The VIALACTEA project has a work package dedicated to "Tools and Infrastructure" and, inside it, a task for the "Database and Virtual Observatory Infrastructure". This task aims at providing an infrastructure to store all the resources needed by the, more purposely, scientific work packages of the project itself. This infrastructure includes a combination of: storage facilities, relational databases and web services on top of them, and has taken, as a whole, the name of VIALACTEA Knowledge Base (VLKB). This contribution illustrates the current status of this VLKB. It details the set of data resources put together; describes the database that allows data discovery through VO inspired metadata mainteinance; illustrates the discovery, cutout and access services built on top of the former two for the users to exploit the data content.
Workflow applications are frequently used in many production Grids.There is a natural need to run the same workflow with many different parameter sets. Unfortunately current Grid portals either do not support this kind of applications or give only specialized support and hence users are obliged to do all the tedious work needed to manage such parameter study applications. P-GRADE portal has been providing a high-level, graphical workflow development and execution environment for various Grids (EGEE, UK NGS, GIN VO, OSG, TeraGrid, etc.) built on second and third generation Grid technologies (GT2, LCG-2, GT4, gLite). Feedback from the user communities of the portal showed that parameter study support is highly needed and hence the recent release of the portal supports the workflow-level parameter study applications. The current paper describes the semantics and implementation principles of managing and executing workflows as parameter studies. Two algorithms are described in detail. The black box algorithm optimizes the usage of storage resources while the PS-labeling algorithm minimizes the load of Grid processing resources. Special emphasis is on the concurrent management of large number of files and jobs in the portal and in the Grids as well as providing a user-friendly, easy-to-use graphical environment to define the workflows and monitor their parametric study execution. * The work reported in this paper is partly supported by the European Commission under contract numbers LSHC-CT-2006-037559 (FP6 STREP, CancerGrid, www.cancergrid.eu) and 031775 (FP6 SEE-GRID EU project, www.see-grid.eu).
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.