Tessellations emerge in many natural systems, and the constituent domains often contain regular patterns, raising the intriguing possibility that pattern formation within adjacent domains might be correlated by the geometry, without the direct exchange of information between parts comprising either domain. We confirm this paradoxical effect, by simulating pattern formation via reaction-diffusion in domains whose boundary shapes tessellate, and showing that correlations between adjacent patterns are strong compared to controls that self-organize in domains with equivalent sizes but unrelated shapes. The effect holds in systems with linear and non-linear diffusive terms, and for boundary shapes derived from regular and irregular tessellations. Based on the prediction that correlations between adjacent patterns should be bimodally distributed, we develop methods for testing whether a given set of domain boundaries constrained pattern formation within those domains. We then confirm such a prediction by analysing the development of 'subbarrel' patterns, which are thought to emerge via reaction-diffusion, and whose enclosing borders form a Voronoi tessellation on the surface of the rodent somatosensory cortex. In more general terms, this result demonstrates how causal links can be established between the dynamical processes through which biological patterns emerge and the constraints that shape them.

Abstract With the increasing demand for dynamic and customised resource provisioning for computational experiments in e-Science, solutions are required to mediate different participants’ varied demands for such resource provision. This paper presents a novel negotiation protocol based on a new collaboration model. The protocol allows e-Scientists, the manager of an e-Scientist’s collaboration, and resource providers to reach resource provisioning agreements. By considering the manager of an e-Scientist collaboration for negotiation decisions, the protocol enables fine-grained accountable resource provision on a per job basis for e-Scientist collaborations, without binding the e-Scientist collaboration to resource providers. A testbed built with the protocol is also presented, making use of a production e-Science gateway, use cases, and infrastructures. The testbed is experimentally evaluated, via designed scenarios and comparison with existing production tools. It demonstrates that the proposed negotiation protocol can facilitate accountable resource provision per job, based on resource sharing rules defined and managed by e-Scientist collaborations.

E-Science is inherently a collaborative activity, which enables users from different institutions to share computational resources for analysing data. These rerources are provided by different distributed systems, e.g. Clouds, Grids, local Clusters. These can have different access and accounting mechanisms and the providers may have no direct connection to the institutions involved in the collaboration. We address the problem of how e-Science collaborations can manage access to such resources within the collaboration in a fair and accountable way. This requires accountable matchmaking on a fine grained level (e.g. per user request). This is enabled by a standard-based ontology in our work that extends models widely used for resource matching but provides extra functionality in the accounting domain.

This paper briefly describes how the neural structure of fear conditioning has inspired to develop a computational intelligence model that is referred to as the brain emotional learning-inspired model (BELIM). The model is applied to predict long step ahead of solar activity and geomagnetic storms.

We present a negotiation protocol based on contract law to enable agile and reliable e-Science collaboration. It is designed to be compatible with existing models of resource sharing, but focuses on forming and dissolving collaborations in a lightweight and dynamic manner. It allows the collaboration within the resource users to be separated from the interaction with resource providers, arguing that this is more efficient in forming shorter term collaboration. The protocol aims at managing the whole collaboration lifecycle. We describe the formal specification of the protocol, along with its verification via a model checker. The protocol is generic, and can be used for accessing any type of resource provided via any existing e-Science resource provision models (e.g. grids, clouds, and clusters).

The concept that scientists and engineers should be able to monitor and control simulations running on supercomputers has been discussed and implemented since the late 1980s. The recent explosion in the variety and capabilities of mobile devices allows this access to be taken to a new level, since the simulations running on supercomputers can be accessed as users are moving around in their normal work activities. This means that they have to be able to connect and disconnect at will from the simulation running on the supercomputer, without disturbing its execution. We present a general framework for such “mobile supercomputing” within the framework of Web services standards. To illustrate the potential of our method, we present a particular application of this framework to provide a rich mobile interface to a lattice-Boltzmann simulation of complex fluids running on an IBM Blue Gene/Q supercomputer.

When exploring noisy or visually complex data, such as seismic data from the oil and gas industry, it is often the case that algorithms cannot completely identify features of interest. Human intuition must complete the process. Given the nature of intuition, this can be a source of differing interpretations depending on the human expert, thus we do not have a single feature but multiple views of a feature. Managing multi-user and multi-version interpretations, combined with version tracking, is challenging as these interpretations are often stored as geometric objects separately from the raw data and possibly in different local machines. In this paper we combine the storage of the raw data with the storage of the interpretations produced by the visualization of features by multiple user sessions. We present case studies that illustrate our system's ability to reproduce users' amendments to the interpretations of others and the ability to retrace the history of amendments to a visual feature.

Heliophysics is the study of highly energetic events that originate on the sun and propogate through the solar system. Such events can cause critical and possibly fatal disruption of the electromagnetic systems on spacecraft and on ground based structures such as electric power grids, so there is a clear need to understand the events in their totality as they propogate through space and time. This poses a fascinating eScience challenge since the data is gathered by many observatories and communities that have hitherto not needed to work together. We describe how we are developing an eScience infrastructure to make the discovery and analysis of such complex events possible for the communities of heliophysics. The new systematic and data-centric science which will develop from this will be a child of both the space and information ages.

Field workforces have to implement day-to-day control decisions to keep the large scale real-world systems (e. g. Water Distribution Systems) operational. However, existing customized Decision Support Tools (DSTs) for field workforces operate on static and predefined datasets, available in the workers' devices. This results in planning control actions that may appear safe in the local context but can cause conflicts and disturbances elsewhere in the system. To enable informed decision making, we discuss a generic architecture that supports the development of dynamic predictive DSTs for the field workforces. The predictive DSTs would not only provide up-to-date information but also allow field workforces to perform `What-If' simulations. We extend our previous work, on accessing simulations via lightweight mobile devices, by updating the `What-If' simulations with the real-time Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) data and the scheduled future control actions. The calibration with the sensor network data enables the simulations to predict the real-time state of the system, while the incorporation of future control actions reduces the risk of unexpected feedback between different parts of the system. Hence, considering both the current and possible future state in simulations enables the field workforces to take informed control decisions in the real-world system.

Abstract Many scientific phenomena in large high‐resolution datasets such as the U.K. Ocean Circulation and Advanced Modelling (OCCAM) ocean model are better discovered through visualization than by algorithmic analysis: it is often more straightforward to see a feature than it is to characterize it numerically. Using traditional rendering techniques, the size of modern datasets presents a challenge for even high‐end graphical supercomputers, and the cost of such hardware limits its availability for day‐to‐day analysis. We present an architecture that brings visual analysis to the desktop by exploiting consumer‐grade graphics hardware in order to provide initial interactive exploration and Web services to enable finer‐grained analysis and interoperability with traditional visualization tools. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Abstract Access to the computational Grid is restricted to the laptop and desktop environment since Grid client development has been concentrated in this area. This paper presents the design and implementation of a new, lightweight computational Grid client that provides the same level of functionality and security as its desktop counterparts whilst conforming to the limitations and restrictions of a Personal Digital Assistant environment. A solution has been achieved by taking an architectural perspective of the problem and choosing a tiered, asymmetrical Grid middleware providing an asynchronous messaging model with uniform interface to all resources. The client opens up a new area of Grid computing access: secure and flexible job submission and monitoring to dependable, persistent, powerful and consistent computing services provided by a computational Grid has been freed from static environments into the mobile domain. This has been done without the modification of the underlying Grid middleware and using standards‐based protocols and components: J2ME, X.509 certificates, Secure Socket Layer connections and IEEE 802.11b wireless networking. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The ability to record and account for the usage of computational resources in a standardised way across different systems from multiple administrative domains is a precursor to widespread grid deployment and availability. We describe the implementation of a resource usage service (RUS), which is based on two emerging Global Grid Forum (GGF) standards, and uses Web services technology. We address the issue of security, which is essential since usage information is potentially sensitive and must be verifiably accurate. We show that useful robust functionality can be provided using current Web services standards and we thus avoid over-dependency on evolving grid frameworks and middleware. This work has been undertaken within the UK e-Science project Markets for Computational Services, and builds on scenarios contributed to the project by organisations that manage and sell computing resource as a business.

Abstract If we were to have a Grid infrastructure for visualization, what technologies would be needed to build such an infrastructure, what kind of applications would benefit from it, and what challenges are we facing in order to accomplish this goal? In this survey paper, we make use of the term ‘visual supercomputing’ to encapsulate a subject domain concerning the infrastructural technology for visualization. We consider a broad range of scientific and technological advances in computer graphics and visualization, which are relevant to visual supercomputing. We identify the state‐of‐the‐art technologies that have prepared us for building such an infrastructure. We examine a collection of applications that would benefit enormously from such an infrastructure, and discuss their technical requirements. We propose a set of challenges that may guide our strategic efforts in the coming years.

In this showcase we will present live running simulations which are integrated into the Access Grid in a variety of different ways. An example of this is the use of vnc to distribute a desktop on which the simulation is being displayed. Another example is the redirection of the visualization into vic to make 3D animations available over the Access Grid. Other examples that will be explored are the use of SGI's OpenGL VizServer to direct the output of a graphics supercomputer located on the Grid to the AG locations. We will also utilize the ability of the next generation AG software to directly link with visualization toolkits such as vtk, AVS/Express, or COVISE as an integrated part of the Virtual Venue as this functionality has developed by the time of the SC2003 demonstrations. We also demonstrate steering in a collaborative setting using a steering service which is fully compliant with OGSI and with the proposed OGSA architecture. This can be integrated with current Grid middleware (e.g. GT2 and UNICORE) using a specially developed Perl hosting environment, OGSI:Lite.

Recent advances in computer technology, especially grid tools makes them good candidate for development of user interfaces to computing programs and resources. Computational grids enable sharing a wide variety of geographically distributed resources and allow selection and aggregation of distributed resources across multiple organizations for solving large scale computational and data intensive problems in science. User point of view is most important principle in the development of the UNICORE software which was used to establish European computational grid - EUROGRID. BioGRID is application oriented grid which adopts EUROGRID infrastructure to the specific area, namely molecular biology and quantum chemistry. UNICORE is uniform interface to the computer resources which allows user to prepare, submit and control application specific jobs and file transfers. Compare to the other tools BioGRID, using UNICORE as main grid tool, has wider functionality, is more flexible and allows for much easier integration of the User interface with external quantum chemistry or biomolecular applications. Within the UNICORE environment user has a comfortable way to use distributed computing resources without having to learn for site or system specifics. Details of the UNICORE can be found elsewhere. The UNICORE architecture is based, as other grid middleware, on the three tier model. It consists of user, server and target system tier. The user tier consists of the graphical user interface - UNICORE client - written as Java application. User can specify target system and resources required for jobs using standard UNICORE client facilities. User can check job status, monitor execution and retrieve output to the local workstation. All these functions can be performed from the UNICORE client with the single login during client startup. User can monitor job status and retrieve output to any computer connected to the network with the UNICORE client installed. We have used UNICORE as framework for development dedicated user interface to the biomolecular applications. Written in Java plugin is loaded to the UNICORE client during start, or on request. Once it is available in the client, in addition to the standard futures such as preparation of the script job, user gets access to the menu which allows for preparation application specific job. Currently plugins are available for most popular quantum mechanical and molecular dynamics codes: Gaussian98 and Amber.