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This study investigates the roles of movie storylines and celebrity fandom on destination image. It further considers a wide range of films and their ratings at the film level as a boundary conditi...

Background In mammals, Imprinting Control Regions (ICRs) regulate a subset of genes in a parent-of-origin-specific manner. In both human and mouse, previous studies identified a set of CpG-rich motifs occurring as clusters in ICRs and germline Differentially Methylated Regions (gDMRs). These motifs consist of the ZFP57 binding site (ZFBS) overlapping a subset of MLL binding units known as MLL morphemes. MLL or MLL1 (Mixed Lineage Leukemia 1) is a relatively large multidomain protein that plays a central role in the regulation of transcription. The structures of both MLL1 and MLL2 include a domain (MT) that binds CpG-rich DNA and a conserved domain (SET) that methylates lysine 4 in histone H3 producing H3K4me3 marks in chromatin. Results Since genomic imprinting impacts many developmental and key physiological processes, we followed a previous bioinformatics strategy to pinpoint ICR positions in the Bos taurus genome. Initial genome-wide analyses involved finding the positions of ZFP57 binding sites, and the CpG-rich motifs (ZFBS-morph overlaps) along cattle chromosomal DNA. By creating plots displaying the density of ZFBS-morph overlaps, we removed background noise and thus improved signal detection. With the density-plots, we could view the positions of peaks locating known and candidate ICRs in cattle DNA. Our evaluations revealed the correspondence of peaks in plots to reported known and inferred ICRs/DMRs in cattle. Beside peaks pinpointing such ICRs, the density-plots also revealed additional peaks. Since evaluations validated the robustness of our approach, we inferred that the additional peaks may correspond to candidate ICRs for imprinted gene expression. Conclusion Our bioinformatics strategy offers the first genome-wide approach for systematically localizing candidate ICRs. Furthermore, we have tailored our datasets for upload onto the UCSC genome browser so that researchers could find known and candidate ICRs with respect to a wide variety of annotations at all scales: from the positions of Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms (SNPs), to positions of genes, transcripts, and repeated DNA elements. Furthermore, the UCSC genome browser offers tools to produce enlarged views: to uncover the genes in the vicinity of candidate ICRs and thus discover potential imprinted genes for experimental validations.

Science gateways are an integral component of modern collaborative research. They find widespread adoption by research groups to share data, code and tools both amongst collaborators on a project and the broader community. However, not unlike research groups, gateways too, face the vagaries of research funding often resulting in a bleak outlook for their maintenance beyond the original project’s conclusion. We present a sustainability model based on the HUBzero cyberinfrastructure platform that enables multiple research projects to share a single science gateway allowing for their maintenance even after the original funding source has run out. This model brings with it certain other advantages as well; general improvements to the gateway apply to all hosted projects, similar requirements across projects can often be abstracted into new general purpose capabilities for the gateway which feed back into all hosted projects. Such newly developed capabilities can also foster additional research aiding in new funding proposals that can revitalize and jumpstart hosted dormant projects. We describe a specific instance of a HUBzero science gateway, MyGeoHub, that successfully employs this sustainability model to host several geospatial research projects. We also illustrate the specific advantages of this sustainability model in the case of the MyGeoHub gateway that have led to the development of general-purpose data management and visualization software modules that have found use beyond MyGeoHub.

Collaborative scientific research is now increasingly conducted online in web-based research platforms termed “science gateways”. Most science gateways provide common capabilities including data management and sharing, scientific code development, high performance computing (HPC) integration, and scientific workflow execution of varying automation. Despite the availability of scientific workflow frameworks such as Pegasus and workflow definition languages such as the Common Workflow Language (CWL), in practice typical workflows on science gateways still involve a mix of non-reusable code, desktop tools, and intermediate data wrangling. With the growing emphasis on FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) science, such mixed workflows present a significant challenge to ensuring compliance to these principles. These challenges are further compounded in the earth sciences where researchers spend inordinate amounts of time manually acquiring, wrangling, and processing earth observation data from repositories managed by organizations such as NASA, USGS, etc. Our extensible geospatial data framework, GeoEDF is designed to address these challenges, making remote datasets directly usable in computational code and facilitating earth science workflows that execute entirely in a science gateway. In this paper we describe the design of GeoEDF, current implementation status, and future work.

Science gateways provide integrated data and computation support for research, education and online collaboration. To address the emerging shortage of adequately trained students and workforce in science and technology, more projects are utilizing gateways to disseminate training materials and online modules. However, the contents of these online learning modules are mostly limited to static materials, lacking support for dynamic and interactive learning. As part of the NSF funded GeoEDF project, we enhanced the HUBzero platform with novel capabilities to improve the online learning experience. These improvements include developing general purpose online tools for education purpose and implementing integrated data and tool functions in the HUBzero course module so that instructors can create online course outlines that seamlessly combine static teaching materials with dynamic data, tools, and interactive coding environments such as Jupyter Notebook and RStudio. In this paper we describe in detail the newly augmented HUBzero course environment implemented on MyGeoHub and showcase several projects that have been using these capabilities on MyGeoHub to support a broad spectrum of learning and training activities, including (1) development and delivery of adaptable cyber training modules for teaching undergraduate and graduate students on the FAIR (Findable, Accessible Interoperable and Reusable) science principles and applications in the fields of hydrology and climate sciences; (2) development and delivery of a short course and workshop tutorials on studying global sustainability using a gridded crop modeling system on MyGeoHub; (3) development of next-generation workforce through undergraduate internships in partnership with the Purdue Discovery Park Undergraduate Research Internship (DURI) program; and (4) outreach to middle school students entering 10th and 11th grade in the TOTAL (Turned Onto Technology and Leadership) summer camp, introducing them to geospatial data management and analysis using MyGeoHub cyberinfrastructure.

Node downtime and failed jobs in a computing cluster translate into wasted resources and user dissatisfaction. Therefore understanding why nodes and jobs fail in HPC clusters is essential. This paper provides analyses of node and job failures in two university-wide computing clusters at two Tier I US research universities. We analyzed approximately 3.0M job execution data of System A and 2.2M of System B with data sources coming from accounting logs, resource usage for all primary local and remote resources (memory, IO, network), and node failure data. We observe different kinds of correlations of failures with resource usages and propose a job failure prediction model to trigger event-driven checkpointing and avoid wasted work. Additionally, we present user history based resource usage and runtime prediction models. These models have the potential to avoid system related issues such as contention, and improve quality of service such as lower mean queue time, if their predictions are used to make a more informed scheduling decision. As a proof of concept, we simulate an easy backfill scheduler to use predictions of one of these models, i.e., runtime and show the improvements in terms of lower mean queue time. Arising out of these observations, we provide generalizable insights for cluster management to improve reliability, such as, for some execution environments local contention dominates, while for others system-wide contention dominates.

Access to climate and spatial datasets by non-specialists is restricted by technical barriers involving hardware, software and data formats. We discuss an open-source online tool that facilitates downloading the climate data from the global circulation models used by the Inter-Sectoral Impacts Model Intercomparison Project. The tool also offers temporal and spatial aggregation capabilities for incorporating future climate scenarios in applications where spatial aggregation is important. We hope that streamlined access to these data facilitates analysis of climate related issues while considering the uncertainties derived from future climate projections and temporal aggregation choices. Keywords: Climate data, CMIP5, Climate models, HUBzero, Growing season temperature, Growing season precipitation, Climate change and agriculture

This paper describes the use of cyberinfrastructure to create interactive applications as part of the Useful to Usable (U2U) project. These applications transform historical climate data, knowledge, and models into decision support tools for end users such as crop farmers, university Extension educators, and other agricultural advisors. In creating a cyberinfrastructure to support the U2U project, four major challenges have been addressed: designing and developing highly usable web applications with frequent feedback, establishing a software engineering environment to support iterative development, integrating and synthesizing historical and current datasets from a variety of sources (local vs. remote, different access methods, and formats), and supporting project collaboration needs of data and document sharing, project management, and public outreach. The overall goals of the cyberinfrastructure and its architecture design are described. Methods for data retrieval and synthesis, as well as the various software components utilized are discussed. The development and integration of tools into the collaborative HUBzero framework are highlighted, including the use of HUBzero’s core features to share ideas, algorithms, and results. A highly iterative development process that includes feedback from experts and end-users to feed requirement definition, design and application updates are also examined.

Zirconium alloys are widely used as structural materials in nuclear applications because of their attractive properties such as a low absorption cross-section for thermal neutrons, excellent corrosion resistance in water, and good mechanical properties at reactor operating temperatures. Zr-2.5Nb is one of the most commonly used zirconium alloys and has been used for pressure tube materials in CANDU (Canada Deuterium Uranium) and RBMK (Reaktor Bolshoy Moshchnosti Kanalnyy, “High Power Channel-type Reactor”) reactors for over 40 years. In a recent report from the Electric Power Research Institute, Zr-2.5Nb was identified as one of the candidate materials for use in normal structural applications in light-water reactors owing to its increased resistance to irradiation-induced degradation as compared with currently used materials. Historically, the largest program of in-reactor tests on zirconium alloys was performed by Atomic Energy of Canada Limited. Over many years of in-reactor testing and CANDU operating experience with Zr-2.5Nb, extensive research has been conducted on the irradiation effects on its microstructures, mechanical properties, deformation behaviours, fracture toughness, delayed hydride cracking, and corrosion. Most of the results on Zr-2.5Nb obtained from CANDU experience could be used to predict the material performance under light water reactors. This paper reviews the irradiation effects on Zr-2.5Nb in power reactors (including heavy-water and light-water reactors) and summarizes the current state of knowledge.

We discuss an on-line tool that facilitates access to the large collection of climate impacts on crop yields produced by the Agricultural Model Intercomparison and Improvement Project. This collection comprises the output of seven crop models which were run on a global grid using climate data from five different general circulation models under the current set of representative pathways. The output of this modeling endeavor consists of more than 36,000 publicly available global grids at a spatial resolution of one half degree. We offer flexible ways to aggregate these data while reducing the technical barriers implied by learning new download platforms and specialized formats. The tool is accessed trough any standard web browser without any special bandwidth requirement. Facilitates on-line access to AgMIP's global climate impacts on crop yields.The tool is implemented in GEOSHARE's HUBzero cyberinfrastructure.We offer flexible ways to aggregate these data.The tool increases access to the data by reducing technical barriers.The tool is web-based and download does not require special bandwidth requirements.

Hydrologic models for a particular watershed or a region are created for addressing a specific research or management problem, and most of the models do not get reused after the project is completed. Similarly, multiple models may exist for a particular geographic location from different researchers or organizations. To avoid the duplication of efforts, and enable model reuse and enhancement through collaborative efforts, a prototype cyberinfrastructure, called SWATShare, is developed for sharing, execution and visualization of Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT). The objective of this paper is to present the software architecture, functional capabilities and implementation of SWATShare as a collaborative environment for hydrology research and education using the models published and shared in the system. Besides the capability of publishing, sharing, discovery and downloading of SWAT models, some of the functions in SWATShare such as model calibration are supported by providing access to high performance computing resources including the XSEDE and cloud. Additionally, SWATShare can create dynamic spatial and temporal plots of model outputs at different scales. SWATShare can also be used as an educational tool within a classroom setting for comparing the hydrologic processes under different geographic and climatic settings. The utility of SWATShare for collaborative research and education is demonstrated by using three case studies. Even though this paper focuses on the SWAT model, the system's architecture can be replicated for other models as well. A cyberinfrastructure is developed for sharing and publication of hydrologic models.SWATShare is a platform for collaborative research and education using SWAT model.SWATShare can be used for online SWAT simulation, calibration and visualization.SWATShare uses publicly available distributed computing resources.

Tools developed for the Geospatial Data Analysis Building Blocks (GABBs) project that are available on MyGeoHub.org have been used for a geospatial experience for middle school students at Turned Onto Technology & Leadership (TOTAL) summer camps at Purdue University during 2016 and 2017. Thirty to thirty-six middle school students from diverse backgrounds and from around the United States used one such tool, MultiSpec Online to determine the area of a flood which occurred in June 2008 in southern Illinois and Indiana using Landsat 5 multispectral satellite data. The students also got hands-on experience using the GeoBuilder tool to find locations within Indiana with the highest reported rain events.The students received introductions to remote sensing, Geobuilder and MultiSpec Online during a one-day session and the following day they participated in a 75-minute active learning session to work through the exercises. The GABBs team worked closely with the students in multiple sessions helping them with technical questions and at the same time, collecting valuable feedback in how to improve the tools.At the end of the session for the second year, the students completed a four-question evaluation form to provide structured feedback. It was clear that the students were much more excited about the active learning session than the introduction (presentation) session.

In the Midwestern United States, where a third of the world's maize crop is grown, there are few decision support tools available to help farmers and their advisors plan for an uncertain climatic future. Developing tools that are actually useful and usable to agricultural decision makers necessitates an interdisciplinary team of climate scientists, agronomists, computer scientists, and social scientists. With such diversity come varying levels of engagement (e.g. co-project director, student, technician, etc.) and experience working with farmers and/or serving in an official Extension capacity. Therefore working together to address this challenging issue is not straight-forward. This paper reviews how a survey of a large interdisciplinary team working on developing decision support tools to ensure resilient maize production in this region identified differences between team members and helped improve team functioning and communication. Specifically the team survey revealed some important differences in how team members perceive farmers' use of climate information, the types of decisions that should be addressed with a tool, and how such tools should function. These differences can be primarily explained by disciplinary background and project role and have provided valuable opportunities to learn from each other and build consensus on decision support tools developed. The survey as a feed-back tool complements other team communication approaches and reminds the team of the need for continuous communication and frequent discussion of assumptions.

Summary In this paper, we described the benefits and the challenges of integrating existing scientific workflow technologies into science gateways. Scientific workflow managers are powerful tools for handling large computational tasks. Domain scientists find it difficult to create new workflows, so many tasks that could benefit from workflow automation are often avoided or performed by hand. Two technologies have come together to bring the benefits of workflow to the masses. The Pegasus Workflow Management System can manage workflows comprised of millions of tasks, all the while recording data about the execution and intermediate results so that the provenance of the final result is clear. The HUBzero platform for scientific collaboration provides a venue for building and delivering tools to researchers and educators. With the press of a button, these tools can launch Pegasus workflows on national computing infrastructures and bring results back for plotting and visualization. As a result, the combination of Pegasus and HUBzero is bringing high-throughput computing to a much wider audience. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

This paper describes an XSEDE Extended Collaboration Support Service (ECSS) effort on scaling a campus-developed online BLAST service (BLASTer) into an XSEDE gateway to help bridge the gap between genomic researchers and advanced computing and data environments like those found in the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) network. Biologists and geneticists all over the world use the suite of Basic Local Alignment Search Tools (BLAST) developed by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) throughout the full spectrum of genomic research. It has become one of the de facto bioinformatics applications used in all variety of computing environments. BLASTer allows researchers to achieve those tasks faster and without expert computing knowledge by converting BLAST jobs to parallel executions. It handles all of the details of computation submission, execution, and database access for users through an intuitive web-based interface provided by the unique features of the HUBzero gateway platform. This paper details the core development of BLASTer for campus computing resources at Purdue University, some of its successes among the user community, and the current efforts by an ECSS scientific gateways project from XSEDE to include data-intensive use of resources like Wrangler at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) in the XSEDE network. The lessons learned from this project will be used to bring other XSEDE computing resources to BLASTer in the future and other programs like BLASTer to XSEDE users.

Holistic approaches are needed for understanding and addressing a wide range of environmental issues that require multidis- ciplinary studies of complex and interlocking systems. The writers' vision of a cyberinfrastructure for end-to-end environmental explo- ration C4E4 that combines data and modeling tools in an integrated environment across different spatial and temporal scales is presented. The overall goal behind C4E4 is to enable a broad environmental research and remediation community to address the challenges of environmental data management and integration in real-world settings. The St. Joseph Watershed in northern Indiana is chosen as a test bed in this effort. The C4E4 framework will allow researchers to combine heterogeneous data resources with state-of- the-art modeling and visualization tools through a user-friendly web portal. By engaging TeraGrid resources, C4E4 will have the computational resources to store, manipulate, and query large data sets, thereby facilitating new science. C4E4 will serve as a prototype, and provide valuable experience for scaling up to larger observatories at the national level. This paper presents the writers' vision and goals, initial efforts, and briefly describes how C4E4 can benefit the environmental community.

Interactive Parallelization Tool (IPT) is a semi-automatic tool that can be used by domain experts and students for transforming certain classes of existing applications into multiple parallel variants. An end-user of IPT provides existing application and high-level specifications for parallelization as input. On the basis of the specifications provided by the end-user, IPT carries out the code changes in the given existing application to generate parallel variants that can be run on different High Performance Computing (HPC) platforms. The parallel programming paradigms that are currently supported by IPT are MPI, OpenMP, and CUDA. The supported base languages are C and C++. Though IPT is still under active development, it has been recently made available on a web-enabled platform, named DiaGrid Hub, with the support from the XSEDE Extended Collaborative Support Service (ECSS). While the main goal of IPT is to make parallel programming easy for its end-users, the main goal of DiaGrid Hub is to enable the research community with instant access to HPC and High Throughput Computing platforms through a user-friendly web-interface. By deploying IPT on DiaGrid Hub, our goal is to enable the end-users to generate parallel versions of their existing applications without having to install IPT locally. They can also immediately compile and run the generated applications on Purdue and XSEDE resources that are available through DiaGrid Hub. Hence, the collaborative project that is reported in this paper lowers the entry-barriers to parallel programming and the usage of the national CyberInfrastructure (CI). In this paper, we present our ongoing work on deploying IPT over DiaGrid and testing the usability of IPT through a web-interface.

In this paper, we describe a "gateway as a service" approach to help researchers bring their applications online quickly and make them available for the broad user community. This approach builds on the HUBzero technology and leverages the XSEDE HPC resources. It enables individual scientists and small research groups to quickly develop, deploy, and share their applications online without having to learn web programming and the XSEDE system level software stacks. The cost of such approach for a small team would be significantly lower than building a science gateway from scratch and sustaining it in the long run. The applicability of this approach was demonstrated via an XSEDE Extended Collaborative Support Service (ECSS) project we have recently completed for developing a biomechanical imaging (BMI) gateway. Our team consists of ECSS staff from Purdue University and biomechanical imaging researchers from Boston University and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. In the ECSS work, we were able to quickly develop an online tool for composing and executing NLACE model simulations on Gordon and visualizing the model output interactively using ParaView. The online tool runs on DiaGrid Hub (powered by HUBzero) with comprehensive support for job and workflow submission, tickets, content management, discussion forum, wiki, project, group, documentation, rating, citation, and usage tracking.

The NEXRAD Level II super resolution Doppler radars continuously scan the atmosphere above the continental USA, providing a stream of temporally and spatially misaligned large volumetric data about cloud reflectivity, wind velocity, and spectrum width. This data is used for immediate and long term weather predictions. However, because this large amount of sparse streaming data is not temporally aligned, the existing approaches rely either on a 2D projection of the 3D data, or the display of the 3D data only for a single radar. We present a framework that enables users to interactively access, analyze, and visualize the Doppler reflectivity data directly in 3D for multiple radars. Our approach extends the existing body of work on large-scale storage of global weather data and out-of-core volume rendering using CUDA ray-casting. The asynchronously streamed reflectivity data from multiple radars are first temporally aligned and then processed to a hierarchical format that is suitable for a large-scale volumetric visualization in near-real time with a minimal run-time processing. This approach also allows for varying precision and level of detail.

With the advent of XSEDE, the national cyberinfrastructure has evolved from a set of traditional HPC resources to a broader range of digital services. Science gateways, which serve as portals to scientific applications, have also evolved as researchers are dealing with rapidly expanding scientific datasets and the increasingly complex workflows. More and more gateways are being developed to support integrated services for running data-driven applications on HPC resources such as those on XSEDE. To facilitate this type of workflow, there is a pressing need for web-based data management systems that are easy to use, support data upload, sharing, access and management, and can be integrated with advanced computation and storage resources. More importantly such systems need to be accessible by users from the broad research and education communities. In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of iData, a web-based community data publishing and sharing system. iData supports both generic file-based data collections and several commonly used environmental data collection formats including time series, GIS vector and raster data. Integrated data processing, visualization and filtering capabilities are provided for these data formats. Currently iData can be downloaded and deployed in a HUBzero-based gateway, and we plan to make it available for non-HUBzero platforms in the future. We present two examples in which iData has been successfully used to support research collaboration in driNET and GEOSHARE projects.

In today’s highly competitive environment, air transport is crucial to tourism development. A destination marketer must understand the reasons that affect visitors’ purchase behaviour to facilitate service quality. This study aimed to provide specific clues to understanding the low-cost airline (LCA) business in a broad context and to present a holistic perspective of the buying behaviour of low-cost carrier (LCC) passengers. Through its investigation of the motivations of LCC passengers, it found that the main determinants of passengers’ behavioural intentions rested on the values of these passengers and their satisfaction with the destination. This study adopted a qualitative approach in which 30 individuals who travelled to Macau within the last 6 months were interviewed. According to the results, the destination of Macau had a significantly positive effect on the visitors’ purchase intentions. Recommendations for destination marketers are identified in this study.

The study of surface water hydrology involves understanding the occurrence, distribution and movement of water on the surface of the earth. Because of human impacts in the form of landuse change, the hydrologic processes at one geographic location may be different than other locations under same or different climatic settings. As a result, a tool that educators and students can use to explore hydrology through observed data and computational simulations is needed. The objective of this paper is to present a prototype model sharing and data exploration tool that can be used for education as well as for research. A GIS-enabled model sharing platform for Soil Water Assessment Tool (SWAT), called SWATShare, is developed that enables students to not only run model simulations online, but also publish, share and visualize model results to study the impact of land use change on hydrology at watershed scale. SWATShare is developed as a part of the WaterHUB system that is built by combining Purdue's HUBzero technology and TeraGrid/XSEDE computation resources. Experience of developing and using SWATShare in a classroom will be presented and discussed. In addition, the development and implementation plan of another tool, called Hydrology Exploration Tool, will be presented.

The Community Earth System Model (CESM) is a widely used community model for studying the climate system on the Earth. The CESM model is both data and computationally intensive, making it difficult for users to set up and run CESM simulations using local resources. In this paper, we describe an integrated climate modeling environment that supports CESM simulations on the TeraGrid, comprehensive model metadata description, and automatic archival of model data and metadata for easy community access. This system builds upon and integrates several existing efforts -- the Purdue CCSM modeling portal, the Earth System Grid, the Earth System Modeling Framework, and the Earth System Curator. We present the design and implementation of our prototype system as well as an end-to-end usage scenario which is broken down into three workflows: model execution, data publishing, and metadata collection/publishing. The system will be used to support research and education on climate systems. We describe our plan and early efforts to engage users and obtain their feedback.

Many scientists today routinely conduct simulations and run models using high performance computing (HPC) resources provided by national, regional and campus grid infrastructures, either directly logging into such resources or indirectly via web portals and other application client software, i.e. science gateways. Science gateways have proven to be an effective way of bringing HPC resources to a much larger user base. However, developing a new gateway demands substantial effort, requiring both cyberinfrastructure and domain expertise. This paper describes an approach by core software developers to provide domain specific web services (DomWS) to science gateway and application developers. The core developers deliver a set of web services that understand domain specific semantics and translate domain application requests into computational and other tasks that are dispatched onto the distributed high end resources. This approach allows gateway and application developers to easily create customized application services and focus on the gateway functions and interfaces, such as gadgets and desktop clients, that serve their user community. The DomWS approach is not a generic solution for all simulation services. Our aim is to help application developers apply this framework with ease to their specific models and simulations with a small degree of code modification. DomWS also provides reusable modules and templates for common tasks needed by the targeted user community. This paper describes a set of web services that have been developed for Community Climate System Model (CCSM) version 4 using this approach.

Climate science educators face great challenges on combining theory with hands-on practices in teaching climate modeling. Typical model runs require large computation and storage resources that may not be available on a campus. Additionally, the training and support required to bring novices up to speed would consume significant class time. The same challenges also exist across many other science and engineering disciplines. The TeraGrid science gateway program is leading the way of a new paradigm in addressing such challenges. As part of the TeraGrid science gateway initiative, The Purdue CCSM portal aims at assisting both research and education users to run Community Climate System Model (CCSM) simulations using the TeraGrid high performance computing resources. It provides a one-stop shop for creating, configuring, running CCSM simulations as well as managing jobs and processing output data. The CCSM portal was used in a Purdue graduate class for students to get hands-on experience with running world class climate simulations and use the results to study climate change impact on political policies. The CCSM portal is based on a service-oriented architecture with multiple interfaces to facilitate training. This paper describes the design of the CCSM portal with the goal of supporting classroom users, the challenges of utilizing the portal in a classroom setting, and the solutions implemented. We present two student projects from the fall 2009 class that successfully used the CCSM portal.

[1] Community Climate System Model (CCSM3) sensitivity experiments are performed to investigate the impact of past wetland drainage on the hydroclimatology of midwestern United States (MW USA). Coupled land surface and atmospheric components of CCSM3 are used at T85 (∼140 km) horizontal grid mesh size to create four control model experiments. These include: (1) 355 ppm CO2 for year 1990 excluding wetland (present condition), (2) 355 ppm CO2 for 1990 including wetland, (3) 289 ppm CO2 for year 1870 excluding wetland, and (4) 289 ppm CO2 for year 1870 including wetland. The CCSM3 control run for the present condition is validated with high-resolution North American Regional Reanalysis (NARR) data for the Midwest region. Validation results show that CCSM3 is reasonable in simulating at-surface incoming solar radiation, net short-wave radiation, and 2 m air temperature. However, partitioning of net radiation into sensible and latent heat fluxes is imprecise, and summer precipitation is largely underestimated in CCSM3. To remove any biases in CCSM3 output, results from sensitivity experiments are analyzed in terms of difference in monthly climatology. Sensitivity experiment results show significant changes in summer sensible and latent heat fluxes due to wetland drainage. Near-surface (2 m) air temperature has significantly increased, and convective precipitation has decreased by a small amount (∼50 mm) during the summer. Except for 2 m air temperature which is affected by both greenhouse gas emission–based climate change and wetland drainage over the last century, all other climatic variables are primarily affected by wetland drainage in the region.

For new Condor users, an easy-to-use interface to submit and monitor jobs from anywhere will significantly lower their barrier of entry to the Condor grid technology. Abstracting system and configuration details will facilitate more widespread use of Condor, as users with no detailed knowledge of Condor will be able to focus on their computational code. We introduce a context-free system that enables users to easily submit, manage, and monitor their job regardless of the operating system they use or the language by which the client is written. This system helps users to send computational jobs to a federated Condor resource, thus shielding users from details such as pool information, job migration, account used, etc..., so long as the users have valid credentials for job submission. Our system also features bulk job submission with load balancing among multiple schedulers, SpaceLease functionality to manage common data files, and asynchronous job event updates. Our system uses the JBoss application server and Condor Birdbath APIs. The design of this system aims at significantly reducing the overhead on the schedd which currently suffers from continuous polling from the users, and thus, helping Condor to scale in order to serve a very large number of concurrent users. A client application has been developed to test and validate various system components. Using this client application, a user can submit jobs from any operating system anywhere without logging in to the remote Condor submit machine, and is notified of the job status in real-time without any special configuration for the target environment.

This paper presents our work of enhancing the existing cyberinfrastructure using Web 2.0 technologies for delivering real time satellite data to a broader audience. As a resource provider on the TeraGrid, Purdue University hosts several data collections for earth and environmental research, including a large number of satellite data products that are received and generated in real time at the Purdue Terrestrial Observatory (PTO). A science gateway portal, named PRESTIGE, has been developed as the access point to services related to the satellite data generated at PTO. It remains a major challenge to help potential users easily discover the data products that are available and access them based on their needs. In an effort to address this challenge, we developed different interfaces for different user groups. We use the Google gadget as a new way to deliver satellite data and information to a broad user community. Three satellite data viewer gadgets have been developed and deployed. They connect to a data generation and processing system at the backend. The gadgets embrace the recent Web 2.0 technologies in bringing the rich access and sharing capabilities available in the general cyberspace to the scientific user communities.

Most of the space agencies have built Grid systems to manage large volumes of spatial data archives and products. However, the heterogeneous data structure, the distributed storage location, and the gradual progress of building data service systems, make such spatial grid systems to be grid islands. The broker-based manage model can hide complexity and heterogeneity of spatial data sources, so that the research on broker-based data service is meaningful to promote inter-Grid collaboration for earth observation applications. This paper discusses the special problems of spatial information integration and some features of broker-based data management model. We demonstrate the prototype of building broker-based model to integrate heterogeneous data grid. This work securely provides querying and managing geospatial data and services, and transparent access to the related sources under Grid and Web Service environment. The paper also describe our experiences of case study on seamless integration with Purdue TeraGrid Data by using Storage Resource Broker, which is based on the extensible data service interfaces of China Spatial Information Grid.

The dynamic and multi-organizational nature of Grid systems requires effective and efficient accountability systems to scale for accommodating large number of users and resources. The availability of detailed and complete accountability data is crucial for both the Grid administrators and the overall Grid community. In this paper we present a layered architecture for addressing the end-to-end accountability problem. We introduce the concept of accountability agents, entities in charge of collecting accountability data, keeping track of submitted jobs and their users. We present a simple yet effective language to specify the relevant accountability data to be collected and selectively distributed by the accountability agents. Additionally, we design a decentralized and scalable approach to accountability, so to be able to monitor jobs workflow with relatively little intrusion.

Many scientific, engineering and business applications benefit from the ability to submit a large number of computational jobs to a Condor pool simultaneously. However, crafting a correct Condor submission script is not trivial, especially for the less computer command line-savvy users. Therefore, developers often wish to create a job submission page in a Web client application for the Condor system to provide an easy way for users to run their computation jobs. In doing so, the developers must understand the Condor ClassAd mechanism and provide a proper transformation if the application needs to support user or application defined ClassAds. This paper describes a rapid and easy way of creating a job submission page using our visual Web components. By integrating these components into a popular web application integrated development environment (IDE), the developers can easily compose a Condor job submission page by dragging and dropping the components. This will significantly reduce the time spent on creating the job submission application.

The high resolution NEXRAD level II data provides critical information for researchers and the broader community to understand, monitor, and predict weather in a timely manner. There are several limitations in existing systems for providing easy-to-access 3D visualization of the radar data to the user community. In this paper, we present a scalable and user driven solution for near-real-time remote radar data access, processing, and 3D visualization. The system provides multi-layered interfaces for a broad range of users with different levels of services, allowing them to interactively explore data from multiple radar stations over a time period of interest. Parallel data pre-processing using the Purdue Condor pool and volume caching are implemented to help improve the system response time and scalability. The system also provides reusable radar data services and a set of access points which can be invoked by third party applications. With this hierarchical and user driven design, our system creates a rich and easy to use NEXRAD data service environment for research and education users.

Purdue University operates one of the largest cycle recovery systems in existence in academia based on the Condor workload management system. This system represents a valuable and useful cyberinfrastructure (CI) resource supporting research and education for campus and national users. During the construction and operation of this CI, we encountered many unforeseen challenges and benefits unique to an actively used infrastructure of this size. The most significant problems were integrating Condor with existing campus UPC resources, managing resource and user growth, coping with the distributed ownership of compute resources around campus, and integrating this CI with the Tera- Gridand Open Science Grid. In this paper, we describe some of our experiences and establish some best practices, which we believe will be valuable and useful to other academic institutions seeking to operate a production campus cyberinfrastrucure of a similar scale and utility.

The role of DC-SIGN on human rectal mucosal dendritic cells is unknown. Using highly purified human rectal mucosal DC-SIGN + cells and an ultrasensitive real-time reverse transcription-PCR assay to quantify virus binding, we found that HLA-DR + /DC-SIGN + cells can bind and transfer more virus than the HLA-DR + /DC-SIGN − cells. Greater than 90% of the virus bound to total mucosal mononuclear cells (MMCs) was accounted for by the DC-SIGN + cells, which comprise only 1 to 5% of total MMCs. Significantly, anti-DC-SIGN antibodies blocked 90% of the virus binding when more-physiologic amounts of virus inoculum were used. DC-SIGN expression in the rectal mucosa was significantly correlated with the interleukin-10 (IL-10)/IL-12 ratio ( r = 0.58, P < 0.002; n = 26) among human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)-positive patients. Ex vivo and in vitro data implicate the role of IL-10 in upregulating DC-SIGN expression and downregulating expression of the costimulatory molecules CD80/CD86. Dendritic cells derived from monocytes (MDDCs) in the presence of IL-10 render the MDDCs less responsive to maturation stimuli, such as lipopolysaccharide and tumor necrosis factor alpha, and migration to the CCR7 ligand macrophage inflammatory protein 3β. Thus, an increased IL-10 environment could render DC-SIGN + cells less immunostimulatory and migratory, thereby dampening an effective immune response. DC-SIGN and the IL-10/IL-12 axis may play significant roles in the mucosal transmission and pathogenesis of HIV type 1.

Establishment of the Kamal Ewida Earth Observatory (KEEO) has been funded by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Science for Peace Program. KEEO is a joint initiative of two of Egypt's largest and most venerable institutions of higher learning, Cairo University and Al Azhar University, both based in Cairo, Egypt, in collaboration with established environmental observatories in two NATO countries, Turkey and the USA. Specifically, the Egyptian partners, based in their Departments of Meteorology and Astronomy, Faculty of Science, at the two Egyptian Universities, are engaging in applications development, research and instructional collaboration with partnering resources from Bogazici University's Kandilli Observatory and Earthquake Research Institute (Istanbul, Turkey), with expertise in disaster mitigation, and Purdue University's Rosen Center for Advanced Computing's Purdue Terrestrial Observatory (West Lafayette, Indiana, USA), with expertise in real-time remote sensing and multi-disciplinary applications of satellite data. The KEEO project provides an interdisciplinary approach to effective disaster management and facilitates collaborative research and decision support, within the Egyptian context, for disaster mitigation.