P. Massimino

VisIVO-integrated tools and services for large-scale astrophysical visualization

VisIVO is an integrated suite of tools and services specifically designed for the Virtual Observatory. This suite constitutes a software framework for effective visual discovery in currently available (and next-generation) very large-scale astrophysical data sets. VisIVO consists of VisiVO Desktop, a stand alone application for interactive visualization on standard PCs; VisIVO Server, a grid-enabled platform for high performance visualization; and VisIVO Web, a custom designed web portal supporting services based on the VisIVO Server functionality. The main characteristic of VisIVO is support for high-performance, multidimensional visualization of very large-scale astrophysical data sets. Users can obtain meaningful visualizations rapidly while preserving full and intuitive control of the relevant visualization parameters. This paper focuses on newly developed integrated tools in VisIVO Server allowing intuitive visual discovery with three-dimensional (3D) views being created from data tables. VisIVO Server can be installed easily on any web server with a database repository. We discuss briefly aspects of our implementation of VisiVO Server on a computational grid and also outline the functionality of the services offered by VisIVO Web. Finally we conclude with a summary of our work and pointers to future developments.

An Innovative Science Gateway for the Cherenkov Telescope Array

The Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA) is currently building the next generation, ground-based, very high-energy gamma-ray instrumentation. CTA is expected to collect very large datasets (in the order of petabytes) which will have to be stored, managed and processed. This paper presents a graphical user interface built inside a science gateway aiming at providing CTA-users with a common working framework. The gateway is WS-PGRADE/gUSE workflow-oriented and is equipped with a flexible SSO (based on SAML) to control user access for authentication and authorization. An interactive desktop environment is provided, called Astronomical & Physics Cloud Interactive Desktop (ACID). Users are able to exploit the graphical interface as provided natively by the tools included in ACID. A cloud data service shares and synchronizes data files and output results between the user desktop and the science gateway. Our solution is a first attempt towards an ecosystem of new technologies with a high level of flexibility to suit present and future requirements of the CTA community.

VisIVOWeb: A WWW Environment for Large-Scale Astrophysical Visualization

ABSTRACT. This article presents a newly developed Web portal called VisIVOWeb that aims to provide the astrophysical community with powerful visualization tools for large-scale data sets in the context of Web 2.0. VisIVOWeb can effectively handle modern numerical simulations and real-world observations. Our open-source software is based on established visualization toolkits offering high-quality rendering algorithms. The underlying data management is discussed with the supported visualization interfaces and movie-making functionality. We introduce VisIVOWeb Network, a robust network of customized Web portals for visual discovery, and VisIVOWeb Connect, a lightweight and efficient solution for seamlessly connecting to existing astrophysical archives. A significant effort has been devoted for ensuring interoperability with existing tools by adhering to IVOA standards. We conclude with a summary of our work and a discussion on future developments.

ACID: An Interactive Desktop for CTA Science Gateway

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.

An innovative workspace for the Cherenkov Telescope Array

The Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA) is an initiative to build the next generation, ground-based gamma-ray observatories. We present a prototype workspace developed at INAF that aims at providing innovative solutions for the CTA community. The workspace leverages open source technologies providing web access to a set of tools widely used by the CTA community. Two different user interaction models, connected to an authentication and authorization infrastructure, have been implemented in this workspace. The first one is a workflow management system accessed via a science gateway (based on the Liferay platform) and the second one is an interactive virtual desktop environment. The integrated workflow system allows to run applications used in astronomy and physics researches into distributed computing infrastructures (ranging from clusters to grids and clouds). The interactive desktop environment allows to use many software packages without any installation on local desktops exploiting their native graphical user interfaces. The science gateway and the interactive desktop environment are connected to the authentication and authorization infrastructure composed by a Shibboleth identity provider and a Grouper authorization solution. The Grouper released attributes are consumed by the science gateway to authorize the access to specific web resources and the role management mechanism in Liferay provides the attribute-role mapping.