DAS-3 Research

The VL-e project

The VL-e (Virtual Laboratories for e-Science) project is motivated by the increasing demand for worldwide scientific collaborations and by the developments in networking and Grid computing. The project aims to boost e-Science by creating an e-Science environment and doing research on methodologies. The project will do concerted research along the complete e-Science technology chain, ranging from applications to networking, focused on new methodologies and reusable components.

The MultimediaN project

MultimediaN is a consortium of scientific and industrial partners that covers the greater part of the multimedia technology spectrum in The Netherlands. Its main objective is to build an outstanding multimedia science and experimentation platform as a virtual institute. The contributors are the University of Amsterdam, the Centre of Mathematics and Computer Science (CWI), the Delft University of Technology, TNO, the University of Twente, the University of Utrecht, the Telematics Institute, Philips, and IBM, and over 28 high-tech industrial partners. The Intelligent Sensory Information Systems (ISIS) research group at the University of Amsterdam participates in the thematic project Multimedia Knowledge Discovery, which studies automated discovery of new knowledge from large-scale multimedia data repositories. With data volumes commonly in the peta-scale range, DAS-3 is essential to remain at the forefront of scientific and industrial innovations in the field of multimedia computing.

StarPlane: Application-Specific Management of Optical Networks

The DAS-3 grid is a key research tool in the context of the Dutch Science Foundation (NWO) funded StarPlane project led by the University of Amsterdam and the Vrije Universiteit. The StarPlane project aims to empower grid applications to use the most advanced features of the dynamically reconfigurable multi-colour optical backbone of the Dutch National Research and Education Network SURFnet6. By using photonic devices such as wavelength selective switches (WSS), the topology can be adapted to dynamically optimize the network capacity to the grid application needs.

JADE-MM: Adaptive High-Performance Distributed Multimedia Computing

Multimedia data is rapidly gaining importance along with recent deployment of publicly accessible digital television archives, surveillance cameras in public locations, and automatic comparison of forensic video evidence. As emerging large-scale multimedia applications often must meet strict time constraints, even under variable workloads, data-dependent computation, and dynamic resource availability, there is a need for new stochastic runtime performance control methodologies that react to the continuously changing circumstances in Grid systems. The JADE-MM project aims to develop stochastic control schemes that make time-constrained multimedia applications tolerant to the dynamics of large-scale Grid environments. Throughout the project, results from the three participating institutes (University of Amsterdam, Vrije Universiteit, CWI) will be integrated via software prototypes for immediate, application-driven evaluation - with DAS-3 as the most significant target architecture.

GUARD-G: Guaranteed Delivery in Grids

The DAS3 will be the test bed for the Dutch Science Foundation (NWO) funded GUARD-G project led by Delft University of Technology and Leiden University. GUARD-G aims at realizing the vision of grids as a computing utility, similar to the power grid for electricity and the telephone system for voice connections, from which users can tap the resources and get guaranteed or at least predictable responses. For this purpose, GUARD-G will research performance prediction and scheduling techniques, which will be incorporated into in the KOALA grid scheduler.

AstroStream: Stream Processing of Astronomical Data

The AstroStream project aims at creating a framework for stream-based astronomy applications tailored to the needs of the next-generation radio telescopes LOFAR and SKA. The framework will support on-line and off-line processing on central and grid-based supercomputing facilities. It will be optimized for high productivity, high efficiency, multi-platform support and flexibility in run-time behavior. The DAS-3 system provides an excellent platform to analyse the behavior and requirements of astronomy applications, provided by Astron, the Dutch organisation for research in astronomy.

Other ASCI projects

• SCARIe