Cyberinfrastructure
Introduction
"Cyberinfrastructure" is a term that refers to the various software tools and libraries that make it possible to do scientific work with computers. There are various types of cyberinfrastructure, ranging from extremely low-level software that handles communication between computers on the network or nodes within a parallel computer to high-level software that allows scientists to manage data and helps them to draw inferences from it. Most of the cyberinfrastructure work I am involved in as part of my research appointment at NCSA involves tools to make the lives of simulators easier.
Simulation management: Teuthis
Teuthis is a tool to improve the efficiency with which computational scientists make use of computing resources, particularly high-performance computers. It allows users to centrally manage the building of source code, the construction of computational experiments with complex designs involving hundreds of parameter choices and workflow steps, the remote execution and continuation of jobs, and the storage and retrieval of data. Teuthis supports several different astrophysical community codes, including FLASH, and makes use of standard Grid tools and cross-platform windowing libraries. Tools like Teuthis promise to be increasingly essential as astrophysical simulation migrates to petascale dataset and computation sizes. Teuthis is publicly available at
http://sipapu.astro.illinois.edu/projects/teuthis/. Currently work on Teuthis is stalled because of lack of funding, but a prototype version 2 including the advanced features described here is available.
