[seek-dev] enm pipeline

[Matt Jones]

Hi Deana,

We had the conference call on the ENM pipeline in Kepler this morning. 
Its amazing how much stuff still remains to be done.  Our notes from the 
call are on the SEEK web site, including a list of action items to get 
the ENM pipeline done:

http://seek.ecoinformatics.org/Wiki.jsp?page=ENMPipelineConferenceCall14Sep2004

One of the items was tenatively assigned to you -- if you're willing. 
We need someone to coordinate getting the environmental data layers into 
an EcoGrid node and documented with EML metadata.  Then they will be 
pulled into the pipelines as needed.

Interestingly, because the ENM pipleline will have so many runs 
(500,000) it will be important to be able to distribute the load -- so 
it looks like we might be doing some of this stuff on multiple machines. 
  Its gonna be a tough challenge, espacially because data transfer for 
the environmental data layers will be a significant bottleneck.  Ricardo 
estimates that one species (500 GARP runs) will take between 6-24 hours, 
dependging on which env layers are used.  So, unless we distribute it, 
we're looking at 1000 days to run this thing, obviously unacceptable. So 
the tradeoff between distributing the computation and moving the data is 
not an easy one to make. But we'll try to work it out.

Could you look over the notes and let me know what you think?  Thanks,

Matt
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Matt Jones                                     jones at nceas.ucsb.edu
http://www.nceas.ucsb.edu/    Fax: 425-920-2439    Ph: 907-789-0496
National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS)
University of California Santa Barbara
Interested in ecological informatics? http://www.ecoinformatics.org
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