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Research Computing

Online Geographic Information System Services

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Geographic Information System (GIS) software has traditionally been used on desktop computers to develop, display, and analyze spatial data.  Recent advances in web-based GIS software now allow researchers and instructors to upload their spatial data to online GIS services.  Colleagues and students can then view and query — and even edit — GIS data online via a web browser and without having GIS software installed on their desktop computers.

NACS uses ESRI’s ArcGIS Server to provide online GIS services.  Development of a new online GIS service is straightforward.  Once an ArcGIS Desktop document is developed, the document and associated GIS data files are uploaded to an ArcGIS Server. A GIS service is generated and custom data queries are assigned. The URL for this new GIS service can then be distributed for users to visit the new site.

NACS has been developing GIS services using ArcGIS Server for two years.  If you are interested in making your GIS data available online, we can develop a GIS service on our server using your data, or we can help you set up ArcGIS Server on your own or a departmental system.

Here are a few ArcGIS Server applications running on the NACS GIS server.  When viewing these GIS services, consider how your own spatial data might be displayed and explored using ArcGIS Server.

Recent Southern California fires (Freeway, Tea, and Sayre) using ESRI basemap data and fire perimeters collected by the Geospatial Multi-Agency Coordination.

California No Child Left Behind, within the UCI Department of Education.

History of North American Indians used for instruction within the UCI Department of History.

GIS Technology in UCI Research

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Geographical Information Systems (GIS) is a technology which is finding ever broader use in the UCI research community. NACS Research Computing Specialist Tony Soeller has been supporting GIS software, teaching workshops, and working directly with faculty and graduate students on research projects to exploit GIS tools. Here are some recent examples.

Professor Bradford Hawkins in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology is tracking global species diversity in birds. GIS was used on a massive spatial data synthesis project on global bird ranges to georegister, digitize and rasterize bird range maps, then to summarize the number of bird species within discrete cells 27.5 to 220 km on a side. Numerous ArcGIS programs (ArcObjects and VBA) were written to help in the processing of the data.

Cristiane Surbeck completed her Ph.D. studies in Professor Stan Grant’s lab in Chemical Engineering and Materials Sciences and is now an Assistant Professor at University of Mississippi. Cris has been analyzing the Santa Ana River Watershed. Her research looked at the biological and sediment constituents of runoff into the Santa Ana River from three storm events within the watershed, and compared these data to rainfall volume and land use types which contributed to the runoff. GIS was used to synthesize land use data with rainfall data from the storm events, to delineate individual storm watersheds, and to determine the area of land within each land use type and the amount of precipitation within each of those land use types.

Satish Vutuku, a student in Professor Donald Dabdub’s lab in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering is examining the impact on air quality of distributed power generation.

In one project, Satish assessed atmospheric impact of emissions from distributed power generation (DG) sources. DG refers to “on-site” generation of power using technologies such as fuel cells and micro turbines. Such DG installations emit pollutants in an urban area in a highly dispersed manner, in contrast to conventional huge power plants that emit pollutants as a concentrated plume far away from urban areas. In order to analyze effects of such DG emissions, Satish created a set of “DG scenarios” that would predict the adoption of DG technologies and corresponding emissions. The development of DG scenarios was based upon highly-detailed land-use data and population data. The land-use data were obtained as GIS files and were formatted to fit the model grid and resolution with help from Tony Soeller.
This is just a sampling of the many projects at UCI which are making use of GIS software and Tony’s expertise. Please contact NACS if you would be interested in exploring the relevance of GIS to your research project.

Mac Cluster Available

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Apple has donated to UCI a small computational cluster based on its XServe product line.

This three-server cluster (two computational nodes and one control or “head” node) is built on the PowerPC chip. Each node features two 2Ghz PPC CPUs. The cluster also offers a 1.2Tb (1200 Gigabytes) disk array. The PowerPC architecture features high-performance true 64-bit floating point arithmetic, and is particularly well-suited for floating point and vector calculations.

Originally, NACS and faculty evaluated batch processing systems for the cluster under the Macintosh OS X operating system. Currently the cluster is running Linux, because faculty tend to be more familiar with that operating system, and to take advantage of the richer software development environment available under Linux.

GNU compilers for C, C++, and Fortran are available on the cluster, as well as the optimized IBM C/C++ compiler suite for PowerPC. Faculty may contact NACS for accounts, assistance with porting, and benchmarking.

Cluster Computing

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NACS hosts and manages the Middle Performance Computing (MPC) “Beowulf” Cluster on behalf of campus researchers who need substantial computational power.

MPC comprises private nodes and shared nodes, including a part-time shared cluster using NACS PC lab systems. MPC systems feature a mix of architectures to provide high computational throughput.

A feature of the MPC service is the opportunity for researchers to join their own systems to the cluster. In exchange for system administration, housing, and 24/7 oversight provided by NACS, researchers allow 25% of their systems to be configured as part of a campus computational resource. (The remaining 75% is configured to be a cluster, or “queue”, dedicated to the owner.) Contributors may, of course, make use of systems designated for campus use.

Contributors also become voting members of the MPC Advisory Board. The purpose of the MPCAB is to advise NACS on the governance, policies, procedures, and technical aspects of the MPC cluster.

Researchers may request accounts on MPC (and other NACS resources) online. Any future changes that impact MPC users will be posted on the MPC website.

NACS also hosts the GradEA Beowulf Cluster for the exclusive use of UCI graduate students.

MPC web site:
http://www.nacs.uci.edu/computing/mpc/

MPC account requests:
http://www.nacs.uci.edu/rcs/resources.html

GradEA web site:
http://www.nacs.uci.edu/computing/gradea/

Research Computing Support

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The mission of NACS Research Computing Support (RCS) is to facilitate access to and promote the effective use of computational resources available to UCI researchers. The group provides consulting, training, and outreach in the use of hardware and software. Hardware resources promoted by RCS include: NACS administered Beowulf clusters, the Krein supercomputer, and other supercomputer systems and data storage arrays available at the San Diego Supercomputer Center. Software resources include: ArcGIS, Matlab, Mathematica, Maple, LabVIEW, SAS, SPSS, and LaserGene.

RCS staff members are trained in research disciplines and possess an awareness of methodologies and techniques used in research computing. Frank J. Wessel, Ph.D., manages RCS and remains active in fusion-energy research in the Department of Physics and Astronomy. Tony Soeller, M.S., is an expert in the use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS). Additionally, both team members are available to support faculty with their grant writing activities.

The latest RCS activities and general announcements are available to subscribers of the RCS mailing list. Interested researchers can subscribe athttp://maillists.uci.edu/mailman/listinfo/research-computing/ .