Nowadays digital sky surveys and long-duration, high-resolution numerical simulations using high ... more Nowadays digital sky surveys and long-duration, high-resolution numerical simulations using high performance computing and grid systems produce multidimensional astrophysical datasets in the order of several Petabytes. Sharing visualizations of such datasets within communities and collaborating research groups is of paramount importance for disseminating results and advancing astrophysical research. Moreover educational and public outreach programs can benefit greatly from novel ways
The aim of scientific visualization (images and animations) is to create suitable visuals (images... more The aim of scientific visualization (images and animations) is to create suitable visuals (images and animations) to aid scientists in easily understanding highly-complex datasets. Modern visualization can act as a catalyst in rapidly and intuitively discovering correlations and patterns in large-scale astrophysical datasets without involving numerical algorithms or CPU intensive analysis codes. We introduce VisIVODesktop 3.0, a true multi-platform environment for interactive astrophysical visualization. We outline recently added visualization functionality, namely hybrid and stereoscopic rendering. Hybrid rendering combines volume and point rendering and employs an elliptical, Gaussian distribution function. Opacity transfer functions can be finely tuned to extract interesting details within cosmological structures. We conclude with a summary of our work and future developments.
A flux of primary cosmic radiation, mostly protons, continuously falls on Earth. The showers prod... more A flux of primary cosmic radiation, mostly protons, continuously falls on Earth. The showers produced by their interactions with the upper layers of the atmosphere are mainly constituted by charged muons at the sea level. The muon rate is about 1 muon/(cm2 min) and the mean energy of some GeV. This natural flux can be useful as high-energy probe for tomography to detect high-Z materials in liter-sized volumes. PON01_01125 is a project for the realization of a prototype of a muon tomography system. Its target is the inspection of standard containers in order to detect traffic of illegal and dangerous heavy nuclear materials. The project will use research products developed in the Astrophysical and Nuclear fields: a suitable detector technology based on strips of plastic scintillators and coupled with a very sensitive photon sensor (Silicon Photomultiplier, SiPM); suitable tracking algorithms for the reconstruction of tomographic images and a smart visualization of results with an ima...
The participation of Italy in VO activities has been initially delegated to a Grid project (i.e.,... more The participation of Italy in VO activities has been initially delegated to a Grid project (i.e., DRACO). After the MoU between INAF and Euro-VO was signed, the VObs.it project was established. The aim of the VObs.it project is to coordinate within a unified approach the archives and databases developed by the Italian community. The first steps in this direction are to foster the adoption of IVOA standards, to provide Grid-aware VO applications and to build a national registry containing the list of VO-compliant services available to the international community. The Italian participation in EU-funded international projects is targeted to the development of tools to be subsequently used within the international VO. This allows our developers to be at the forefront of technology in the field. Equally important are participation in the IVOA Executive Committee and in the IVOA working groups defining standard protocols and formats. The activities forming the initial core of the VObs.it ...
ABSTRACT Workflow and science gateway technologies have been adopted by scientific communities as... more ABSTRACT Workflow and science gateway technologies have been adopted by scientific communities as a valuable tool to carry out complex experiments. They offer the possibility to perform computations for data analysis and simulations, whereas hiding details of the complex infrastructures underneath. There are many workflow management systems covering a large variety of generic services coordinating execution of workflows. In this paper we describe our experiences in creating workflows oriented science gateways based on gUSE/WS-PGRADE technology and in particular we discuss the efforts devoted to develop a VO-compliant web environment.
ABSTRACT VisIVO provides an integrated suite of tools and services that can be used in many scien... more ABSTRACT VisIVO provides an integrated suite of tools and services that can be used in many scientific fields. VisIVO development starts in the Virtual Observatory framework. VisIVO allows users to visualize meaningfully highly-complex, large-scale datasets and create movies of these visualizations based on distributed infrastructures. VisIVO supports high-performance, multi-dimensional visualization of large-scale astrophysical datasets. Users can rapidly obtain meaningful visualizations while preserving full and intuitive control of the relevant parameters. VisIVO consists of VisIVO Desktop - a stand-alone application for interactive visualization on standard PCs, VisIVO Server - a platform for high performance visualization, VisIVO Web - a custom designed web portal, VisIVOSmartphone - an application to exploit the VisIVO Server functionality and the latest VisIVO features: VisIVO Library allows a job running on a computational system (grid, HPC, etc.) to produce movies directly with the code internal data arrays without the need to produce intermediate files. This is particularly important when running on large computational facilities, where the user wants to have a look at the results during the data production phase. For example, in grid computing facilities, images can be produced directly in the grid catalogue while the user code is running in a system that cannot be directly accessed by the user (a worker node). The deployment of VisIVO on the DG and gLite is carried out with the support of EDGI and EGI-Inspire projects. Depending on the structure and size of datasets under consideration, the data exploration process could take several hours of CPU for creating customized views and the production of movies could potentially last several days. For this reason an MPI parallel version of VisIVO could play a fundamental role in increasing performance, e.g. it could be automatically deployed on nodes that are MPI aware. A central concept in our development is thus to produce unified code that can run either on serial nodes or in parallel by using HPC oriented grid nodes. Another important aspect, to obtain as high performance as possible, is the integration of VisIVO processes with grid nodes where GPUs are available. We have selected CUDA for implementing a range of computationally heavy modules. VisIVO is supported by EGI-Inspire, EDGI and SCI-BUS projects.
ABSTRACT The Muon Portal is a recently born project that plans to build a large area muon detecto... more ABSTRACT The Muon Portal is a recently born project that plans to build a large area muon detector for a noninvasive inspection of shipping containers in the ports, searching for the presence of potential fissile (U, Pu) threats. The technique employed by the project is the well-known muon tomography, based on cosmic muon scattering from high-Z materials. The design and operational parameters of the muon portal under construction will be described in this paper, together with preliminary simulation and test results.
2014 6th International Workshop on Science Gateways, 2014
ABSTRACT The Astronomical & Physics Cloud Interactive Desktop (ACID) has been developed f... more ABSTRACT The Astronomical & Physics Cloud Interactive Desktop (ACID) has been developed for the prototype of CTA Science Gateway in Catania, Italy. ACID is based on a web environment that, avoiding any installation on a local PC, allows the use of plenty of software packages for both on-line and off-line analysis of astrophysical data. The users are able to exploit, if applicable, the native Graphical User Interface (GUI) of the tools available in the ACID environment. The ACID environment exploited by the Science Gateway offers two modes of usage: interactively to perform an on-line analysis through the VNC desktop and the native GUIs or shell environment of the programs, Distributed Computing Infrastructure (DCI) to perform an off-line analysis through a workflow submission. For the interactive usage of the remote software, ACID exploits an ad hoc VNC-based User Interface (VUI). Each type of analysis can be exploited through the CTA Science Gateway based on Life ray and WS-PGRADE/gUSE. Data file sharing is ensured by own Cloud technology. All of these functionalities can be also used through iOS and Android devices.
Nowadays digital sky surveys and long-duration, high-resolution numerical simulations using high ... more Nowadays digital sky surveys and long-duration, high-resolution numerical simulations using high performance computing and grid systems produce multidimensional astrophysical datasets in the order of several Petabytes. Sharing visualizations of such datasets within communities and collaborating research groups is of paramount importance for disseminating results and advancing astrophysical research. Moreover educational and public outreach programs can benefit greatly from novel ways
The aim of scientific visualization (images and animations) is to create suitable visuals (images... more The aim of scientific visualization (images and animations) is to create suitable visuals (images and animations) to aid scientists in easily understanding highly-complex datasets. Modern visualization can act as a catalyst in rapidly and intuitively discovering correlations and patterns in large-scale astrophysical datasets without involving numerical algorithms or CPU intensive analysis codes. We introduce VisIVODesktop 3.0, a true multi-platform environment for interactive astrophysical visualization. We outline recently added visualization functionality, namely hybrid and stereoscopic rendering. Hybrid rendering combines volume and point rendering and employs an elliptical, Gaussian distribution function. Opacity transfer functions can be finely tuned to extract interesting details within cosmological structures. We conclude with a summary of our work and future developments.
A flux of primary cosmic radiation, mostly protons, continuously falls on Earth. The showers prod... more A flux of primary cosmic radiation, mostly protons, continuously falls on Earth. The showers produced by their interactions with the upper layers of the atmosphere are mainly constituted by charged muons at the sea level. The muon rate is about 1 muon/(cm2 min) and the mean energy of some GeV. This natural flux can be useful as high-energy probe for tomography to detect high-Z materials in liter-sized volumes. PON01_01125 is a project for the realization of a prototype of a muon tomography system. Its target is the inspection of standard containers in order to detect traffic of illegal and dangerous heavy nuclear materials. The project will use research products developed in the Astrophysical and Nuclear fields: a suitable detector technology based on strips of plastic scintillators and coupled with a very sensitive photon sensor (Silicon Photomultiplier, SiPM); suitable tracking algorithms for the reconstruction of tomographic images and a smart visualization of results with an ima...
The participation of Italy in VO activities has been initially delegated to a Grid project (i.e.,... more The participation of Italy in VO activities has been initially delegated to a Grid project (i.e., DRACO). After the MoU between INAF and Euro-VO was signed, the VObs.it project was established. The aim of the VObs.it project is to coordinate within a unified approach the archives and databases developed by the Italian community. The first steps in this direction are to foster the adoption of IVOA standards, to provide Grid-aware VO applications and to build a national registry containing the list of VO-compliant services available to the international community. The Italian participation in EU-funded international projects is targeted to the development of tools to be subsequently used within the international VO. This allows our developers to be at the forefront of technology in the field. Equally important are participation in the IVOA Executive Committee and in the IVOA working groups defining standard protocols and formats. The activities forming the initial core of the VObs.it ...
ABSTRACT Workflow and science gateway technologies have been adopted by scientific communities as... more ABSTRACT Workflow and science gateway technologies have been adopted by scientific communities as a valuable tool to carry out complex experiments. They offer the possibility to perform computations for data analysis and simulations, whereas hiding details of the complex infrastructures underneath. There are many workflow management systems covering a large variety of generic services coordinating execution of workflows. In this paper we describe our experiences in creating workflows oriented science gateways based on gUSE/WS-PGRADE technology and in particular we discuss the efforts devoted to develop a VO-compliant web environment.
ABSTRACT VisIVO provides an integrated suite of tools and services that can be used in many scien... more ABSTRACT VisIVO provides an integrated suite of tools and services that can be used in many scientific fields. VisIVO development starts in the Virtual Observatory framework. VisIVO allows users to visualize meaningfully highly-complex, large-scale datasets and create movies of these visualizations based on distributed infrastructures. VisIVO supports high-performance, multi-dimensional visualization of large-scale astrophysical datasets. Users can rapidly obtain meaningful visualizations while preserving full and intuitive control of the relevant parameters. VisIVO consists of VisIVO Desktop - a stand-alone application for interactive visualization on standard PCs, VisIVO Server - a platform for high performance visualization, VisIVO Web - a custom designed web portal, VisIVOSmartphone - an application to exploit the VisIVO Server functionality and the latest VisIVO features: VisIVO Library allows a job running on a computational system (grid, HPC, etc.) to produce movies directly with the code internal data arrays without the need to produce intermediate files. This is particularly important when running on large computational facilities, where the user wants to have a look at the results during the data production phase. For example, in grid computing facilities, images can be produced directly in the grid catalogue while the user code is running in a system that cannot be directly accessed by the user (a worker node). The deployment of VisIVO on the DG and gLite is carried out with the support of EDGI and EGI-Inspire projects. Depending on the structure and size of datasets under consideration, the data exploration process could take several hours of CPU for creating customized views and the production of movies could potentially last several days. For this reason an MPI parallel version of VisIVO could play a fundamental role in increasing performance, e.g. it could be automatically deployed on nodes that are MPI aware. A central concept in our development is thus to produce unified code that can run either on serial nodes or in parallel by using HPC oriented grid nodes. Another important aspect, to obtain as high performance as possible, is the integration of VisIVO processes with grid nodes where GPUs are available. We have selected CUDA for implementing a range of computationally heavy modules. VisIVO is supported by EGI-Inspire, EDGI and SCI-BUS projects.
ABSTRACT The Muon Portal is a recently born project that plans to build a large area muon detecto... more ABSTRACT The Muon Portal is a recently born project that plans to build a large area muon detector for a noninvasive inspection of shipping containers in the ports, searching for the presence of potential fissile (U, Pu) threats. The technique employed by the project is the well-known muon tomography, based on cosmic muon scattering from high-Z materials. The design and operational parameters of the muon portal under construction will be described in this paper, together with preliminary simulation and test results.
2014 6th International Workshop on Science Gateways, 2014
ABSTRACT The Astronomical & Physics Cloud Interactive Desktop (ACID) has been developed f... more ABSTRACT The Astronomical & Physics Cloud Interactive Desktop (ACID) has been developed for the prototype of CTA Science Gateway in Catania, Italy. ACID is based on a web environment that, avoiding any installation on a local PC, allows the use of plenty of software packages for both on-line and off-line analysis of astrophysical data. The users are able to exploit, if applicable, the native Graphical User Interface (GUI) of the tools available in the ACID environment. The ACID environment exploited by the Science Gateway offers two modes of usage: interactively to perform an on-line analysis through the VNC desktop and the native GUIs or shell environment of the programs, Distributed Computing Infrastructure (DCI) to perform an off-line analysis through a workflow submission. For the interactive usage of the remote software, ACID exploits an ad hoc VNC-based User Interface (VUI). Each type of analysis can be exploited through the CTA Science Gateway based on Life ray and WS-PGRADE/gUSE. Data file sharing is ensured by own Cloud technology. All of these functionalities can be also used through iOS and Android devices.
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Papers by Ugo Becciani