SFB 963 - AstroFIT

Collabborative Research Centre 963 – strophysical Flow Instabilities and Turbulence (CRC 963 – AstroFIT)

Subproject: INF ADIR: the AstroFIT Data InfRastructure

Project Goals

The projects in the CRC 963 are for research on fundamental questions related to the formation and evolution of planets, stars and galaxies. To this end, various aspects of the turbulent generation and amplification of magnetic fields, the turbulence and instability in rotating systems and the interaction of turbulence and instability flow with gravity, radiation and dust particles are investigated. Located at the research campus Göttingen, the sub-project INF ADIR is responsible for providing the central infrastructure for the storage and management of data for the entire CRC 963. The IT infrastructure includes the semi-automatic data integration, analysis, and visualization. The system supports the exchange of observational and experimental data and allows the calibration of simulation models. Through this platform cooperation is promoted in terms of technical and methodological aspects and numerical simulations. The archiving platform ADIR Archive of the INF project enables direct archiving of simulation and observation data straight from the parallel computers, the workstations of scientists and the measurement computers in the local institutions, that are directly connected to sensors and high speed cameras. Even greater filings of vast amounts of data ranging into the terabytes causes no problems. The data transmission is AES encrypted with the possibility to resume broken uploads.

The administration of the archive records is done in a Web application. Therefor the data sets are to be tagged with Handle Persistent Indentifier on the EPIC-API v2 in order to ensure referenceability the archived data in publications. The archiving platform is integrated into the project management system of the SFB to allow uniform password usage and mapping project affiliations. The project management platform of the CRC 963 allows subproject across to share files, build knowledge bases in integrated Wiki and jointly create publications and software with the built-in SVN / GIT repositories. There is also the possibility of granting access to both platforms for worldwide associated scientists or colleagues from other research institutions outside of the CRC 963 and edit scientific questions jointly without a loss of time. The software for uploading research data in the archiving platform is available for Linux, Windows and Mac OS X. For the assignment of data to institutions and researchers a PKI infrastructure is used.

GWDG’s Role in the Project

The GWDG works on the ADIR INF subproject of the SFB 963 together with the Institute of Astrophysics of the University of Göttingen. The archiving system ADIR Archive described above was designed, planned and implemented by employees of the GWDG. The GWDG is responsible to the archive system for the operation of the system, the connection of measuring computers and parallel computing cluster. Further the GWDG handles the end-customer support. In addition to technical expertise the GWDG also provides best practices, process consulting and user training for the organization and archiving of research data. The GWDG spreads also the lessons learned methodologies and technics of the in the CRC 963 in other data-intensive collaborative research centers at the Göttingen Research Campus and a variety of other scientific institutions among the customers of the GWDG.

Project Partners

The SFB 963 subproject INF ADIR is a research group consisting of actors from the scientific community of Göttingen and the Technical University of Braunschweig.

Participants are

• Institutes of the Georg-August-University of Göttingen: Astrophysics, Geophysics, Non-Linear Dynamics, Numerical and Applied Mathematics, and Geoscientific Center Department of Isotope Geology
• Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research
• Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization
• DLR Institute of Aerodynamics and Flow Technology
• Institutes of the TU Braunschweig: geophysics and extraterrestrial physics as well as theoretical physics

The Department of Astrophysics at the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen and the GWDG is responsible for the subproject INF ADIR.