Patricia Mendez Lorenzo is part of the LCG Experiment and Integration Support Team at CERN. Normally she supports ALICE, helping LCG sites to install and run the ALICE software. But last summer she was assigned an additional task: to help gridify satellite imagery applications for UNOSAT, a United Nations initiative that provides the humanitarian community with access to satellite imagery for use in crises such as earthquakes and tsunamis.
CERN has hosted the UNOSAT team for the past four years, so that it can benefit from CERN's substantial IT infrastructure and Internet access. Tapping into CERN's Grid know-how was another reason, and last year a summer student project, supervised by Mendez Lorenzo and Einar Bjorgo of UNOSAT, provided an ideal opportunity to push forward on this front.
With Sean Moran, a student from Cambridge University, they began by transferring some 3.5 TB of data on the Asian tsunami to the CASTOR storage management system. They then set up a software infrastructure to enable the UNOSAT team to access the data using standard LCG tools. At the same time, Mendez Lorenzo and Bjorgo created a virtual organization for UNOSAT, with a view to extending this to other sites around the globe that UNOSAT collaborates with. In this way, in future this sort of data can be stored in a truly distributed way.
With members of the ARDA project, led by Massimo Lamanna, Bjorgo and Mendez Lorenzo implemented metadata applications that enable stored data to be searched according to geographical co-ordinates. They also interfaced computer-intensive UNOSAT programs to LCG. These programs can heavily compress satellite images for transmission over low-bandwidth connections to relief workers in the field. Mendez Lorenzo has continued to test these Grid applications and was invited to present the results at a workshop during the 1st IEEE International Conference on e-Science and Grid Computing in Melbourne, Australia, in December.
"Gridifying an application like this from zero is gratifying," said Mendez Lorenzo, "because you get to develop the whole infrastructure and see applications run in a relatively short time." The UNOSAT team is equally enthusiastic, and is already planning the next stage of this development project - to adapt more of the UNOSAT software suite to the Grid - with Mendez Lorenzo and LCG.