Project Information

• Documents
• Wiki

• Project Overview
• SIMDAT Virtual Global Information Centre
  • SIMDAT V-GISC Infrastructure
  • SIMDAT V-GISC Architecture
• SIMDAT Prototype Phase I
  • Results Achieved
  • Lessons Learned in the project
• CBS Conference Nov 2006 (Seoul)

Project Overview

SIMDAT is Data grids for process and product development using numerical simulation and knowledge discovery. SIMDAT is funded by the European Commission under the Information Society Technologies Programme(IST), contract number IST-2004-511438

Development of industrial and large-scale products and services pose complex problems. The processes used to develop these products and services typically involve a large number of independent organisational entities at different locations grouped in partnerships and supply chains. Offering connectivity plus interoperability, Grids are a major enabler of improved collaboration and of virtual organisations. They have the potential to reduce substantially the complexity of the development process, thereby improving the ability to deal with product complexity. Applications and associated computing power are central to the product development process; however, data is the heart of the issue. Grid technology is needed to connect diverse data sources, to enable flexible, secure and sophisticated levels of collaboration and make possible the use of powerful knowledge discovery techniques.

• The strategic objectives of SIMDAT are:
• to test and enhance Grid data technology for product development and production process design;
• to develop federated versions of problem-solving environments by leveraging enhanced Grid services;
• to exploit data Grids as a basis for distributed knowledge discovery;
• to promote de facto standards for these enhanced Grid technologies across a range of disciplines and sectors;
• to raise awareness of the advantages of Data Grids in important industrial sectors.

SIMDAT focuses on four application areas: product design in automotive, aerospace and pharma industries as well as a service provision in meteorology. For each of these application areas, a challenging problem has been identified which will be solved using Grid technology. Key to seamless data access is the federation of problem-solving environments that use Grid technologies. Delivery of such federated environments will be a major result of SIMDAT.

SIMDAT Virtual Global Information System Centre

The objective of SIMDAT for the meteorology sector is to develop a virtual and consistent view of all meteorological data distributed in the real-time and archived databases of the partners and to provide a secure, reliable and efficient mechanism to collect, exchange and share these distributed data, in order to support research and operational activities of the meteorological community.
DWD, ECMWF, EUMETSAT, Météo-France and the Met Office with the help of SIMDAT technology specialists, plans to develop and deploy a common system for the collection and sharing of distributed meteorological data.

The V-GISC partners will form a cluster, with partners enjoying equal rights and supporting one another. By the use of Grid technologies and standards and protocols for metadata, data discovery, transport and on-line browsing, the V-GISC infrastructure will improve the load distribution and availability of the system and provide a uniform external interface to the users allowing them to easily locate, access and use the diverse distributed forms of data and their associated metadata.

SIMDAT V-GISC Infrastructure

The project will develop an infrastructure that brings together the data of the partners and
provide access to distributed meteorological databases through the V-GISC. The V-GISC will be seen as a normal GISC and will fulfill the WMO Information System technical requirements. Some key elements of the project are:

• Improve visibility and access to data through a comprehensive discovery service based on metadata development;
• Add value to existing data sets by enabling diverse databases to be used as a unique virtual resource;
• Offer a variety of reliable delivery services;
• Provide a global access control policy managed by the partners and integrated into their existing security infrastructure.
The software developed within the project will be made freely available to the WMO community.

 

SIMDAT V-GISC Architecture

The project will develop Grid-based data services for the V-GISC. Metadata systems, delivery and access tools will be developed to provide users with Grid services linking data discovery across distributed databases to dataset delivery.

• Distributed portal: users search and retrieve data, subscribe to services subject to
authentication and authorization
• Discovery Service: provides data searching
• Subscription Service: provides delivery scheduling,
• Transport Service: provides data delivery,
• Analysis Service: provides post-processing facilities,
• Security Service: verifies user identity and provides authorization credentials
(roles linked with data policies)
• Management Service: provides administrator with management facilities
• Monitoring Service: provides operators and users with monitoring facilities
• Virtual database Service: provides a single view of partners databases

 

 

SIMDAT Prototype Phase I

During the phase I of the project (Oct 04 - Oct 05), a prototype implementing a flexible infrastructure on top of which a Virtual information Centre has been built. The SIMDAT prototype has been developed following a Grid Architecture where Grid Technologies have been used to federate databases located on partner's sites. Another main objective was to design and develop a first version of the unified catalogue based on the XML WMO Core Metadata from which a user can discover and request distributed data. The prototype constitutes a robust basis for the next implementation phases; it has consolidated the SIMDAT initial requirements of the meteorology activity.

 

Results Achieved

 

Lessons learned in the project