Solar Terrestrial Physics:ESA SpaceGRID

Chris Perry, Rutherford Appleton Laboratory

21st March 2003

STP: SpaceGRID

• Introduction• Existing Activities

– Community Consultation– AstroGrid: Phase A - STP Pilot– ESA SpaceGRID - Solar System Research– Related activities

• e-Science and other opportunities

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

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.

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 -> incorrect use of available data.

Community Consultation

• User prioritisation of baseline requirementsAll SSR

0.50 0.55 0.60 0.65 0.70 0.75 0.80 0.85

Resource Location

Metadata

Data

Compatibility

Catalogue Query

Data Query

Dist. Cat. Query

Dist Data Query

Remote Processing

Web Portal

GRID Server

API

Collaborative Env.

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.

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 supported1) Select/Output fields2) Query data set3) Find/Select time intervals4) Time series join (nearest neighbour).

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 caneasily be loaded into a spreadsheet.

AstroGrid Phase A: STP Pilot

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).

ESA SpaceGRID Study

SSR BaselineRequirements

Capture UserRequirements

Survey of SSRFacilities

EvaluateOptions

Plan PrototypeImplementation

Prototyping(led by SSL)

DisseminationActivities

Started Oct 2001PDT 20th March 2003Final presentation May 2003

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.

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 don’t need to learn OGSA).

• Useful technical test-bed for future work

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.

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? )

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