One sentence summary

  • SCA should be (seen to be) leader in mainstream computing technologies for the lab, a reliable partner for collaboration and able to develop and support tools for the wider physics community.

First Steps

  • Developing criteria/metrics for project support levels within SCA
    • Take into account need to support existing experiments/projects vs need to develop new initiatives
    • Support single experiment/projects vs set of SLAC based projects vs extended community
    • Internal funding vs external funding
  • Understanding existing and planned projects within SCA
    • Including projects which SCA could/should be involved in
    • Try to identify common requirements which can be "factored out"
      • Maximize reuse, eliminate unnecessary/unintentional duplication
  • Defining technical direction for new projects
    • Attempt to balance leveraging of existing skill-sets vs understanding and exploiting new industry trends
    • Need people's input on what we should be doing
    • Form "task-force" to evaluate some new technologies
    • Create SLAC wide developers "journal-club"
  • Developing targets of opportunity for new projects and collaborations
    • Set of projects ready when new funding opportunities present themselves
    • Developing priority list for existing/new projects
  • Creation of (new) project teams
    • Possibly bring people together from different parts of SCA, and people from outside of SCA
      • E.g. LSST Camera Control System 
        • SLAC Max, Tofigh, Owen Saxton, Stuart Marshall
        • Paris, Indiana, Arizona, Brookhaven, ...

Possible Projects (very early ideas -- not meant to all be good ideas)

  • New Projects
    • Projects with Computing Division
        • Support for GIT, Fisheye, ...
      • Interactive web based scientific computing status page
      • Better integration between Crowd, Group Manager, Single sign-on
      • Account management
      • mathjax for confluence
      • LSF with virtualization
    • Data Management
      • Data Portal for Photon Science (and Astro physics)
        • Best features from Fermi data catalog, JCSG, CXIDB, ICAT, Dirac, ...
      • Why stop at presenting data location via the web?
        • Should be able to drill into and operate on data
      • In a collaborative way
    • Web based scientific data visualization tools
      • Extension/compatible with Google Visualization API
    • Virtual Observatory integration
    • LCLS real-time image displays
  • Existing Projects

Improved SCA web presence

Possible Technologies (see above)

  • Technology selection criteria
    • Lifespan/stability
    • Adoption/Support
    • Popularity/Mindset
    • Language neutrality/Interoperability
  • Google visualization API
  • Web/HTML5/GWT/Dart/Json
  • HDF5
  • IPython/IPython Notebook
  • Virtual Observatory
  • MatLab 
  • DGAS (http://www.to.infn.it/dgas/)
  • LSF virtualized cluster support
  • Google Cloud
  • Replacement for LSF (Steffen)

See also SCA Tech Coord.pdf

  • No labels