NOAA ISET Cooperative Research and Education Center

Research Area III-C: Distributed Architectures

Adequate solutions for the fusion, mining, and analysis of climate data likely will involve non-traditional architectures, such as grids, which make vast data and computational resources transparently available to users, and multiagent systems, which use flexible problem-solving protocols to allow persistent computational entities to collaborate.

Click here to see the problem statement.

Click here to see the research objectives.

Click here to access the meeting minutes.

Projects

• The ISET/DDF Pilot Project is developing an application to demonstrate the use of OGC standards (see below under "Other Links"), shaders¹, and EIS (see below) concepts in a real-world problem. Click here for more information on this project. Click here to see the NOAA press release announcing the visit to NOAA ESRL by NOAA-ISET students and faculty that led to the formulation of this project.
  
  ¹The OpenGL Shading Language allows application programmers to express the processing that occurs at various points of the OpenGL pipeline. An independently compilable unit written in this language is a shader. A program is a set of compiled shaders linked together.

Presentations at the NOAA-ISET Seminar Series

• Tracy Lee Hansen, "Multipass Processing for Automatic Text Generation", March 25, 2008.

ISET/ESRL Joint Meeting, Sept. 2007, Thrust Area III Discussion

Tom LeFebvre produced some slides summarizing the discussion among Thrust Area III (Data Mining & Fusion and Geospatial Data Models) participants at the ISET/ESRL Joint Meeting, Sept. 18-19, 2007 in Boulder, CO.
Click here to access these .ppt slides.
Click here for a group photo of the ISET participants at the Joint Meeting."

Researchers

• Albert Esterline (esterlin@ncat.edu), Dept. of Computer Science, North Carolina A&T State University
• Yaohang Li (yaohang@ncat.edu), Dept. of Computer Science, North Carolina A&T State University
• Matt Heavner (matt.heavner@gmail.com), Dept. of Environmental Science, University of Alaska Southeast

Related Projects Involving the Researchers

• SEAMONSTER (SouthEast Alaska MOnitoring Network for Science Technology Education and Research) is a smart sensor web project (at the University of Alaska Southeast) to support collaborative environmental science with near-real-time recovery of large volumes of environmental data. It is a scientific resource, a sensor web testbed, an educational tool, and a public resource. The network is in place in a watershed in the Juneau, Alaska area, and expansion will cover nearby glacial and coastal marine environments.
  Click here for more information on SEAMONSTER.
  
• A student project at A&T, intended to gain experience with technologies used by SEAMONSTER, captures data from a single weather station and publishes it in an HTML accessible by clicking the pin in the rendering of this KML file.

Collaborating Researchers from Research Area III-B: Data Mining

• Michael Steinbach (steinbac@cs.umn.edu), Dept. of Computer Science & Engineering, University of Minnesota
• Vipin Kumar (kumar@cs.umn.edu), Dept. of Computer Science & Engineering, University of Minnesota
• Lei Qian (lqian@fisk.edu), Dept. of Computer Science, Fisk University
• H. John Caulfield (hjc@fisk.edu), Fisk University

Related Projects Involving the Collaborating Researchers

• Discovery of Changes from the Global Carbon Cycle and Climate System Using Data Mining
  (More will be added later.)
  Click here for more information about this project.

Associated NOAA Researchers

• Mark Govett (Mark.W.Govett@noaa.gov), NOAA Advanced Computing Section
• Tracy Hansen (Tracy.L.Hansen@noaa.gov), NOAA Earth Systems Research Laboratory (ESRL), Global Systems Division, Information Systems Branch
• Tom LeFebvre (Thomas.J.Lefebvre@noaa.gov), NOAA Earth Systems Research Laboratory (ESRL), Global Systems Division, Information Systems Branch
• MarySue Schultz (MarySue.Schultz@noaa.gov), NOAA Earth Systems Research Laboratory (ESRL), Global Systems Division, Information Systems Branch and Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere (CIRA)
• Paul Hamer (Paul.Hamer@noaa.gov), NOAA Earth Systems Research Laboratory (ESRL), Global Systems Division
• Ashvin Mysore (black.iris.dancer@gmail.com), a Colorado University student associated with ESRL

Related Projects Involving the Assocaited NOAA Scientists

• The Earth Information System (EIS) is a proposed end-to-end information system to support end-to-end science. Besides supporting research applications, the EIS will support time-critical applications. The EIS will provide a framework into which applications can plug-in and which will support distributed data and code sharing. The architecture involves a suite of simplified layers, each building on the layers below it.
  Click here form more information on the EIS.

Projects that Inspire Us

• Hans Rosling, Professor of International Health at Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, co-founded the Gapminder Foundation, which developed the Trendalyzer software that converts international statistics into moving, interactive and enjoyable graphics. The aim is to promote a fact-based world view through increased use and understanding of freely accessible public data. We would like to develop similar software for weather and climate data. For more on Rosling, Gapminder, and Trendalyzer, click here.

Other Links

• The OGC Website. The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) is a voluntary consensus standards organization leading the development of standards for geospatial and location based services. We are particularly interested in their markup-language recommendations.
• NOAA ISET Cooperative Research and Education Center
• Yaohang Li's High Performance Computing and Monte Carlo Methods course. This provides an introduction to fundamental concepts of Monte Carlo methods, such as Monte Carlo integration, Markov chain Monte Carlo methods, variance reduction methods, and Bayesian computation.
• Grid computing at NOAA’s Advanced Computing Section
• Federation Of Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP) This is a unique consortium of more than 90 organizations that collect, interpret and develop applications for remotely sensed Earth observation information. Included in the ESIP network are NASA, NOAA and USGS data centers, research universities, government research laboratories, supercomputing facilities, education resource providers, information technology innovators, nonprofit organizations and commercial enterprises
• LEAD (Linked Environments for Atmospheric Discovery) is an $11.25M, 5-year NSF project begun in 2003 with the University of Oklahoma as the lead institution. It makes meteorological data, forecast models, and analysis and visualization tools available for interactively exploring the weather as it evolves. The LEAD Portal provides access to these resources, supported by high-performance computing systems.
• The Unidata Website. Unidata's mission is to provide the data services, tools, and cyber-infrastructure leadership that advance Earth system science, enhance educational opportunities, and broaden participation. Unidata is funded primarily by the NSF and is one of eight programs in the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) Office of Programs (UOP). UOP units create, conduct, and coordinate projects that strengthen education and research in the atmospheric, oceanic and earth sciences.

Documenet Surveying Geospatial and Sensor Markup Languages and Related Topics

This is a work in progress, meant as a resource for this group. Click here to view this PDF document.

Organization

The next teleconference will be Wed., April 30 at 9:00 AM MST.