Difference between revisions of "ENGAGE"

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-For those of you not involved in previous discussions - OMII and the
-ENGAGE project may fund the GUI development part of our earlier proposal
-to OMII to request support for open-sourcing GENIE. Some other aspects of
-this may also go ahead with seperate OMII funding, but the ENGAGE project
-is coming to it's end so getting a proposal together for the GUI work is
-the most urgent part. Steve is Steve Brewer, who I expect most of you
-know. He suggested gettign the ball rolling in the most expedient way
-possible on exploring possible funding options - in an informal email
-discussion. My slightly incoherent ramblings start here:
-Dear Steve,
-Thanks for an informative discussion on the phone earlier. I'm copying in
-the people who have been party to the last few emails, in the hope that
-they might chime in with useful info whenever they can, also Rupert Ford
-and Graham Riley from Manchester who have been involved in BFG2
-(http://intranet.cs.man.ac.uk/cnc/projects/bfg.php,
-http://source.ggy.bris.ac.uk/wiki/GENIE_BFG) work with GENIE, which may
-integrate nicely as part of the work we put into the proposal. Have also
-copied in Andrew Price (SOTON e-science) who is a long-standing GENIE
-collaborator and whose input and funded involvement we would also welcome.
-GENIE (Grid-ENabled Integrated Earth-system model) is a modular, flexible
-Earth-system model of intermediate complexity (EMIC), which is used
-extensively within the UK and internationally in Earth-system science. One
-important aspect of GENIE which makes it unique (or nearly so?) amongst
-EMICS is the modularity which currently allows experienced users to plug
-in new or different models of a particular Earth-system component or in
-theory even to use a different 'glue' code for sticking all the components
-together.
-To enable less experienced users to access these aspects of the model, and
-also to facilitate ease of running the model in its 'standard'
-configuration, a user interface would be extremely valuable. As well as
-saving end-user time in manipulating XML config files and running shell
-scripts, for example, it will also broaden the community of researchers
-able to use GENIE to answer their research questions as less technical
-computing knowledge will be necessary. The facility to increase or
-decrease the complexity of options available in the GUI to produce
-teaching, or targeted research versions would aldo be valuable.
-Steve - you suggested that the best way to go about formulating a good
-proposal for ENGAGE was to have an 'ideal world' goal for Mid-May '09 -
-the deadline for completion of work funded under the ENGAGE project - from
-which we can work back to person-months, staff availability etc. SO here
-goes!
-I envisage a beta release of a 'scaleable' GUI, which can be easily
-configured to work at any required level of complexity with the underlying
-code (so for example, parameters would be at their default values if not
-selected for control by the GUI). The GUI would also allow configuration
-and selection/deselection of a series of currently available modules
-(different atmospheres, land and ocean models for example) and the ability
-for the model to run with the current standard 'GENIE-main' model glue but
-also with the BFG2 option. This would require effort from the Manchester
-team and would realise excellent the preliminary work already undertaken
-by their group. Part of this would be to BFG-wrap a number (1 or 2?) of
-modules not currently available to BFG-GENIE - although it would not be
-possible to comprehensively cover all current (non-BFG)GENIE-available
-models due to time constraints.
-We would need to ensure that this GUI was future-proof - we already have a
-coherent XML configuration system, so it simply has to be able to
-dynamically expand to cope with more modules and parameter options. New
-model glue codes and approaches would presumably require new GUI code
-unavoidably.
-The GUI would be released along with the GENIE source and presumably be
-included in the GENIE subversion repository for download.
-Platform options:
-A preliminary effort has produced 'Aladdin' which is a basic GUI built in
-Matlab, currently running only with the old non-XML configuration of
-GENIE. This was intended for release within the GENIELab Matlab Toolbox
-(http://source.ggy.bris.ac.uk/wiki/GENIE_GENIELab) - which includes
-Toolboxes for running GENIE ensemble experiments on the National Grid
-Service facilities, and integrates the OMII-supported GEODISE toolbox for
-optimisation and tuning.  For this reason, the Matlab approach is
-attractive as Aladdin or its decendent will integrate with the
-Grid-Enables aspect of GENIE. Although Matlab is closed-source, commercial
-software, the Toolboxes can be open-source (i think)  and freely available
-and can be run as an executables using freely available Matlab libraries
-(Sudipta - is this correct?) for those without access to the full
-software.  GENIELab has been realised through the hard work of Andy Prcie
-at Soton, and Aladdin through the similarly heroic efforts of Sudipta
-Goswami at UEA. Sudipta is probably best placed to start a step-by-step
-plan of how the existing Aladdin might be developed into a beta release in
-months time - what work needs doing etc.
-Alternatively a platform-independent Java GUI is a possible option or
-possibly a web-based one (which would have to run locally as well as on
-remote servers, so would need to ship with its own web-server). My feeling
-is that moving away from the existing base of work with Matlab is a 'phase
-' goal and that we should build on the work Sudipta has already done for
-now, although this does depend on the specific requirements of the ENGAGE
-funding wrt open-source / commercial software and also the manpower
-available - Steve to confirm.
-General comments
-This is all very ambitios for what would most likely be a 6 month project,
-and I'm sure it will need simplifying somewhat. However this depends a bit
-on how / if we can split the work up into discrete chunks which can be
-tackled at different institutions. Someone will of course have to perform
-a technical project management / overview role and this might be best
-acheived by Gethin if he's happy with that.
-BFG2 integration is valuable because other models and EMIC components are
-being wrapped in a compatible way, which would mean GENIE could integrate
-e.g. Hadley CENTRE atmosphere models for 'free'. This would mean that the
-GUI would have to be extra-clever to cope with reading the information for
-a newly acquired BFG-wrapped model to get the parameters which can be
-configured, then providing options to configure them. Not impossible, as
-BFG presumably needs to know about all of these anyway. Such non core
-GENIE modules would raise broader problems as well, such as integration
-with XML configs so this is a future goal which would not be realised
-within the short timeframe of this possible funding.
-Most of the people currently involved have limited flexibility in their
-workloads and are fully funded over the coming months. However, it may be
-that they can juggle contracts around to fit some of this work in -
-people, can you confirm what availability you could muster between 1/12/08
-and 15/05/09? At most I'd guess we could possibly get 1 full-time
-persons's worth of time out of the recipients of this email over the
-fundable period. Steve mentioned that OMII have a good track record in
-'matchmaking' projects with people with the necessary skills so we might
-be able to bring some fresh blood in. Maybe Manchester have someone
-looking for a job with them who might work well on the BFG side of GUI
-intergration and module-wrapping?
-In terms of short timescales vs lots of people and communications
-problems, the current GENIE team have existing strong working
-relationships and this would greatly strengthen the likely success of the
-project.
-Apologies all for the rather rambling nature of all this. Getting it
-bashed out so that some discussion can get underway seemed important. I
-feel a bit like I've just volunteered you all for something without asking
-you first, so if you have better things to do with your lives / jobs over
-the next few months don't be afraid to decline this possibility.
-Look forward to the discussion getting started
-Best regards to all
-Martin

Difference between revisions of "ENGAGE"

Latest revision as of 14:11, 20 January 2009

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