Page History

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

Possible Collaborators (see above)

• Atlas group at Argonne (Sergei Chekanov, David Malon, ...)
• Root team
• Tech-X
• Google/Amazon/...

...

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