Integrating VisIVO and FLY into the AstroGrid infractructure

Running FLY on Lomond

Progress

• Accounts created for Marco and JDT
• FLY installed
• Tomcat 5.0.x and Java 1.4.2 installed
• FLY wrapper script created by Marco
• CEA installed into Tomcat, and configured to take 4 input filenames and 1 output filename as parameters
• CEA registered in Galahad
• FLY script written to drive FLY from CEA

Still to do

• Add more output files
• Investigate using different machines
• Create a CEA app to create the initial conditions

Adding a CEA interface to FLY

Issues

• Changing parameters requires recompilation of FLY, therefore the wrapper script must change various header files and recompile (on the 4 front end processors of Lomond)
• Concurrent users
  • Temporary directory for each user
  • Lomond only allows a single job to be run at a time, and only half a dozen may be queued - how to deal

• Lomond is much slower than expected
• Binary files - big and little endian
• Script terminates after queuing job...causing ACR to return before script complete
• Correct user on Lomond
• What happens to resources when Marco leaves?

Calling CEA applications from VisIVO via ACR

Progress

• Marco has implemented a UI for this in VisIVO that calls the ACR

Issues

Plastic

Progress

• Messages fully implmented: info messages such as getName
• Message partially implemented:

Issues

• Parsing the .plastic file is not trivial in C++
• Coping with loadVOTableFromUrl messages that refer to a non-local URL. Parsing the URL.
• Injecting GUI messages into the framework is non-trivial and has required significant help from the framework development team.

Things to do

• Provide a Plastlet to assist VisIVO with certain tasks such as downloading from URLs and converting tables. This could be webstarted from the ACR.

Other ideas

• Add a logo for VisIVO and list of messages. DONE
• Get the FLY-CEA to return the correct data for VisIVO to visualise
  • ? grid-enable Ugo's subsampling application
• Connect two hubs together and have VisIVOs controlling each other across the internet REQUIRES MORE THOUGHT DUE TO NATS ISSUES
  • Ideas: control the VisIVO camera, remotely choose the axis to visualise e.g. via Eirik
• VisIVO loading data from myspace, finding and querying datasets through the ACR.

References

• FLY http://www.ct.astro.it/fly/
• VisIVO http://visivo.cineca.it/
• EPCC Lomond User Guide http://www.epcc.ed.ac.uk/computing/services/sun/documents/hpc-intro/html/index.html

Funding bodies:

• HPC-Europa http://www.epcc.ed.ac.uk/computing/visitor_programme/
• Edinburgh Small Projects Grants http://www.edinburghcampaign.com/Campaign/SmallProjects.aspx

-- JohnTaylor - 22 Mar 2006 and -- MarcoComparato