Presentations by group members at external events

Not every user knows how to submit a compute job by a remote login or to adapt to different job- submission systems when switching between facilities. In recognition, a recent trend is to provide web portals as an interface, which come in two types, each with its own major drawback. The first type consists of generic job-submission portals, which still require many technical specifics to be supplied by the user and much manual handling of data and results. The second type consists of domain-specific portals, which are expensive and time-consuming to build and maintain.

Edinburgh Data-Intensive Research Data-intensive refers to huge volumes of data, complex patterns of data integration and analysis, and intricate interactions between data and users. Current methods and tools are failing to address data-intensive challenges effectively. They fail for several reasons, all of which are aspects of scalability.

There is a significant pool of untapped sensor resources available in portable computer embedded motion sensors. Included primarily to detect sudden strong motion in order to park the disk heads to prevent damage to the disks in the event of a fall or other severe motion, these sensors may also be tapped for other uses as well. We have developed a system that takes advantage of the Apple Macintosh laptops’ embedded Sudden Motion Sensors to record earthquake strong motion data to rapidly build maps of where and to what extent an earthquake has been felt.

The objective of this JISC-funded pilot project was to remove perceived barriers to uptake of an application that performs analysis of seismic waveform data. The aim was to provide the seismological community with a simplified system that overcame important barriers such as installation and understanding of the analysis package, location and transfer of large amounts of input data and visualisation of results.