experiment “Acoustic Pattern Matching”
Ornithologic (bird) pattern matching
DSP/Matlab workbench
Match unknown dataset to an known signature

13. User Scenario User logs onto portal (single sign-on)
Selects known signature file(s)
Performs data search via Metacat for unknown acoustic file(s)
Performs acoustic matching on HPC; match probability identified to user

14. Infrastructure Scenario
Portal accepts user credentials and passes to MyProxy
MyProxy validates thru LDAP and issues certificate back to Portal
Portal accepts acoustic signature selection by user
Portal accepts acoustic query; passes query and certificate to GT4/Metacat; request logged
Metacat returns query results to Portal; return logged
Portal accepts selection of unknowns by user; passes certificate and data transfer request to data POP and HPC
POP and HPC accepts certificate; POP, via GridFTP, transfers data to HPC
HPC performs matching; returns results back to Portal 2 1 3 5 4 8 6 7

15. Architectural Components
Portal/web application *noname (J2EE using struts and jglobus)
MyProxy
GridFTP
GT4 Web Services
GRAM (pre-WS)
Metacat 1.5 modified for GSI (Java servlet)
Metacat Query Inteface (Java servlet using struts framework)
Matlab (for DSP analysis)

16. Timeline March 2005 April 2005 June 2005 July 2005 August 2005
Generate detailed work-flow and application(s) specified
Generate detailed project plan
Identify components, services, and APIs
Identify roles and responsibilities
Generate detailed architecture
Identify site, personnel, and data involved
Team meeting at NCSA
April 2005
System and User Environment configuration
Software/hardware development and integration
June 2005
Software/hardware development and integration
July 2005
Release of functioning prototype
Prototype testing and evaluation
Site deployment of software/hardware
Site integration of software/hardware
Site testing and evaluation
August 2005
Release of working system
System testing and evaluation
Preparation of demonstration
September 2005
Demonstration