The Cornell Theory Center (CTC), an interdisciplinary research center at Cornell University focused on providing cyberinfrastructure resources for research and education, announced its connection and partnership with the National Science Foundation's TeraGrid. As a TeraGrid Science Gateway Partner, CTC will initially provide data from the Arecibo Observatory to the national community as an integrated service provider within the TeraGrid facility. CTC's Science Gateway, through the TeraGrid facility, will enable national and international researchers, students and the general public to use this information through a common Internet interface. As importantly, the integration of the CTC digital assets with the TeraGrid facility will allow users to develop applications that leverage TeraGrid computational systems to analyze data collections at CTC.

Charlie Catlett, Director of the NSF TeraGrid Project said, “The TeraGrid was established as a cyberinfrastructure foundation to integrate the computational, data, and visualization capabilities available to the scientific community. We anticipate the data collections from the CTC will be in great demand and we are pleased to partner with CTC to develop services and capabilities that will begin to weave the nation's digital assets into a national data framework, analogous to today's networking and computational frameworks.”

The Arecibo Observatory, the world's largest and most sensitive single-dish radio/radar telescope is operated by the National Astronomy and Ionosphere Center (NAIC) at Cornell under a cooperative agreement with the NSF. Arecibo provides state-of-the-art observing facilities for scientists in radio astronomy, solar system radar astronomy and atmospheric studies. The volume of information being gathered in astronomy today is estimated to be doubling every 1.5 years or so. This huge growth in data volume is accompanied by a great increase in data complexity. Cornell astronomers, along with consortia of national and international researchers, use the Arecibo telescope to conduct data-intensive surveys. These surveys will produce on the order of thousands of terabytes of data.

The TeraGrid will provide a single source of entry to this information, allowing it to reach a larger astrophysical community. Arecibo data and refined data products on pulsars and galaxies will be a unique resource for years to come, providing synergistic opportunities with other large-scale surveys that have been done and with telescopes of the future, including the Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope, to be launched later this year. Access to astronomical data at the CTC will be done in accordance with virtual observatory methods that are now being developed.

CTC will use a 10G wave, acquired from the National LambdaRail (NLR), to link into the TeraGrid. Cornell University is one of 14 members of the NLR. External access to the Arecibo dataset requires high bandwidth connectivity and CTC's connection to the TeraGrid will provide this performance. The Arecibo data can be accessed by users via a web portal on the TeraGrid site (www.TeraGrid.org).

CTC's eScience unit (eSU) has worked closely with the Arecibo group to develop database structures and procedures. eSU provides the umbrella under which the Arecibo collection lives. It provides a breadth of services to researchers with data-intensive applications — data management, database programming and consulting, data-driven application design and development, data curation, and data mining. eSU conducts leading-edge research in related data management and data-mining topics. “With the TeraGrid we will be able to give the scientific community access to Cornell's data resources and analysis tools,” comments Johannes Gehrke, Associate Director of CTC.

“The Arecibo data collection and other Cornell data collections soon to be available via the TeraGrid are producing large, diverse datasets. It is important that such data be archived for use by current science teams, but also those scientists who may wish to use them for wholly different, even unanticipated, science applications,” says CTC acting director, Anthony Ingraffea.

A second data compilation, a combined library and laboratory or “Web Lab” based on historical collections of the Internet Archive funded by a National Science Foundation's cybertools grant to CTC will be available on the TeraGrid later this year.

About CTC

CTC is an interdisciplinary research center at Cornell University focused on providing cyberinfrastructure resources for research and education; these resources include high-performance and data-intensive computing hardware and expertise, visualization, and K-12 outreach. Scientific and engineering projects supported by CTC represent a wide variety of disciplines, including bioinformatics, behavioral and social sciences, computer science, engineering, geosciences, mathematics, physical sciences, and business.

About the TeraGrid

TeraGrid sponsored by the National Science Foundation Office of Cyberinfrastructure, is a partner of people and a comprehensive collection of resources and services that enables and accelerates discovery in U.S. science and engineering research. Through coordinated grid middleware, policy and high performance network connections, TeraGrid integrates a distributed set of high-capability computational, data management and visualization resources to make U.S. research more productive. TeraGrid's Science Gateway collaborations, education and mentoring programs interconnect and broaden scientific communities.

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Source: Cornell Theory Center