was presented by Guy Rixon (gtr@ast.cam.ac.uk) of the Cambridge Institute of Astronomy
on Wednesday 4 February 2004 at 16:15 over the Access Grid nodes located:
The Virtual Observatory movement (www.ivoa.net), of which AstroGrid (www.astrogrid.org) is the British contribution, aims to allow processing of distributed, astronomical data, with particular emphasis on tabular data in relational databases. An outstanding problem is how to combine efficiently tables held in widely-separated databases; a relational join of tables over the internet is technically difficult and wildly inefficient.
The preferred solution is to concentrate extracts from the original archive tables in a single database: an astronomical data warehouse. This allows large-scale data-mining with high efficiency. The remaining problem is how to manage the warehouse and how to feed it with data.
AstroGrid is developing a data grid, based on Globus and OGSA-DAI, to feed the data warehouse. Queries on archives in the virtual observatory will be able to stream results into the warehouse for later data-mining. I describe the way in which grid technology has been used for this system and the benefits and drawbacks of grid programming.
