AUTOMOTIVE
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Archaeology 2.0
In addition to digging up artifacts and poring over ancient texts, today's archaeologists may draw on knowledge from dozens of scientific fields to create complex computer models of ancient societies. Pelfer and colleagues at the University of Florence and Italy's National Institute of Nuclear Physics in Catania are developing a grid application for the EGEE infrastructure called the ArchaeoGRID, which will bring all that knowledge together and link it with advanced computing resources. 
Pelfer might need to draw on climatology, biology, botany, mathematics, topology and economy to accurately model the formation of the first cities around 3,000 years ago. Once he's synthesized all that knowledge into his model—no easy feat—he'll need large amounts of computing power to run the model and even more resources to create a meaningful visualization of the results. As if that weren't enough strain on a limited computing budget, his collaborators in Italy, Greece and Spain must remotely participate in the research every step of the way. Riding to the rescue is grid computing. Pelfer hopes to make the ArchaeoGRID into one-stop shopping for archaeologists, a place where they can access data stored at an institution in Greece, run a computer model from Paris on a supercomputer in Switzerland, and visualize the results in Italy. He'll need to start small. Integrating data from different fields of science is notoriously difficult, even if you concentrate on one small area of land over one time period—in Pelfer's case, the area around modern-day northern Lazio between 1,100 and 750 B.C. Each research group in each field of science has its own highly specialized data sets and computer models to make sense of that data, which are largely indecipherable to scientists outside the group. So Pelfer will start his investigation into the rise of the first European city by modeling the ancient climate and its effect on human activities, in the process testing a prototype version of the ArchaeoGRID. "Weather conditions affect a large set of human activities, like planning for agragian productivity," says Pelfer. "We're developing a weather simulation application that will be used to validate the existing grid infrastructure." The climate application will be deployed on the GILDA t-Infrastructure developed by Italy's National Institute of Nuclear Physics in Catania, and will use middleware from the digital library project DILIGENT. Learn more at the EGEE and GILDA Web sites. —Katie Yurkewicz, Science Grid This Week
Pelfer might need to draw on climatology, biology, botany, mathematics, topology and economy to accurately model the formation of the first cities around 3,000 years ago. Once he's synthesized all that knowledge into his model—no easy feat—he'll need large amounts of computing power to run the model and even more resources to create a meaningful visualization of the results. As if that weren't enough strain on a limited computing budget, his collaborators in Italy, Greece and Spain must remotely participate in the research every step of the way. Riding to the rescue is grid computing. Pelfer hopes to make the ArchaeoGRID into one-stop shopping for archaeologists, a place where they can access data stored at an institution in Greece, run a computer model from Paris on a supercomputer in Switzerland, and visualize the results in Italy. He'll need to start small. Integrating data from different fields of science is notoriously difficult, even if you concentrate on one small area of land over one time period—in Pelfer's case, the area around modern-day northern Lazio between 1,100 and 750 B.C. Each research group in each field of science has its own highly specialized data sets and computer models to make sense of that data, which are largely indecipherable to scientists outside the group. So Pelfer will start his investigation into the rise of the first European city by modeling the ancient climate and its effect on human activities, in the process testing a prototype version of the ArchaeoGRID. "Weather conditions affect a large set of human activities, like planning for agragian productivity," says Pelfer. "We're developing a weather simulation application that will be used to validate the existing grid infrastructure." The climate application will be deployed on the GILDA t-Infrastructure developed by Italy's National Institute of Nuclear Physics in Catania, and will use middleware from the digital library project DILIGENT. Learn more at the EGEE and GILDA Web sites. —Katie Yurkewicz, Science Grid This Week