eMinerals view of escience

The eMinerals project recognises that the domain area of escience is multifaceted. The diagram above highlights three core areas of escience: computing, data and collaborative grids. eMinerals is working at the intersection of each of these three areas.

Computing grids provide the means to support the large computational demands of the eMinerals project. Although some of our work requires high-performance facilities (particularly the work on nuclear waste), a large part of our work requires access to many compute processes in high-throughput mode for our combinatorial studies. Examples are studies over a whole family of molecules or sweeps through parameters such as pressure. This need is well met using grid computing. We have constructed a heterogeneous compute grid based on clusters and Condor pools - the "eMinerals Minigrid". Our work on Condor pools has led to us building the first campus grid in the UK (at UCL), as well as contributing to the development of the Cambridge campus grid.

Data grids provide the means by which the eMinerals project scientists store and share data. We make considerable use of the San Diego Storage Resource Broker, with data vaults distributed across the project. The SRB is integrated into our compute grid, and provides the primary mechanism by which we transfer date between the scientist user and the grid compute resources. The SRB also provides the means by which data are shared between the project members, enabling the eMinerals project team to work as members of a virtual organisation. In addition to the SRB providing our primary means of data delivery, we make considerable use of XML data formats, and have developed tools to facilitate information delivery between team members.

Collaborative grids provide the means by which team members can work closely together to tackle studies that would normally be out of the reach of a single research group. The SRB and XML tools make up one component of our collaborative grid. The other component is the use of the desktop Access Grid to enable regular discussion between project members, whether as a whole or within smaller task-oriented groups. We have developed new tools to facilitate sharing of applications over the Access Grid.

General references

Papers that illustrate our use of escience, and which can be downloaded as pdf files, are:

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