International Symposium on Grids & Clouds 2018 (ISGC 2018) in conjunction with Frontiers in Computational Drug Discovery (FCDD)

Asia/Taipei
Academia Sinica

Academia Sinica

Ludek Matyska (CESNET) , Simon C. Lin (ASGC)
Description
The International Symposium on Grids and Clouds (ISGC) 2018 in conjunction with Frontiers in Computational Drug Discovery (FCDD) will be held at Academia Sinica in Taipei, Taiwan from 16-23 March 2018, with co-located events and workshops. The main theme of ISGC 2018 is “Understanding Open Data: Challenges and Opportunities in the Deep Learning Era”. The global move towards an Open science and its Open data policy is bringing its first results in opening access to fast growing base of scientific data. This leads to a new set of challenges for the e-infrastructures expected to be the Open Science foundations. They must deal with new demands in traditional areas of their expertise: increase storage and computing capacity, simultaneous access to different pools and warehouses of scientific data, strong access control for sensitive data and many other things at scale levels of magnitude higher than before. On top of that, increased amount of accessible Open data brings also new challenges, most notably how to understand and interpret the fast growing base of available scientific data. Machine learning and specifically deep learning techniques are currently the most promising general answers to this challenge. However, to deploy these techniques at scale of global e-infrastructures is a highly challenging task, pushing forwards the limits of technology, management and operation. The goal of ISGC 2018 in conjunction with Frontiers in Computational Drug Discovery (FCDD) is to create a face-to-face venue where individual communities and national representatives can present and share their contributions to the global puzzle and contribute thus to the solution of global challenges. We cordially invite and welcome your participation!
    • 09:00 11:10
      Workshop on Frontiers in Computational Drug Discovery
      • 09:00
        Registration & overview of the workshop 1h 30m
        Speaker: Dr Jung-Hsin LIN (Academia Sinica)
        Slides
    • 11:10 11:30
      Coffee Break 20m
    • 11:30 12:30
      Workshop on Frontiers in Computational Drug Discovery
      • 11:30
        Fundamentals in structure biology 1h
        Speaker: Dr Jung-Hsin LIN (Academia Sinica)
        Slides
    • 12:30 14:00
      Lunch 1h 30m 4F, Recreation Hall, BHSS

      4F, Recreation Hall, BHSS

    • 14:00 15:30
      Workshop on Frontiers in Computational Drug Discovery Conference Room 2, BHSS

      Conference Room 2, BHSS

      Academia Sinica

      • 14:00
        Introduction to Protein Data Bank (PDB) and molecular graphics (PyMOL) 1h 30m
        Speaker: Ching-Shu SUEN
        Slides
    • 15:30 16:00
      Coffee Break 30m
    • 16:00 18:00
      Workshop on Frontiers in Computational Drug Discovery Conference Room 2, BHSS

      Conference Room 2, BHSS

      Academia Sinica

      • 16:00
        Molecular graphics (UCSF Chimera) and analytics for biomolecule-drug interactions (LigPlot+, PDB2PQR, etc.) 2h
        Speaker: Ms Pei-Ying CHU
        Slides
    • 09:00 10:30
      Workshop on Frontiers in Computational Drug Discovery Conference Room 2, BHSS

      Conference Room 2, BHSS

      Academia Sinica

      • 09:00
        Quantum chemical calculations of drug-like molecules 1h 30m
        Speaker: Dr Jung-Hsin LIN (Academia Sinica)
        Slides
    • 10:30 11:00
      Coffee Break 30m
    • 11:00 12:30
      Workshop on Frontiers in Computational Drug Discovery Conference Room 2, BHSS

      Conference Room 2, BHSS

      Academia Sinica

      • 11:00
        Hands-on tutorials of quantum chemical calculation with Gaussian and visualization of molecular orbitals and chemical spectra (GaussView) 1h 30m
        Speaker: Dr Ching-Yu CHOU
        Slides
    • 12:30 14:00
      Lunch 1h 30m
    • 14:00 15:30
      Workshop on Frontiers in Computational Drug Discovery Conference Room 2, BHSS

      Conference Room 2, BHSS

      Academia Sinica

      • 14:00
        Principle of molecular docking 1h 30m
        Speaker: Dr Jung-Hsin LIN (Academia Sinica)
        Slides
    • 15:30 16:00
      Coffee Break 30m
    • 16:00 18:00
      Workshop on Frontiers in Computational Drug Discovery Conference Room 2, BHSS

      Conference Room 2, BHSS

      Academia Sinica

      • 16:00
        Hands-on tutorials of AutoDock 4.0 and AutoDock vina 2h
        Speaker: Ms Pei-Ying CHU
        Slides
    • 09:00 10:30
      APGridPMA & IGTF Meeting Media Conference Room, BHSS

      Media Conference Room, BHSS

      Academia Sinica

      Convener: Dr Eric YEN (ASGC)
    • 09:00 10:30
      ECAI/ApSTi Workshop Conference Room 1, BHSS

      Conference Room 1, BHSS

      Academia Sinica

      Convener: Oliver STREITER
      • 09:00
        Our ApSTi Approach: Physical Heritage Conservation through Spatial Humanities 30m
        Speaker: Dr David BLUNDELL
        Slides
      • 09:30
        Story Maps of Taipei City 30m
        Speakers: Jihn-Fa (Andy) JAN, Meng-Chin TSAI, Tzu-Ming FENG, Wei-Sheng WANG
        Slides
      • 10:00
        Visualizing Historical Stories Using Virtual Reality 30m
        Speaker: Tzu-Kai CHOU
        Slides
    • 09:00 10:30
      Workshop on Frontiers in Computational Drug Discovery Conference Room 2, BHSS

      Conference Room 2, BHSS

      Academia Sinica

      • 09:00
        Deep learning approaches in computation drug discovery 40m
        Speaker: Dr Jung-Hsin LIN (Academia Sinica)
        Slides
      • 09:50
        Improving Scoring-Docking-Screening Powers of Protein–Ligand Scoring Functions using Random Forest 40m
        Speaker: Prof. Yingkai ZHANG
        Slides
    • 10:30 11:00
      Coffee Break 30m
    • 11:00 12:30
      APGridPMA & IGTF Meeting Media Conference Room, BHSS

      Media Conference Room, BHSS

      Academia Sinica

      Convener: Dr Eric YEN (ASGC)
      • 11:00
        Remote Vetting 45m
        Speaker: Dr Eisaku Sakane (National Institute of Informatics)
        Slides
      • 11:45
        MICS CA Audit Guideline 45m
        Speaker: Dr Eisaku Sakane (National Institute of Informatics)
    • 11:00 12:30
      ECAI/ApSTi Workshop Conference Room 1, BHSS

      Conference Room 1, BHSS

      Academia Sinica

      Convener: James MORRIS
      • 11:00
        Tombs Research in the Ryukyus: Crossing the border between Okinawa and Kagoshima 30m
        Speaker: Ya-Ching ZHAN
        Slides
      • 11:30
        Variance or Uniformity: Muslim Epigraphs in Macau and Hong Kong 30m
        Speaker: Sara Yuting WANG
        Slides
      • 12:00
        Eternal Resting Place: Conservation of the Variety in the Muslim Section of Kaohsiung Fudingjin Public Cemetery 30m
        Speaker: Marit HAIGHTON
        Slides
    • 11:00 12:30
      Workshop on Frontiers in Computational Drug Discovery Conference Room 2, BHSS

      Conference Room 2, BHSS

      Academia Sinica

      • 11:00
        Hands-on Tutorial of Δvina 30m
        Speakers: Ms Pei-Ying CHU, Prof. Yingkai Zhang
        Slides
      • 11:30
        Hands-on Tutorial of DeepChem and Gnina 1h
        Speaker: Ms Pei-Ying CHU
    • 12:30 14:00
      Lunch 1h 30m
    • 14:00 15:30
      APGridPMA & IGTF Meeting Media Conference Room, BHSS

      Media Conference Room, BHSS

      Academia Sinica

      Convener: Dr Eric YEN (ASGC)
    • 14:00 15:30
      ECAI/ApSTi Workshop Conference Room 1, BHSS

      Conference Room 1, BHSS

      Academia Sinica

      Convener: Jihn-Fa JAN
      • 14:00
        Endangered Languages and the Flow of Ethnicity: State Policies and Language Ideology among the Thao of Taiwan 30m
        Speaker: Yoyoi MITSUDA
      • 14:30
        Comments on the Political Obstacles and Meaning of Cultural Preservation in Taiwan 30m
        Speaker: Linda Gail ARRIGO
        Slides
      • 15:00
        Cultural Asset Preservation Efforts at Xindian First Public Cemetery 2015-2017 30m
        Speaker: James MORRIS
        Slides
    • 14:00 15:30
      Workshop on Frontiers in Computational Drug Discovery Conference Room 2, BHSS

      Conference Room 2, BHSS

      Academia Sinica

      • 14:00
        Molecular dynamics simulations for drug-target complexes 1h 30m Conf. Room 2, BHSS

        Conf. Room 2, BHSS

        Academia Sinica

        Speaker: Dr Jung-Hsin LIN (Academia Sinica)
        Slides
    • 15:30 16:00
      Coffee Break 30m
    • 16:00 17:30
      APGridPMA & IGTF Meeting Media Conference Room, BHSS

      Media Conference Room, BHSS

      Academia Sinica

      Convener: Dr Eric YEN
    • 16:00 17:30
      ECAI/ApSTi Workshop Conference Room 1, BHSS

      Conference Room 1, BHSS

      Academia Sinica

      Convener: Yoyoi MITSUDA
      • 16:00
        Update on the Research Data Repository data.depositar.io 30m
        Speaker: Trng-Ruey CHUANG
        Slides
      • 16:30
        In Search of Agents and Routes: Mapping Stone Carving Practices in the Penghu Archipelago 30m
        Speaker: Oliver STREITER
        Slides
      • 17:00
        Discussion “On Cultural Conservation – Physical and Digital” 30m
        Speakers: James MORRIS, Jihn-Fa Andy JAN, Linda Gail ARRIGO, Oliver STREITER, Tyng-Ruey CHUANG
    • 16:00 18:00
      Workshop on Frontiers in Computational Drug Discovery Conference Room 2, BHSS

      Conference Room 2, BHSS

      Academia Sinica

      • 16:00
        Hands-on Tutorial of AMBER16 (xLEaP, sander, pmemd, cpptraj) 2h Conf. Room 2, BHSS

        Conf. Room 2, BHSS

        Academia Sinica

        Speaker: Dr Ching-Yu CHOU
        Slides
    • 09:00 10:30
      Environmental Computing Workshop Conference Room 1, BHSS

      Conference Room 1, BHSS

      Academia Sinica

      Convener: Dr Stephan HACHINGER
      • 09:00
        Introduction 15m
        Speaker: Dr Stephan HACHINGER
      • 09:15
        Remote Sensing for Disaster Mitigation in Taiwan 40m
        Speakers: Dr Cynthia LIU, Dr NY Chen (NSPO, Taiwan)
        Slides
      • 09:55
        Storm Surge Modeling and Case Study of 2013 Super Typhoon Haiyan 35m
        Speaker: Dr Yu-Lin TSAI (NCU)
        Slides
    • 09:00 10:30
      Security Workshop Auditorium, BHSS

      Auditorium, BHSS

      Academia Sinica

      Conveners: Dr David Kelsey (STFC-RAL) , Dr Sven Gabriel (Nikhef/EGI)
      • 09:00
        Introduction 15m
        Speaker: Dr David Kelsey (STFC-RAL)
      • 09:15
        The Threat Landscape: Introducing terms in context of ENISA’s Threat Landscape Underground economy 1h 15m
        Speaker: Mr Fyodor YAROCHKIN (Academia Sinica)
    • 09:00 10:30
      Workshop on Frontiers in Computational Drug Discovery Conference Room 2, BHSS

      Conference Room 2, BHSS

      Academia Sinica

      • 09:00
        Quantum mechanical/molecular mechanical molecular dynamics simulations 1h 30m Conf. Room 2, BHSS

        Conf. Room 2, BHSS

        Academia Sinica

        Speaker: Prof. Yingkai ZHANG
        Slides
    • 09:00 10:30
      Workshop on Learning Analytics Media Conference Room, BHSS

      Media Conference Room, BHSS

      Academia Sinica

      Convener: Tosh Yamamoto (Kansai University)
    • 10:30 11:00
      Coffee Break 30m
    • 11:00 12:30
      Environmental Computing Workshop Conference Room 1, BHSS

      Conference Room 1, BHSS

      Academia Sinica

      Convener: Dr Eric YEN (ASGC)
      • 11:00
        Regional Collaboration on Disaster Mitigation 15m
        Speaker: Dr Eric YEN (ASGC)
        Slides
      • 11:15
        Case Study of Philippine 20m
        Speaker: Mr Jay Samuel Combinido (Department of Science and Technology -- Advanced Science and Technology Institute)
        Slides
      • 11:35
        Case Study of Indonesia 20m
        Speaker: Dr Basuki SUHARDIMAN
        Slides
      • 11:55
        Case Study of Malaysia 20m
        Speaker: Dr Suhaimi NAPIS
        Slides
      • 12:15
        Interoperation with EOSC-Hub Framework 15m
        Speaker: Dr Ludek Matyska (CESNET)
    • 11:00 12:30
      Security Workshop Auditorium, BHSS

      Auditorium, BHSS

      Academia Sinica

      Conveners: Dr David Kelsey (STFC-RAL) , Dr Sven Gabriel (Nikhef/EGI)
      • 11:00
        Malware Techniques 45m
        Speaker: U. KAILA (CSC)
      • 11:45
        Demonstration of typical attacks on FedCLoud Virtual Machines 45m
        Speaker: Dr Sven Gabriel (Nikhef/EGI)
    • 11:00 12:30
      Workshop on Frontiers in Computational Drug Discovery Conference Room 2, BHSS

      Conference Room 2, BHSS

      Academia Sinica

      • 11:00
        Hands-on Tutorial of AMBER16 (sqm, sander, pmemd) 1h 30m Conf. Room 2, BHSS

        Conf. Room 2, BHSS

        Academia Sinica

        Speaker: Dr Ching-Yu CHOU
    • 11:00 12:30
      Workshop on Learning Analytics Media Conference Room, BHSS

      Media Conference Room, BHSS

      Academia Sinica

      Convener: Tosh Yamamoto (Kansai University)
      • 11:00
        Second Language Writing for Meta Cognitive Reflection 20m Media Conference Room, BHSS

        Media Conference Room, BHSS

        Academia Sinica

        Speaker: Dr Yuri KITE
        Slides
      • 11:20
        Reflective Writing enhanced with ICT 20m Media Conference Room, BHSS

        Media Conference Room, BHSS

        Academia Sinica

        Speaker: Dr Masaki WATANABE
        Slides
      • 11:40
        Learning Analytics or Assessment for Active Learning (PBL/TBL) 30m Media Conference Room, BHSS

        Media Conference Room, BHSS

        Academia Sinica

        Speakers: Dr Maki OKUNUKI, Dr Ti-Chuang CHIANG, Tosh Yamamoto (Kansai University)
      • 12:10
        Wrapping Up: Summary 20m Media Conference Room, BHSS

        Media Conference Room, BHSS

        Academia Sinica

        Speakers: Dr Maki OKUNUKI, Dr Ti-Chuang CHIANG, Tosh Yamamoto (Kansai University)
    • 12:30 14:00
      Lunch 1h 30m
    • 14:00 15:30
      Environmental Computing Workshop Conference Room 1, BHSS

      Conference Room 1, BHSS

      Academia Sinica

      Convener: Dr Eric YEN
      • 14:00
        Environmental Computing 30m
        Speaker: Dr Stephan HACHINGER
        Slides
      • 14:30
        Science & Technology – Hydroinformatics Implementation for Water Related Disasters in Thailand (Remote Presentation) 30m
        Speaker: Dr Veerachai TANPIPAT
        Slides
      • 15:00
        EOSC-Hub Project (Remote Presentation) 30m
        Speaker: Dr Gergely SIPOS
        Slides
    • 14:00 15:30
      Security Workshop Media Conference Room, BHSS

      Media Conference Room, BHSS

      Academia Sinica

      Conveners: Dr David Kelsey (STFC-RAL) , Dr Sven Gabriel (Nikhef/EGI)
      • 14:00
        Discussion and Hands-on of operational security for Cloud User Communities – session 1 1h 30m
        Speakers: Dr Sven Gabriel (Nikhef/EGI) , U. KAILA (CSC)
    • 14:00 15:30
      Workshop on Frontiers in Computational Drug Discovery Conference Room 2, BHSS

      Conference Room 2, BHSS

      Academia Sinica

      • 14:00
        Potential of mean force and free energy calculations 40m
        Speaker: Dr Jung-Hsin LIN
      • 14:50
        Gaussian accelerated molecular dynamics simulation (GaMD) 40m
        Speaker: Prof. Yinglong MIAO
    • 15:30 16:00
      Coffee Break 30m
    • 16:00 17:30
      Environmental Computing Workshop Conference Room 1, BHSS

      Conference Room 1, BHSS

      Academia Sinica

      Convener: Dr Stephan HACHINGER
      • 16:00
        DRIHM WRF Portal (Remote Presentation) 30m
        Speaker: Dr Antonio PARODI
        Slides
      • 16:30
        Case Study of Vietnam (Remote Presentation) 30m
        Speaker: Dr Nam THOAI
        Slides
      • 17:00
        Discussion 30m
        Speaker: Dr Eric YEN
    • 16:00 17:30
      Security Workshop Media Conference Room, BHSS

      Media Conference Room, BHSS

      Academia Sinica

      Conveners: Dr David Kelsey (STFC-RAL) , Dr Sven Gabriel (Nikhef/EGI)
      • 16:00
        Discussion and Hands-on – session 2 1h 20m
        Speakers: Dr Sven Gabriel (Nikhef/EGI) , U. KAILA (CSC)
      • 17:20
        Wrap up/conclusions 10m
        Speaker: Dr David Kelsey (STFC-RAL)
    • 16:00 18:00
      Workshop on Frontiers in Computational Drug Discovery Conference Room 2, BHSS

      Conference Room 2, BHSS

      Academia Sinica

      • 16:00
        Hand-on Tutorial of AMBER16 (sander, pmemd, WHAM, UI) and Gaussian accelerated molecular dynamics (GaMD) 2h
        Speakers: Dr Ching-Yu CHOU, Prof. Yinglong MIAO
    • 09:00 10:30
      Keynote Session: I Auditorium, BHSS

      Auditorium, BHSS

      Academia Sinica

      Convener: Dr Ludek Matyska (CESNET)
      • 09:00
        Opening Remarks 10m
        Speakers: Dr Ludek Matyska (CESNET) , Simon C. Lin (ASGC)
      • 09:10
        The European Open Cloud for e-Science towards automation, service composition, big data analytics and new frontiers in data management 40m
        Speaker: Dr Davide SALOMONI (INFN)
        Slides
      • 09:50
        Applying deep learning to the prediction of protein structure and function 40m
        Speaker: Dr David JONES (UCL)
        Slides
    • 10:30 11:00
      Coffee Break 30m
    • 11:00 12:30
      Data Management & Big Data Session: I Conference Room 1, BHSS

      Conference Room 1, BHSS

      Academia Sinica

      Convener: Dr David Groep (Nikhef)
      • 11:00
        Management of Cost Effective Mass Storage Environments 30m
        The Scientific Data and Computing Center (SDCC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) is a major scientific data storage site with more than 100 PB of archived experimental data, which amount is supposed to grow exponentially during the next several years. BNL is a Tier 1 data center for the ATLAS collaboration. The challenge is to meet the data storage and processing requirements of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) experiments at BNL and especially the newly emerging enormous storage needs of ATLAS with limited budget. In this past year SDCC has developed several tools to lower operating costs. One of the cost saving implementations is the introduction of JBOD in addition to existing RAID systems and LTO tape systems. The SDCC-developed software gathers statistical information to provide adaptive methods and techniques for device management and rigorous performance tuning and optimization of the entire storage environment. The software suite provides an intuitive user-friendly web-based interface enabling dynamic parameter visualization based on a priority-driven device-monitoring paradigm and addresses the following major technical issues: - proprietary JBOD monitoring and management software enhancing the scalability of JBOD systems. It can monitor, configure and optimize the disk systems at 50% of the cost of commercial RAID systems. - developed in-house data retrieval management and optimization application. ERADAT is SDCC developed software that manages and optimizes data retrievals from mass storage media, such as tape cartridges. This application will optimize data retrievals based on the data locations on the media, and manage the device allocations for multiuser concurrent operations. - predict device failures before they actually happen and service the devices. This self-developed software periodically queries all mass storage devices for usage history and predicts failure before it actually happens. It alerts administrators when a device usage is nearing marginal limits and when a media error or device error is detected. - detect and protect storage devices and media from unauthorized access. All media access and data retrievals are monitored and logged. The self-developed application will alert system administrators of any unusual data access/deletion patterns. - encryption and duplication of data as requested by users.
        Speaker: Mr Tim Chou (Brookhaven National Laboratory)
        Slides
      • 11:30
        Progress on Machine and Deep Learning applications in CMS Computing 30m
        Machine and Deep Learning techniques are being used in various areas of CMS operations at the LHC collider, like data taking, monitoring, processing and physics analysis. A review a few selected use cases shows the progress in the field, with highlight on most recent developments, as well as an outlook to future applications in LHC Run III and towards the High-Luminosity LHC phase.
        Speaker: Prof. Daniele Bonacorsi (University of Bologna)
        Slides
      • 12:00
        What goes up must go down: A case study from RAL on the process of shrinking an existing storage service 30m
        Much attention is paid to the process of how new storage services are deployed into production that the challenges therein. Far less is paid to what happens when a storage service is approaching the end of its useful life. The challenges in rationalising and de-scoping a service that, while relatively old, is still critical to production work for both the UK WLCG Tier 1 and local facilities are not to be underestimated. RAL has been running a disk and tape storage service based on CASTOR (Cern Advanced STORage) for over 10 years. CASTOR must cope with both the throughput requirements of supplying data to a large batch farm and the data integrity requirements needed by a long-term tape archive. A new storage service, called ‘Echo’ is now being deployed to replace the disk-only element of CASTOR, but we intend to continue supporting the CASTOR system for tape into the medium term. This, in turn, implies a downsizing and redesign of the CASTOR service in order to improve manageability and cost effectiveness. We will give an outline of both Echo and CASTOR as background. This paper will discuss the project to downsize CASTOR and improve its manageability when running both at a considerably smaller scale (we intend to go from around 140 storage nodes to around 20), and with a considerably lower amount of available staff effort. This transformation must be achieved while, at the same time, running the service in 24/7 production and supporting the transition to the newer storage element. To achieve this goal, we intend to transition to a virtualised infrastructure to underpin the remaining management nodes and improve resilience by allowing management functions to be performed by many different nodes concurrently (‘cattle’ as opposed to ‘pets’), and also intend to streamline the system by condensing the existing 4 CASTOR ‘stagers’ (databases that record the state of the disk pools) into a single one that supports all users.
        Speaker: Mr Rob Appleyard (STFC)
        Slides
    • 11:00 12:30
      Symposium on Frontiers in Computational Drug Discovery Auditorium, BHSS

      Auditorium, BHSS

      Academia Sinica

      Convener: Dr Jung-Hsin LIN
      • 11:00
        HADDOCK goes small molecules. Integrative modelling of biomolecular interactions from fuzzy data 45m
        Speaker: Dr Alexandre M.J.J. Bonvin (Utrecht University)
      • 11:45
        Computaional Modulator Design to Target Protein-Protein Interactions 45m
        Speaker: Dr Yingkai ZHANG (New York University)
    • 11:00 12:30
      VRE Media Conference Room, BHSS

      Media Conference Room, BHSS

      Academia Sinica

      Convener: Dr Patrick Fuhrmann (DESY/dCache.org)
      • 11:00
        Unified Account Management for High Performance Computing as a Service with Microservice Architecture 30m
        In recent years, High Performance Computing (HPC) has developed rapidly in China. From Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) level, Scientific Computing Grid (ScGrid), is a general-purpose computing platform started from 2006 in CAS, which provided a problem solving environment for computing users through grid computing and cloud computing technologies. Then ScGrid becomes Supercomputing Cloud, an important port of Chins Science Cloud from 2011. From national level, China National Grid (CNGrid) has integrated massive HPC resources from several national supercomputing centers and other large centers distributed geographically, and been providing efficient computing services for users in diverse disciplines and research areas. During more than 10 years, CNGrid and ScGrid has integrated tens of HPC resources distributed geographically across China, comprising 6 National Supercomputer Centers of Tianjin, Jinan, Changsha, and Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Wuxi, and also dozens of teraflops-scale HPC resources belong to universities and institutes. In total, the computing capability is more than 200PF and the storage capacity is more than 160PB in CNGrid.  As worked in the operation and management center of CNGrid and ScGrid for many years, we notice that users prefer to manage their jobs at different supercomputers and clusters via a global account on different remote clients such as science gateways, desktop applications and even scripts. And they don’t like to apply for an account to each supercomputer and login into the supercomputer in specific way.   Therefore, we described Unified Account Management as a Service (UAMS) to access and use all HPC resources via a global account for each user in this paper. We addressed and solved challenges for mapping a global account to many local accounts, and provided unified account registration, management and authentication for different collaborative web gateways, command toolkits and other desktop applications. UAMS was designed in accordance with the core rules of simplicity, compatibility and reusability. In architecture design, we focused on loosely-coupled style to acquire good scalability and update internal modules transparently. In implementation, we applied widely accepted knowledge for the definitions of the RESTful API and divided them into several isolated microservices according to their usages and scenarios. For security, all sensitive data transferred in wide-network is protected by HTTPS with transport layer security outside of CNGrid and secure communication channels provided by OpenSSH inside of CNGrid. In addition, all parameters submitted to RESTful web services are strictly checked in format and variable type.   By providing these frequently important but always challenging capabilities as a service, UAMS allows users to use tens of HPC resources and clients via only an account, and makes it easy for developers to implement clients and services related HPC with advantages of numerous users and single sign-on capability. Based on UAMS, representative clients are introduced and reviewed combined with different authentication schemes. Finally, analysis and test of UAMS shows that it can support authentication in milliseconds level and has good scalability. In future, we plan to implement federated account service that enable a local HPC account similar to a global account to login the national HPC environment, access and use all HPC resources in CNGrid.
        Speaker: Dr Rongqiang Cao (Computer Network Information Center, Chinese Academy of Sciences)
        Slides
      • 11:30
        DODAS: How to effectively exploit heterogeneous clouds for scientific computations 30m
        Dynamic On Demand Analysis Service (DODAS) is a Platform as a Service tool built combining several solutions and products developed by the INDIGO-DataCloud H2020 project. DODAS allows on-demand generation of a container-based HTCondor batch system over cloud-based infrastructures implementing the “Batch System as a Service” paradigm. As such, it is a cloud enabler designed for scientists seeking to easily exploit distributed and heterogeneous clouds to process data. Aiming to reduce the learning curve as well as the operational cost of managing community specific services running on distributed cloud, DODAS completely automates the process of provisioning, creating, managing and accessing a pool of heterogeneous computing and storage resources. DODAS has a modular architecture providing the following major features: the abstraction of the underlying compute and data resources, which is crucial for the interoperability across IaaS providers; the security toolkit, a key aspect for managing community services on opportunistic resources; the automated resource provisioning and configuration, to simplify the setup of the complex experiment computing environments. The resource abstraction and the full automation are implemented combining together the INDIGO PaaS Orchestrator and the INDIGO Infrastructure Manager (IM). IM provides the support for several types of IaaS like, for example, OpenStack, OpenNebula, Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure, while the PaaS Orchestrator represents the DODAS entrypoint. As such it is directly exposed to the end user, who is required to provide properly configured TOSCA templates, which will be then processed by the INDIGO PaaS layer. The cluster setup and the services configuration are automated using Ansible recipes. The TOSCA and Ansible combination guarantees an easy procedure to describe complex computing infrastructures. The Identity Access Manager (IAM) and Token Translation Service (TTS) are used to manage user authentication/authorization both to grant access to the resources and to protect experiment services such as Workload Management Systems and data storages. Apache Mesos is the baseline solution used by DODAS to abstract CPU, RAM and storage, while Marathon is adopted as container orchestration platform on top of Mesos. Marathon takes care of setting up both HTCondor and any additional services (e.g squid proxy, proxy certificate cache) that experiments might require. Such architecture provides high scaling capabilities and self-healing support that results in a drastic reduction of time and cost, through setup and operational efficiency increase. The high level of modularity of DODAS is a key to its generic applicability, providing the ability to easily customize the workflow depending on the community computational requirements. Although originally designed for the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) Experiment at LHC, DODAS has been quickly adopted by the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) astroparticle physics experiment mounted on the ISS as a solution to exploit opportunistic computing, nowadays an extremely important topic for research domains where computing needs constantly increase. Due to its flexibility and efficiency, DODAS was selected as one of the Thematic Services that will provide multi-disciplinary solutions in the EOSC-hub project, an integration and management system of the European Open Science Cloud starting in January 2018. The main goals of this contribution are to provide a comprehensive overview of the overall technical implementation of DODAS, as well as to illustrate two distinct real examples of usage: the integration within the CMS Workload Management System and the extension of the AMS computing model.
        Speaker: Dr Daniele spiga (INFN-PG)
        Slides
      • 12:00
        Workload management for heterogeneous multi-community grid infrastructures 30m
        Grid infrastructures are providing access to computing resources using transparent uniform tools to multiple user communities of different sizes exploiting applications with different properties and requirements. Traditional grid computing resources, the so-called High Throughput Computing (HTC) clusters can be complemented with virtualized cloud and High Performance Computing (HPC) resources. The user workflows can require access to either of these types of resources or can use all of them. This can be done with job scheduling systems that can submit user payloads to various types of the computing resources transparently. The DIRAC project Workload Management System is providing a job scheduler that spans various heterogeneous computing resources and provides means for the users to select dynamically those resources that correspond to their application requirements. Various policies can be applied to activities of different users and groups to allow fair sharing of the communal resources. In particular HTC and cloud resources can be used together for the same user payloads. Special attention is paid to the use of the cloud resources respecting quotas for different user groups, which allows to share those resources efficiently. In this contribution we describe the use of the DIRAC Workload Management System (WMS) based on the example of the European Grid Infrastructure (EGI). We outline the general architecture of the system and give details on its practical operations. Experience with the replacement of the traditional grid middleware WMS will be presented as well as the necessary developments to meet the requirements of different user communities and applications.
        Speaker: Dr Andrei Tsaregorodtsev (CPPM-IN2P3-CNRS)
        Slides
    • 11:00 13:00
      eScience Activities in Asia Pacific Session: I Conference Room 2, BHSS

      Conference Room 2, BHSS

      Academia Sinica

      Convener: Simon C. Lin (ASGC)
      • 11:00
        eScience Activities in Thailand 20m Conference Room 2, BHSS

        Conference Room 2, BHSS

        Academia Sinica

        Speaker: Dr Chalee VORAKULPIPAT
        Slides
      • 11:20
        eScience Activities in Indonesia 20m Conference Room 2, BHSS

        Conference Room 2, BHSS

        Academia Sinica

        Speaker: Dr Basuki SUHARDIMAN
        Slides
      • 11:40
        eScience Activity in Malaysia 20m Conference Room 2, BHSS

        Conference Room 2, BHSS

        Academia Sinica

        Speaker: Dr Suhaimi NAPIS
        Slides
      • 12:00
        eScience Activities in Vietnam 20m Conference Room 2, BHSS

        Conference Room 2, BHSS

        Academia Sinica

        Speaker: Dr Nam THOAI
      • 12:20
        eScience Activities in Philippine 20m Conference Room 2, BHSS

        Conference Room 2, BHSS

        Academia Sinica

        Speaker: Mr Jay Samuel Combinido (Department of Science and Technology -- Advanced Science and Technology Institute)
        Slides
      • 12:40
        Panel Discussion 20m Conference Room 2, BHSS

        Conference Room 2, BHSS

        Academia Sinica

    • 12:30 14:00
      Lunch 1h 30m 4F Recreational Hall, BHSS

      4F Recreational Hall, BHSS

    • 14:00 15:30
      Biomedicine & Life Science Session Media Conference Room, BHSS

      Media Conference Room, BHSS

      Academia Sinica

      Convener: Dr Danny HSU (Academia Sinica)
      • 14:00
        Building bridges between services and e-infrastructure in structural biology 30m Media Conf. Room

        Media Conf. Room

        Structural biology deals with the characterization of the structural (atomic coordinates) and dynamic (fluctuation of atomic coordinates over time) properties of biological macromolecules and adducts thereof. Since 2010, the WeNMR project has implemented numerous web-based services to facilitate the use of advanced computational tools by researchers in the field, using the grid computational infrastructure provided by EGI [1]. These services have been further developed in subsequent initiatives, such as the MoBrain competence center within EGI-ENGAGE. Currently, in the context of the West-Life Virtual Research Environment H2020 project [2], we have been working on the integration of different pre-existing services to enable the combined application of tools on the same given dataset. Here we will demonstrate how a user can exploit these integrated services without the need to download partial data, entirely via a browser interface. Examples involve the calculation of protein-protein complexes from nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) data using the FANTEN web server, followed by the optimization of the initial model using HADDOCK and fitting structures into cryo-EM maps with the PowerFit web server using maps obtained from the Scipion web portal. In addition, we will show the implementation of a cloud storage solution developed by the West-Life H2020 project [2], called VirtualFolder [3], which allows the user to connect to her/his account on for example B2DROP or on public clouds (e.g. Dropbox). In the future, this will allow users to access datasets acquired in different experimental facilities directly from the web interfaces of the services connected to West-Life. 1. Wassenaar TA, et al. WeNMR: Structural biology on the Grid. J. Grid. Computing 10:743-767, 2012 2. https://www.west-life.eu/ 3. https://portal.west-life.eu/virtualfolder/
        Speaker: Dr Alexandre M.J.J. Bonvin (Utrecht University)
        Slides
      • 14:30
        Bridging artificial intelligence and physics-based docking for better modelling of biomolecular complexes 30m Media Conf. Room

        Media Conf. Room

        Proteins and other biomolecules, such as DNA and RNA, are the minimal functional entities that realize life. Understanding how they execute their functions through their 3D structures and interaction dynamics provides a fundamental view of what defines life. This knowledge also allows us to exploit or modify these elegant molecules for a wide variety of purposes, such as gene therapy, drug design, immunotherapy, novel enzymes and others. Since it is still challenging to experimentally study protein interactions at high-resolution, we combine the computational power of data-driven machine learning with physics-based molecular docking to better model 3D protein complexes (static) and their binding affinity (thermodynamic). Specifically, we exploit deep learning and graph theory to tackle the major challenge in docking, namely scoring, the identification of correct conformations from a large pool of docked conformations, which still suffers from a low success rate. Another challenge in the field of biomolecular interaction is to quantitatively characterize the impact of a mutation on the binding affinity of a complex. For this purpose, we developed iSEE, a fast and reliable predictor for binding affinity changes upon single point mutation. iSEE is trained and cross-validated over a diverse dataset consisting of 1102 mutations in 57 protein-protein complexes, and it outperforms state-of-the-art methods on two independent test datasets. Reliably predicting binding affinity changes upon mutations has wide applications in, for example, the study of the relation between coding variants and phenotype, design of antigen-binding CDR loops of antibodies, and engineering binding specificity. Our projects integrate statistical models learned from the huge wealth of heterogeneous experimental data with fundamental physics rules governing protein interactions at atomic level. By combining machine learning with physics-based modelling we aim to markedly enhance our capability to reliably model biomolecular complexes. This will help molecular biologists formulate testable hypotheses to answer important questions about cells’ molecular machinery and aid the development of new therapeutics.
        Speaker: Dr Li Xue (Utrecht University)
        Slides
      • 15:00
        First-principle-based and data-driven design of therapeutic peptides 30m Media Conf. Room

        Media Conf. Room

        To combat antibiotic resistance demands timely improvement of drug efficacy. Here we introduce a computational approach that systematically creates variants from known antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) and selects the ones with improved potency based on physical quantities computed from a short, so called “immerse and surface” (IAS), molecular dynamics (MD) simulation. The designed in-silico platform was used to evaluate the efficacy of a series of tryptophan-rich AMPs, targeting Gram-positive and negative lipid membranes without a mediating receptor. Structures of three AMPs were solved by nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy revealing their formation of α-helices on membrane, supported by circular dichroism (CD) data. Insertion orientations of AMPs predicted by MD simulations were validated by Paramagnetic relaxation enhancement (PRE) experiments. It was found, from both NMR experiments and computation, that antimicrobial efficacy of AMPs increased with the characterized insertion depth. Simulations reveal atomistic details of the AMP insertion over time and the importance of spatial arrangement of key residues synergistically mediating the insertion. To preserve important insertion patterns, peptide X, an AMP with already characterized potency, has its sequence circularly shuffled to create 13 variants. Partition free energies of all these AMPs are calculated from the SAS simulations and found to highly correlate with their minimal inhibitory concentration (MIC) values. The resulting correlation coefficient (>0.84) is found much favorably compare to those obtained from data-driven (machine learning) algorithms implemented in published web servers. Our computational platform capable of predicting AMP potency for peptides with similar primary sequences lends itself well to the development of new AMP design as well as improving existing AMPs in our continuous battle against pathogenic microbes. If time allows, I will also mention how accumulated structural data could help the design of anti-cancer peptides.
        Speaker: Prof. Lee-Wei Yang (National Tsing Hua University)
    • 14:00 15:30
      Data Management & Big Data Session: II Conference Room 1, BHSS

      Conference Room 1, BHSS

      Academia Sinica

      Convener: Prof. Daniele Bonacorsi (University of Bologna)
      • 14:00
        Next Generation Data Management Services: the eXtreme DataCloud project 30m
        The eXtreme DataCloud (XDC) is a EU H2020 funded project aimed at developing scalable technologies for federating storage resources and managing data in highly distributed computing environments. The services provided will be capable of operating at the unprecedented scale required by the most demanding, data intensive, research experiments in Europe and Worldwide. XDC will be based on existing tools, whose technical maturity is proved and that the project will enrich with new functionalities and plugins already available as prototypes (TRL6+) that will be brought at the production level (TRL8+) at end of XDC. The targeted platforms are the current and next generation e-Infrastructures deployed in Europe, such as the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), the European Grid Infrastructure (EGI), the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG) and the computing infrastructures funded by other public and academic initiatives. The main high-level topics addressed by the project include: i) federation of storage resources with standard protocols, ii) smart caching solutions among remote locations, ii) policy driven data management based on Quality of Service, data lifecycle management, metadata handling and manipulation, data preprocessing and encryption during ingestion, optimized data management based on access patterns. All the developments will be community-driven and tested against real life use cases provided by the consortium partners representing research communities belonging to a variety of scientific domains: Life Science, Astrophysics, High Energy Physics, Photon Science and Clinical Research. The XDC project aims at opening new possibilities to scientific research communities in Europe and worldwide by supporting the evolution of e-Infrastructure services for Exascale data resources. The XDC software will be released as Open Source platforms available for general exploitation.
        Speaker: Daniele Cesini (INFN-CNAF)
        Slides
      • 14:30
        Smart Policy Driven Data Management and Data Federations, enabled by the H2020 eXtreme DataCloud project. 30m
        In November 2017, the H2020 “eXtreme DataCloud” project will be launched, developing scalable technologies for federating storage resources and managing data in highly distributed computing environments. The project will last for 27 months and combines the expertise of 8 large European organizations. The targeted platforms are the current and next generation e-Infrastructures deployed in Europe, such as the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), the European Grid Infrastructure (EGI), the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG) and the computing infrastructures that will be funded by H2020 EINFRA-12 calls. One of the core activities within XDC is the policy-driven orchestration of federated and heterogeneous data management. The high-level objective of this work is the semi or fully automated placement of scientific data in the Exabyte region on the site (IaaS), as well as on the federated storage level. In the context of this Work Package, placement may either refer to the media the data is stored on, to guarantee a requested Quality of Service, or the geographical location, to move data as close to the compute facility as possible to overcome latency issues in geographically distributed infrastructures. The solutions will be based on already well established data management components as there are dCache, EOS, FTS and the INDIGO PaaS Orchestrator, Onedata and many more. The targeted scientific communities, represented within the project itself, are from a variety of domains, like astronomy (CTA), Photon Science (European X-FEL), High Energy Physics (LHC), Life Science (LifeWatch) and others. The work will cover “Data Lifecycle Management” and smart data placement on meta-data, including storage availability, network bandwidth and data access patterns. The inevitable problem of network latency is planned to be tackled by smart caching mechanisms or, if time allows, using deep learning algorithms to avoid data transfers in the first place. Furthermore, data ingestion and data movement events, reported to the centralized INDIGO PaaS orchestration engine can trigger automated compute processes, starting from meta-data extraction tools to sophisticated workflows, e.g. to pre-analyze images from Photon Science or Astronomy detectors. This presentation will present the overall architecture of this activity inside the eXtreme DataCloud project and will elaborate on the work plan and expected outcome for the involved communities.
        Speaker: Dr Patrick Fuhrmann (DESY/dCache.org)
        Slides
      • 15:00
        Experiences of hard disk management in a erasure coded 10 petabyte-scale Ceph cluster 30m
        RAL has developed a disk storage solution based on Inktank and Red Hat's ‘Ceph’ object storage platform to support the UK's WLCG Tier One centre. This solution, known as 'Echo' (Erasure-Coded High-throughput Object store), is now providing ~40% of the disk storage available to the LHC experiments and wider WLCG at the UK Tier 1. Data is stored in the cluster using erasure coding to reduce the space overhead while keeping the data safety and availability high in the face of disk failures. An erasure coding profile of 8 data shards plus 3 erasure coding shards is used to provide data safety levels comparable to a system with 4-fold replication at a fraction of the cost, keeping the space overheads down to 37.5%. In large-scale Ceph clusters, deployment of storage nodes without RAID controllers is preferred, mainly for performance reasons. This comes at a cost however, as any and all disk errors become visible to Ceph and will cause inconsistencies to be noticed that must be dealt with, generating administrative workload for the service’s operators. Factors from disk age and disk placement in the physical machine to disk utilisation and load contribute to create and operational environment that requires constant attention and administrative intervention. In this paper, we present the history of disk-related problems that have affected Echo. Echo consists of approximately 2200 disks with a raw capacity approaching 13 PiB. A certain quantity of disk problems are to be expected when running this quantity of hard disks. However, we have also experienced a problem where undetected bad sectors on disks have a destructive interactaction with a Ceph bug that can trigger cascading failures during routine data movement operations. We present methods the Ceph team have utilised to cope with this workload, as well as how the disk management tooling provided by the Ceph project has evolved.
        Speaker: Mr Rob Appleyard (STFC)
        Slides
    • 14:00 15:30
      Networking, Security, Infrastructure & Operation Session: I Conference Room 2, BHSS

      Conference Room 2, BHSS

      Academia Sinica

      Convener: Dr David Groep (Nikhef)
      • 14:00
        Creating a trust-group for security information sharing 20m Conf. Room 2

        Conf. Room 2

        Academia Sinica

        A growing number of organisations realise the only cost-effective mean to protect themselves against cybercrime is to join forces with peer organisations and operate a community-based response to common security threats. However, organising such a joint response is challenging both from the trust and technical aspects. This presentation provides guidance and advice on how to setup a trust group, how to enable new participants to join, how to encourage active participation and information sharing, how to provide added value for the members, and how to connect such a trust group to existing forums in the Internet community.
        Speaker: Romain Wartel (CERN)
        Slides
      • 14:20
        Harnessing the Power of Threat Intelligence in Grids and Clouds: WLCG SOC Working Group 20m Conf. Room 2

        Conf. Room 2

        Academia Sinica

        The modern security landscape affecting Grid and Cloud sites is evolving to include possible threats from a range of avenues, including social engineering as well as more direct approaches. An effective strategy to defend against these risks must include cooperation between security teams in different contexts. It is essential that sites have the ability to share threat intelligence data with confidence, as well as being able to act on this data in a timely and effective manner. As reported at ISGC 2017, the WLCG [1] Security Operations Centres Working Group has been working with sites across the WLCG to develop a model for a Security Operations Centre reference design. This work includes not only the technical aspect of developing a security stack appropriate for sites of different sizes and topologies, but also the more social aspect of sharing data between groups of different kinds. In particular, since many Grid and Cloud sites operate as part of larger University or other Facility networks, collaboration between Grid and Campus/Facility security teams is an important aspect of maintaining overall security. We discuss recent work on sharing threat intelligence, particularly involving the WLCG MISP [2] instance located at CERN. In addition, we examine strategies for the use of this intelligence, as well as considering recent progress in the deployment and integration of the Bro Intrusion Detection System at contributing sites. An important part of this work is a report on the first WLCG SOC WG Workshop/Hackathon, a workshop planned at time of writing for December 2017. This workshop is planned to assist participating sites in the deployment of these security tools as well as giving attendees the opportunity to share experiences and consider site policies as a result. This workshop is hoped to play a substantial role in shaping the future goals of the working group. [1] Worldwide LHC Computing Grid [2] Malware Information Sharing Platform
        Speakers: Dr David Crooks (University of Glasgow) , Mr Liviu Valsan (CERN)
        Slides
      • 14:40
        Towards cross infrastructure Operational Security in EOSC-hub 20m Conf. Room 2

        Conf. Room 2

        Academia Sinica

        The EOSC-hub proposes a new vision to data-driven science, where researchers from all disciplines have easy, integrated and open access to the advanced digital services, scientific instruments, data, knowledge and expertise they need to collaborate to achieve excellence in science, research and innovation. The process towards the integration of the different security activities will be supported through the development of harmonized policies and procedures, to ensure consistent and coordinated security operations across the services provided in the catalogue. Coordinating the Operational Security in such a broad environment is a challenge. At the same time it offers many possibilities of a closer collaboration of the already existing security teams active in the distributed infrastructures. The expertise built, and tools developed in response to specific problems in the different infrastructures can be used in cross-infrastructure co-operations. In this presentation we will present examples for possible collaborations in: * Incident Prevention * Incident Handling/Coordination * Security Training and Exercises In our presentation we will also share information on some actual cases of vulnerability management and incident coordination within and across infrastructures. A discussion on lessons learned will include review on how comprehensively critical vulnerabilities and incidents have been identified and how efficiently risks and incidents have been contained. As usual, the results from the debriefings give us pointers to which tools and procedures need further development to further improve our cross infrastructure operational security capabilities.
        Speaker: Dr Sven Gabriel (Nikhef/EGI)
        Slides
      • 15:00
        FIM4R version 2 - Federated Identity Requirements for Research 20m Conf. Room 2

        Conf. Room 2

        Academia Sinica

        Federated identity management (FIM) is an arrangement that can be made among multiple organisations that lets subscribers use the same identification data to obtain access to the secured resources of all organisations in the group. In many research communities there is an increasing interest in a common approach to FIM as there is obviously a large potential for synergies. FIM4R [1] provides a forum for communities to share challenges and ideas, and to shape the future of FIM for our researchers. Current participation covers life sciences, humanities, and physics, to mention but a few. In 2012 FIM4R converged on a common vision for FIM, enumerated a set of requirements and proposed a number of recommendations for ensuring a roadmap for the uptake of FIM is achieved [2]. FIM4R is currently working on an updated version of this paper, to be published in spring 2018. How can research communities leverage identity federations for the benefit of their researchers? What are the specific challenges faced by virtual organisations in heterogeneous computing environments? The experience gained by FIM4R over the past 5 years has led to a general acceptance of the necessity of proxies, to act as a mediator between identity providers and the services leveraged by research disciplines. Although many aspects of a federated Authentication and Authorization Infrastructure (AAI) are simplified by the use of such a proxy, several new complexities have been introduced. The adoption of proxies represents a shift in the approach to identity federation and provides the opportunity to reflect on whether our requirements for research environments can be adequately served by existing technologies. The second whitepaper to be authored by FIM4R is currently under draft and will document the progress made in FIM for Research, in addition to the current challenges. Preliminary requirements gathering activities at FIM4R’s 11th Workshop in Montreal and at Internet2’s Technology Exchange 2017 has identified multiple areas of focus. It is hoped that FIM4R version 2 will be a source of input for federation operators, technology providers, and collaborative projects such as AARC [3] and GN4 [4] as they consider their work plans for the coming years. During this presentation we will share the conclusions of this second FIM4R whitepaper and present a summary of the identified requirements and recommendations. [1] https://fim4r.org [2] https://fim4r.org/documents/ [3] https://aarc-project.eu [4] https://www.geant.org/Projects/GEANT_Project_GN4
        Speaker: Dr David Kelsey (STFC-RAL)
        Slides
    • 14:00 15:30
      Symposium on Frontiers in Computational Drug Discovery Auditorium, BHSS

      Auditorium, BHSS

      Academia Sinica

      Convener: Dr Jung-Hsin LIN
      • 14:00
        Accelerated Computer Simulations and Drug Discovery of G-Protein-Coupled Receptors 45m
        Speaker: Dr Yinglong MIAO (Kentucky University)
      • 14:45
        Principles governing biological Processes: Applications to drug design and drug target identification 45m
        Speaker: Carmay LIM
    • 15:30 16:00
      Coffee Break 30m
    • 16:00 16:40
      Symposium on Frontiers in Computational Drug Discovery Auditorium, BHSS

      Auditorium, BHSS

      Academia Sinica

      • 16:00
        Harnessing structures and dynamics of biomolecules for polypharmacology-based computational drug design" 40m
        Speaker: Dr Jung-Hsin LIN (Academia Sinica)
    • 18:00 21:00
      Reception 3h
    • 09:45 10:30
      Keynote Session: II Auditorium, BHSS

      Auditorium, BHSS

      Academia Sinica

      Convener: Dr Alexandre M.J.J. Bonvin (Utrecht University)
      • 09:45
        Grid computing and cryo-EM 45m
        Throughout the last 25 years, single particle cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) has continuously evolved into a powerful modality for determining the 3D structure of radiation-sensitive biological macromolecules, culminating in the award of the recent Nobel prices in Chemistry 2017. This development has been enabled by constant maturation of image processing algorithms in concert with the emergence of direct electron detectors, improvements in electron optics, stage stability and microscope automation, resulting in ever-growing image data volumes. I will give a brief overview of the state-of-the-art single particle cryo-EM workflow and the process of 3D reconstruction from images. Although the data volume generated by a single modern cryo electron microscope is still far from what detectors in particle physics produce each day, the growing interest and combined word-wide deployment of these facilities have already created bottlenecks in data storage and processing capacity. I will outline the resulting challenges faced by cryo-EM labs, describe the current modus operandi and a road map to grid computing in this field, which may enable institutions without expensive local infrastructure to benefit from distributed compute resources.
        Speaker: Dr Matthias WOLF (OIST)
        Slides
    • 10:30 11:00
      Coffee Break 30m
    • 11:00 12:30
      CryoEM Workshop Conference Room 1, BHSS

      Conference Room 1, BHSS

      Academia Sinica

      Convener: Dr Danny HSU (Academia Sinica)
      • 11:00
        De-demystifying 2017 Nobel Prize in Chemistry from a structural biologist view 1h 30m
        Since the year of 2013, Low temperature transmission electron microscope operated at high voltage (cryo-EM) has suddenly emerged as a powerful of tool for elucidating virtually "solution" structures of many proteins to near atomic resolution, allowing for the building of PDB model directly from the cryo-EM "Coulomb Map". However, the last year Nobel Prize has gone to three scholars that seems not to have direct contributions as to the technology breakthroughs that transformed cryo-EM. In this lecture, I will brief transverse the landscape the development of cryo-EM since 1974 to address milestones in the advance of cryo-EM including the pioneering effort by those three laureates, and the final removal of the key barriers of resolution by technology advance in (1) direct electron camera; (2) microscope automation; and (3) Baysian-based algorithm for 3D reconstruction, despite none of the inventor of the above has been rewarded with Nobel prize.
        Speaker: Dr Wei-Hau Chang (Academia Sinica)
        Slides
    • 11:00 12:30
      Earth, Environmental Science & Biodiversity Session: I Media Conference Room, BHSS

      Media Conference Room, BHSS

      Academia Sinica

      Convener: Dr Mao-Ning TUANMU (Academia Sinica)
      • 11:00
        Introduction of Soundscape Project 30m Media Conf. Room

        Media Conf. Room

        Speaker: Dr Eric Yen (ASGC)
        Slides
      • 11:30
        Improving biodiversity monitoring through soundscape information retrieval 30m Media Conf. Room

        Media Conf. Room

        Passive acoustic monitoring has been suggested as an effective tool for investigating the dynamics of biodiversity. For instance, automatic detection and classification of sounds can acquire information of species occurrences and behavioral activities of vocalizing animals. However, current methods of automatic acoustic identification of species remain uncertain for most taxa, which constrains the application of remote acoustic sensing in biodiversity monitoring. One challenge is that most of the training samples more-or-less contains undesired sound signals from non-target sources. To overcome this issue, we developed a source separation algorithm based on a deep version of non-negative matrix factorization (NMF). Using multiple layers of convolutive NMF to learn spectral features and temporal modulation of sound signals from a spectrogram, vocalizations of different species can be effectively separated in an unsupervised manner. Based on the pre-trained features, acoustic activities of target species can be efficiently separated from long-duration field recordings. Besides, spectral features of each vocalizing species can also be archived for further utilizations. In this presentation, we will demonstrate the application of deep NMF on separating sounds from different species for both birds and bats. Our results show that the proposed deep NMF approach can be used to establish recognition database of vocalizing animals for soundscape-based biodiversity monitoring, confirming its promising applicability for the field of soundscape information retrieval.
        Speaker: Dr Yu Tsao (Research Center for Information Technology Innovation, Academia Sinica)
        Slides
      • 12:00
        Monitoring of coral reef ecosystem: an integrated approach of marine soundscape and machine learning 30m Media Conf. Room

        Media Conf. Room

        Coral reefs represent the most biologically diverse marine ecosystem, however, they are vulnerable to environmental changes and impacts. Therefore, information on the variability of environment and biodiversity is essential for the conservation management of coral reefs. In this study, a soundscape monitoring network of shallow and mesophotic coral reefs was established in Okinawa, Japan. Three autonomous sound recorders were deployed in water depths of 1.5 m, 20 m, and 40 m since May 2017. To investigate the soundscape variability, we applied the periodicity-coded nonnegative matrix factorization to separate biological sounds and the other noise sources displayed on long-term spectrograms. The separation results indicate that the coral reef soundscape varied among different locations. At 1.5 m depth, biological sounds were dominated by snapping shrimp sounds and transient fish calls. Although not knowing the specific source, noises were clearly driven by tidal activities. At 20 m and 40 m depths, biological sounds were dominated by nighttime fish choruses and noises were primary related to shipping activities. Furthermore, the clustering result indicates the complexity of biological sounds was higher in mesophotic coral reefs compare to shallow-water coral reefs. Our study demonstrates that the integration of machine learning in the analysis of soundscape is efficient to interpret the variability of biological sounds, environmental and anthropogenic noises. Therefore, the conservation management of coral reefs, especially those rarely studied such as mesophotic coral reefs, can be facilitated by the long-term monitoring of coral reef soundscape.
        Speaker: Dr Tzu-Hao Lin (Research Center for Information Technology Innovation, Academia Sinica)
        Slides
    • 11:00 12:30
      GDB Meeting Room 802, BHSS

      Room 802, BHSS

      Academia Sinica

      See main WLCG GDB agenda at URL
      https://indico.cern.ch/event/651351/

      Convener: Dr Ian COLLIER
      • 11:00
        Introduction 10m
        Speaker: Dr Ian COLLIER
      • 11:10
        Storage Accounting Update 25m
        Speaker: Mr Dimitrios CHRISTIDIS
      • 11:35
        IHEP Grid Report 25m
        Speaker: Prof. wenjing wu (IHEP)
      • 12:00
        Security Report 30m
        Speaker: Romain Wartel (CERN)
    • 11:00 12:40
      eScience Activities in Asia Pacific Session: II Conference Room 2, BHSS

      Conference Room 2, BHSS

      Academia Sinica

      Convener: Dr Alberto MASONI (INFN)
      • 11:00
        Singapore Smart Nation Initiatives Using HPC 20m Conference Room 2, BHSS

        Conference Room 2, BHSS

        Academia Sinica

        Speaker: Dr John KAN
        Slides
      • 11:20
        eScience Activity in Pakistan 20m Conference Room 2, BHSS

        Conference Room 2, BHSS

        Academia Sinica

        Speaker: Dr Muhammad Imran (National Centre for Physics)
        Slides
      • 11:40
        eScience Activity in India 20m Conference Room 2, BHSS

        Conference Room 2, BHSS

        Academia Sinica

        Speaker: Mr Santhosh J (C-DAC)
        Slides
      • 12:00
        Panel Discussion 30m Conference Room 2, BHSS

        Conference Room 2, BHSS

        Academia Sinica

    • 12:30 14:00
      Lunch 1h 30m 4F Recreational Hall, BHSS

      4F Recreational Hall, BHSS

      Academia Sinica

    • 14:00 15:30
      CryoEM Workshop Conference Room 1, BHSS

      Conference Room 1, BHSS

      Academia Sinica

      Convener: Dr Danny HSU (Academia Sinica)
      • 14:00
        EMAN2 (part 1) 1h 30m
        Speakers: Cassie WU (Institute of Biological Chemistry, Academia Sinica) , Deli Irene LEE (Institute of Biological Chemistry, Academia Sinica) , Shih-Chi LUO (Institute of Biological Chemistry, Academia Sinica) , Tzu-Jing YANG (Institute of Biological Chemistry, Academia Sinica) , Wei-Cheng HUANG (Institute of Biological Chemistry, Academia Sinica)
        Slides
    • 14:00 15:30
      Earth, Environmental Science & Biodiversity Session: II Conference Room 2, BHSS

      Conference Room 2, BHSS

      Academia Sinica

      Convener: Dr Bor-Shouh HUANG
      • 14:00
        Taiwan Earthquake Model: Bring in Earthquake Science to Society 30m
        Speaker: Prof. Kuo-Fong MA
        Slides
      • 14:30
        Taiwan Earthquake Science Information System and Crowdsourcing-based Earthquake Reporting Systems 30m
        Speaker: Dr Jian-Cheng LEE
        Slides
      • 15:00
        Development of advanced infrastructure for earthquake science in Taiwan: Taiwan Earthquake Research Center 30m
        Speaker: Dr Wen-Tzong LIANG
        Slides
    • 14:00 15:30
      GDB Meeting Room 802, BHSS

      Room 802, BHSS

      Academia Sinica

      See main WLCG GDB agenda at URL
      https://indico.cern.ch/event/651351/

      Convener: Dr Ian COLLIER
      • 14:00
        IPv6 Status 30m
        Speaker: Dr David Kelsey (STFC-RAL)
        Slides
      • 14:30
        Belle II Report 30m
        Speaker: Takanori HARA
      • 15:00
        Middleware Report 30m
        Speaker: Erik Mattias WADENSTEIN
    • 14:00 15:30
      Humanities, Arts & Social Sciences Session: I Media Conference Room, BHSS

      Media Conference Room, BHSS

      Academia Sinica

      Convener: Dr Jiping LIN (Academia Sinica)
      • 14:00
        Trust Building as a Magnet of Online Survey Participation: How an Open Survey Data Platform Assists Theory Development in Social Sciences 30m
        Conventional practice of public opinion data collection is conducting face-to-face or telephone surveys. Recently scholars have turned to online survey for reducing cost and increasing efficiency. The problems of collecting public opinion data online, however, are that (1) data quality cannot be assured, that (2) respondents may not like to be (re)contacted, and that (3) panel data where respondents are willing to be re-contacted are stored privately. This paper demonstrates a practice of how an online-survey data collection platform overcomes these challenges. Since 2012, the platform smilepoll.tw has been serving as the only one public, open-data survey platform that provides respondents full datasets, which are released to their account right after the survey period. This transparency, as well as other practices of trust building, provides researchers a new tool for both qualitative interviewing and quantitative analysis. This paper will also give an example about how such publicized survey data help exploring attitudinal and behavioral patterns among the respondents. Social scientists in Taiwan are empowered with a resources of pattern recognition and theory formation.
        Speaker: Dr Frank Liu (National Sun Yat-Sen University)
        Slides
      • 14:30
        Responding to Environmental Change: Research Collaborations, Integrated Data Systems, and Deep Mapping 30m
        In 2016, Indiana University created a multi-campus interdisciplinary team and charged it to understand how climate change has affected and will affect the citizens of Indiana. Six interdisciplinary research clusters are examining the biologic, environmental, and human and cultural dimensions of climate change. The Polis Center is developing a distributed spatial data platform to allow the research and findings to be integrated and visualized within and across the geography of the state. The aim is to produce a deep map of the data, both qualitative and quantitative, that allows researchers to examine problems within a spatio-temporal framework that scales easily from small units such as neighborhoods (or smaller) to the state, as well as to any number of intermediate geographies. Tools will exit within the platform to permit easier transformation, management, and visualization of the data, with the aim to make data available in as near real-time fashion as possible. More importantly, the deep map that results must be flexible, supporting different perspectives and capable of managing both expert and native knowledge, the later contributed by citizen scientists who will be an important part of the initiative. The presentation will outline the requirements for the integrated data spatial data platform as well as the resulting system schema. It will suggest how technologies such as GIS may be linked with other non-spatial modules to construct a dynamic interdisciplinary virtual research environment for experts as well as a system that invites volunteered information and citizen participation. It will outline as well the schema for producing on-the-fly advanced visualizations for purposes of research and public consumption. Finally, the presentation will invite both ideas and collaboration from attendees at the conference. Ultimately, grand challenges are collaborative ventures, and this presentation will seek to model how such collaborations may cross continents and not simply disciplines.
        Speaker: Dr David J. Bodenhamer (Indiana University-Purdue University)
        Slides
      • 15:00
        Complex Negotiations in Agent-Based Modelling (ABM): Insights from Model Building 30m
        Negotiation is one of the most common things in the world. Everyone negotiates something every day. People negotiate even when they don’t think that they are doing so. As negotiation is part of social life, it is also undeniable of its complex essence. Complexity arises when there are a lot of variables interacting, such as the variety of interests, the number of agents and issues. Complex negotiations actually have been studied for quite a long time. However, only recently the complex negotiation’s fundamental nature, essential elements, and the causal effect relations among elements, etc., are discussed-through a “descriptive five-level framework”, namely, (1) negotiation structure, (2) context, (3) structure and relationships, (4) process and (5) decision making. Nevertheless, the “descriptive five-level framework” only can provide basic understanding of the complex nature such as the background, critical timing, elements and structures of a negotiation case. With this regard, this paper will introduce a new approach - Agent-Based Modelling (ABM) - to further analyze complex negotiations such as how agents interact and how a consensus is reached. The three-year work experience as the coordinator of Taiwan to the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) SME Working Group (SMEWG) allows me to deeply involve in international negotiations and collective decision-making process. Therefore, a specific complex negotiation case from APEC SMEWG will be introduced and examined by the built ABM model through NetLogo. To sum up, in this preliminary study, I will firstly review the academic literature of complex negotiation and display how an ABM model can be designed for analyzing a complex negotiation. After that, a systematically review of the case study will be presented for further discussions regarding insights from model building of ABM. Keywords: Complex Negotiations, Agent-Based Modelling (ABM), NetLogo, Model Building, Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), Small and Medium Enterprise Working Group (SMEWG)
        Speaker: Mr Shih-Chieh Wang (Taiwan Institute of Economic Research)
    • 15:30 16:00
      Coffee Break 30m
    • 16:00 17:30
      CryoEM Workshop Conference Room 1, BHSS

      Conference Room 1, BHSS

      Academia Sinica

      Convener: Dr Danny HSU (Academia Sinica)
      • 16:00
        EMAN2 (part 2) 1h 30m
        Speakers: Cassie WU (Institute of Biological Chemistry, Academia Sinica) , Deli Irene LEE (Institute of Biological Chemistry, Academia Sinica) , Shih-Chi LUO (Institute of Biological Chemistry, Academia Sinica) , Tzu-Jing YANG (Institute of Biological Chemistry, Academia Sinica) , Wei-Cheng HUANG (Institute of Biological Chemistry, Academia Sinica)
        Slides
    • 16:00 17:30
      Earth, Environmental Science & Biodiversity Session: III Conference Room 2, BHSS

      Conference Room 2, BHSS

      Academia Sinica

      Convener: Dr Stephan HACHINGER
      • 16:00
        Impacts of Horizontal Resolution and Air–Sea Flux Parameterizations on the Intensity and Structure of Tropical Cyclone 30m
        This study investigates the impacts of horizontal resolution and surface flux formulas on typhoon intensity and structure simulations through the case study of the Super Typhoon Haiyan (2013). Three different surface flux formulas in the Weather Research and Forecasting Model are tested for grid spacing from 6 to 1 km. Both increased resolution and more reasonable flux formulas can improve the typhoon intensity simulation, but their impacts on wind structures are different. Sufficiently high resolution is more conducive to the positive effect of flux formulas. Reduce the grid spacing to 1 km yields deeper and stronger, more upright and contracted eyewall. As resolution increases, the size of updraft cores in the eyewall shrinks and the region of downdraft increases, and both updraft and downdraft become more intense. In the finer resolution of simulations, the convective cores are driven by more intense updrafts within a rather small fraction of spatial area. This resolution dependence of the spatial scale of updrafts is attributed to the model effective resolution, which is determined by grid spacing, not the flux formulas. While the use of more reasonable flux formulas can increase the simulated storm intensity to some extent, the positive effect of surface flux formulas cannot be effectively enhanced unless the grid spacing is properly reduced to efficiently yield intense and contracted eyewall structure.
        Speaker: Dr Chuan-Yao Lin (Academia Sinica)
        Slides
      • 16:30
        A Deep Learning Approach to Tropical Cyclone Intensity Estimation Using Satellite-based Infrared Images 30m
        The standard method for estimating tropical cyclone (TC) intensity is by interpreting TC structure from geostationary satellite images, except when aircraft reconnaissance flights are routine. Since much of a TC life cycle occurs over an ocean, satellites are an excellent source of meteorological information for the task as it offers coverage much better than traditional observations. While satellite imagers do not directly measure variables related to TC strength such as winds and central pressure, TC intensity can be gleaned based on the extent and organization of its cloud patterns. One of the first comprehensive pattern recognition methods for estimating TC intensity using satellite-based images is known as the "Dvorak technique'' introduced by Vernon Dvorak. The technique uses visible and infrared (IR) brightness temperature images to extract specific cloud patterns to detect rotation, deep thunderstorms, and eye; then relates them to the deepening or weakening of a TC. Satellite-based TC intensity estimation is tackled as a feature extraction and pattern recognition task. In its basic principle, the detection of a well-formed eye is indicative of an organized TC structure. A well-formed eye is likely a sign of a strong TC. Likewise, visually disorganized cloud signatures are regarded as an attribute of weaker TCs. The original Dvorak technique is a rule-based algorithm that looks for central dense overcasts (CDO) and outer banding features of a TC to determine its intensity. Several objective methodologies developed, thereafter, also involved prior manual extraction of satellite image features that relate to TC intensity. These features included cloud organization properties, inner core characteristics, the radius of curvature and the rain rate. Recent approaches to image-based classification tasks though enabled implicit extraction of features from images. Particularly, artificial neural networks (ANN) designed for image classification such as the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) learns about relevant low to high-level features through several layers of artificial neurons. In this work, we posit that: since the features are directly engineered from TC satellite images, TC intensity estimation can be performed directly over the images without the need for explicit feature extraction. This idea transforms the task of satellite-based TC intensity estimation from a feature extraction and pattern recognition task into an image classification problem. In this study, we investigate transfer learning of a pre-trained CNN architecture for estimating TC intensity based on grayscale IR images of TCs in the Western North Pacific basin; and identify relevant TC features relating to TC intensity. Transfer learning is the process of extending the knowledge of a pre-trained ANN to learn additional new knowledge. We particularly use the VGG19 network architecture for this task in this study. Furthermore, we qualify how much information IR image signatures offer in the estimation of TC maximum wind speeds. Different from previous works, the study explores a different approach without explicitly extracting TC features. To our knowledge, this is by far the first attempt use CNN transfer learning to estimate TC intensities solely based on grayscale IR images of TCs. Specifically, we make the following contributions - We construct a CNN model using transfer learning with VGG19 network architecture for the purpose of TC intensity estimation through satellite IR image classification. - We show that our model performs well on 2015-2016 TC satellite images and is comparable to previous methods which require explicit feature extraction. - We show that our model is also able to learn TC features which are previously found to be strong indicators of TC intensity, such as cloud formation and presence or absence of a well-formed eye.
        Speaker: Mr Jays Samuel Combinido (Department of Science and Technology -- Advanced Science and Technology Institute)
        Slides
      • 17:00
        Towards a crowdsourcing platform for labelling remote sensing images online 30m
        Vast quantities of remote sensing data are becoming available at an ever-accelerating rate, and it is transforming geosciences today. When investigating global-scale environmental phenomena, large scale of temporal and spatial remote sensing data need to be processed to extract useful information, especially the land use types. As most powerful remote sensing image processing methods need labeled training dataset, and there is no such open remote sensing image training dataset, researchers have to label the image all by themselves. Sometimes, researcher have to download and label large volume of remote sensing images to satisfy their machine learning methods, such as deep learning. This is not only time-consuming, but also a waste of researchers energy. Based on our past work of having built a cloud-based platform for massive remote sensing data retrieving, downloading and processing, we have accumulated a large volume of remote sensing data, and more than 187 thousand users. Crowdsourcing is a way of utilizing the human intelligence of citizens. As it has been proved to be an effective way to tackle tasks that are difficult to be automated processed, such as Wikipedia, we decide to try to collect training datasets for remote sensing image processing through crowdsourcing. It not only can fully utilize the human intelligence of the large number of users, but also can build a large remote sensing labeled dataset of great value. In this paper, we propose an on-line remote sensing image labeling platform. Through it, users neither have to install any software, nor download large remote sensing images. Remote sensing images are displayed on the web, and users can directly label the images by just drawing polygons and add tags. Tags are predefined. All the labeled dataset can be downloaded and shared with other people. Moreover, standards of the training dataset have been studied. And two components of the labeled data are stored, which are the true image values of the labeled region and their metadata, such as the bounding box, tag, and location information. In this way, the training data can be used directly for a variety of machine learning models. By implementing such an online remote sensing labelling platform, participants not only can visualize, label, download, and share training datasets only with a simple web-connection, but also will have a better understanding of the land types on our planet.
        Speaker: Ms Jianghua Zhao (Computer Network Information Center, Chinese Academy of Sciences)
        Slides
    • 16:00 17:30
      GDB Meeting Room 802, BHSS

      Room 802, BHSS

      Academia Sinica

      See main WLCG GDB agenda at URL
      https://indico.cern.ch/event/651351/

      Convener: Dr Ian COLLIER
      • 16:00
        LHCOPN/LHCONE Report 30m
        Speaker: Edoardo MARTELLI
      • 16:30
        EISCAT 3D Report 30m
        Speaker: Erik Mattias WADENSTEIN
      • 17:00
        AMS Report 30m
        Speaker: Mr Felix LEE
    • 16:00 17:30
      Humanities, Arts & Social Sciences Session: II Media Conference Room, BHSS

      Media Conference Room, BHSS

      Academia Sinica

      Convener: Dr David J. Bodenhamer (Indiana University-Purdue University)
      • 16:00
        Skill-based Occupation/Job Recommendation system 30m
        A mass of adolescents has decided their occupations/jobs/majors out of proper and professional advice from school services. For instance, adolescents do not have adequate information about occupations/jobs, what occupations can be reached by which majors, and what kind of education and training are needed for particular jobs. On the other hand, major choices of adolescents are influenced by a society and their family. They receive occupational information in common jobs from the environment. But they are a lack of information in professional occupations. Furthermore, the choice of major has become increasingly complex due to the existence of multiple human skills which mean each person has their ability at the certain area and can be applied to multiple jobs/occupations. Their major choices are influenced by society, education environment, and mostly their families. Those pitfalls are potentially the causes of a mismatch major between academic achievements, personality, interest and skills of students. It would be useful to understand how students’ choice of the academic majors depends on personal characteristics, competencies, and vocational interests. Most of the students do not possess adequate information about meaning of occupations/majors, what careers can be reached by which majors, and what kind of skills and abilities are needed for a particular occupation/major. For those reasons, students need an automatic counselling system according to their values. To do this, occupation recommendation system is implemented with a variety of IT and soft skills. The main goal of this research is to build an occupation recommendation system (ORS) by using data mining and natural language processing (NLP) methods on open educational resource (OER) and skill dataset, in order to help adolescents. The system can provide different variety of academic programs, related online courses (e.g., MOOCs), required skills, ability, knowledge, and job tasks, and jobs currently announced as well as relevant occupational descriptions. The system can assist adolescents in major selection and career planning. Furthermore, the system incorporates a set of searching results, which are recommended using similarity measurements and hybridization recommendation techniques. These methods serve as a base for recommending occupations that meet interests and competencies of adolescents.
        Speaker: Ms Ankhtuya Ochirbat (National University of Mongolia)
        Slides
      • 16:30
        Authorship recognition and disambiguation of scientific papers using a neural networks approach 30m
        One of the main issues affecting the quality and reliability of bibliographic records retrieved from digital libraries -- such as Web of Science, Scopus, Google Scholar and many others -- is the autorship recognition and author names disambiguation. So far these problems have been faced using methods mainly based on text-pattern-recognition for specific datasets, with high-level degree of errors. In this paper, we propose an approach using neural networks to learn features automatically for solving authorship recognition and disambiguation of author names. The network learns for each author the set of co-writers, and from this information recovers authorship of papers. In addition, the network can be trained taking into account other features such as author affiliations, keywords, projects and research areas. The network has been developed using the TensorFlow framework, and run on recent Nvidia GPUs and multi-core Intel CPUs. Test datasets have been selected from records exported in RIS format from the Scopus digital library, for several groups of authors working in the fields of computer science, environmental science and physics. The proposed methods achieves accuracies above 99% in authorship recognition and is able to effectively disambiguate homonyms. We have taken into account several network parameters, such as training-set size and batch size, number of levels and hidden units, threshold and weight initialization, back-propagation algorithms, and analyzed the impact on accuracy of results. This approach can be easily extended to any dataset and any bibliographic records provider.
        Speakers: Dr Luca Tomassetti (University of Ferrara and INFN) , Dr Sebastiano Fabio Schifano (University of Ferrara and INFN)
      • 17:00
        Educational Quality Assurance and Accountability of ICT-Enhanced Higher Education - Developing an SOP for Educational Informatics - 30m
        This proposal is to put the higher education in a bigger picture and looks at the education from the institutional level or Chief Information Officer’s perspective. Target audience will be school administrators as well as decision-makers for the deployment and implementation of ICT-enhanced curriculum or education. In order to assure the quality of education enhanced with ICT-enhanced learning to better design the future society, no one denies that education plays the essential role. However, there has not been any quality assurance model to visually explain the quality of education or any specification or standard for an effective role of ICT in education discussed in an institution or presented in public. Further, there has not been any demonstration of accountability of such issues to stakeholders. As the results, school administrators or IT staff in charge of implementing ICT in education did not have any chance to quality control the education. Teachers and instructors has been implementing ICT-enhanced education with trials and errors. This paper purports to propose a robust standard operating procedures for the use of ICT in education, especially in the field of learning rather than teaching, i.e., educational Informatics. In the presentation, the SOP in consideration with the following components are discussed: (i) the educational paradigm as well as the learning environment to fortify the ICT-enhanced learning, (ii) the strategies for effective ICT-enhanced learning, (iii) effective methodologies for learning, (iv) effective assessment strategies for ICT-learning in conjunction with required ICT literacy level for learners and educators.
        Speakers: Mr Masaki Watanabe (CTL, Kansai University) , Dr Tosh YAMAMOTO (CTL, Kansai University)
        Slides
    • 18:30 20:30
      PC & GDB Dinner 2h
    • 09:00 10:30
      Keynote Session: III Auditorium, BHSS

      Auditorium, BHSS

      Academia Sinica

      Convener: Dr Ian COLLIER (Science and Technology Facilities Council)
      • 09:00
        Preparing Applications for the New Era of Computing 45m
        We are entering a new Era of computing with large scale HPC systems soon reaching performance levels of Exaflops and large scale cloud infrastructures providing unprecedented levels of compute power. These greatly enhanced computational capabilities will enable new science, pushing both the boundaries of existing computational science and enhancing new domains like artificial intelligence and high performance data analytics. These enormous advances are being enabled by new hardware technologies, particularly changing CPU and memory design. Unfortunately, these changes are not transparent to applications and call for revised algorithms and implementations; appropriate programming environments, workflows, and data management systems; and a deep understanding of the hardware developments to come. Dedicated effort have started in Europe to address these issues and in this talk we review some of the key challenges and present Europe's approach to them. Highlights of some selected projects, like the BioExcel Centre of Excellence for Computational Biomolecular Research will also be presented.
        Speaker: Dr Erwin LAURE (KTH)
        Slides
      • 09:45
        Challenging Einstein's Theory of General Relativity by Gravitational Waves with Advanced Computing Technologies 45m
        The recent historic discovery of Gravitational Waves (GW) by LIGO won the Nobel Prize in physics in 2017 and opened a new era of GW astronomy. After about 100 years since the completion of General Relativity by Einstein, for the first time we can test this theory at extreme gravity conditions by using GW signals. The advanced computing technologies such as GRID and GPU play important roles to achieve these goals. The summary of world-wide GW detection network and data analysis approaches will be discussed.
        Speaker: Dr Sadakazu HAINO (Institute of Physics, Academia Sinica)
        Slides
    • 10:30 11:00
      Coffee Break 30m
    • 11:00 12:30
      CryoEM Workshop Conference Room 1, BHSS

      Conference Room 1, BHSS

      Academia Sinica

      Convener: Dr Danny HSU (Academia Sinica)
      • 11:00
        Relion (part 1) 1h 30m
        Speakers: Cassie WU (Institute of Biological Chemistry, Academia Sinica) , Deli Irene LEE (Institute of Biological Chemistry, Academia Sinica) , Shih-Chi LUO (Institute of Biological Chemistry, Academia Sinica) , Tzu-Jing YANG (Institute of Biological Chemistry, Academia Sinica) , Wei-Cheng HUANG (Institute of Biological Chemistry, Academia Sinica)
    • 11:00 12:30
      Data Management & Big Data Session: III Media Conference Room, BHSS

      Media Conference Room, BHSS

      Academia Sinica

      Convener: Dr Philippe Charpentier (CERN)
      • 11:00
        dCache - running a fault-tolerant storage over public networks 30m
        As a robust and scalable storage system, dCache has always allowed the number of storage nodes and user accessible endpoints to be scaled horizontally, providing several levels of fault tolerance and high throughput. Core management services like the POSIX name space and central load balancing components however are merely vertically scalable. This greatly limits the scalability of the core services as well as provides single points of failures. Such single points of failures are not just a concern for fault tolerance, but also prevent zero downtime rolling upgrades. For large sites, redundant and horizontally scalable services translate to higher uptime, easier up- grades, and higher maximum request rates. This becomes more important with growing demand in muti-site distributed deployments. Since version 2.16 dCache team have made a big effort to move towards redundant services in dCache. The low level UDP based service discovery is replaced with widely-adopted Apache-ZooKeeper, which is a redundant, persistent, hierarchical directory service with strong ordering guarantees. As ZooKeeper itself run in a fault-tolerant cluster mode with strong consistency guarantee, it become a natural place to keep shared state or take a role of service coordination. Many dCache internal services are updated and can run in replicated mode by providing truly fault-tolerant deployment. However, as any distributed service, dCache is affected by a network partitioning. In terms of so-called CAP theorem, dCache will prefer consistency over availability and return an error or timeout if data consistency can not be guaranteed. Yet another aspect of distributed deployments, is the security. The different components must be authenticated and communication must be secure. The latest dCache versions provide a mechanism to use standard PKI infrastructure to achieve secure network communication as well as inter-component authentication. With this presentation we will show how to deploy distributed, fault-tolerant dCache to provide reliable storage. We will discuss some technical details, share experience and lessons learned.
        Speaker: Dr Patrick Fuhrmann (DESY/dCache.org)
        Slides
      • 11:30
        EOS Open Storage - the CERN storage ecosystem for scientific data repositories 30m
        EOS Open Storage platform is a software solution for central data recording, user analysis and data processing. In 2017 the EOS system at CERN provided 250 PB of disk storage on more than 50k disks. Most of the stored data originates from the Large Hadron Collider and various other experiments at CERN. Originally developed as a pure disk storage system, EOS has been extended with interfaces to support data life cycle management and tiered storage setups. A work flow engine allows to trigger chained work flows on predefined storage events to notify external services on arrival, retrieval or deletion of data. It is planned to connect EOS during 2018 to the CERN tape archive system (currently archiving 200 PB) to optimize data durability and costs. Unlike many classical storage systems, EOS is also designed and used for distributed deployments in WAN environments. The CERN storage setup is distributed over two computer centers in Geneva and Budapest. Another example is a distributed setup in Australia for the CloudStor service of the australian research network AARNet. EOS participates in the eXtreme Data Cloud project with the goal to use EOS as an overlay layer to implement a data lake concept where various non-uniform storage systems can be virtualized into a centrally managed distributed storage system. The described deployment model allows to optimize redundancy parameters on a higher level for cost reduction and availability optimization - in contrast to a simplistic file replication model where local redundancy within servers or a storage site is not taken into account. To enable scientific collaboration and interactive data analysis EOS is used as the back-end implementation for CERNBox with file synchronization, sharing and collaborative editing capabilities - and SWAN as a service for web-based data analysis (Jupyter notebook interface). The CERN OpenData digital repository based on Invenio uses EOS as its storage back-end. The enabling functionality for these front-end services is a very versatile quota and access control system built-in to EOS and a large variety of access protocols optimized for LAN and WAN usage. Another major development area in the EOS ecosystem is a FUSE based file system client providing low-latency/high-throughput access to EOS data via a file system interface. The third generation allows kerberos or certificate based authentication with similar performance levels of distributed file systems like AFS and allows transparent re-exporting via NFS or CIFS protocol.
        Speaker: Dr Andreas-Joachim Peters (CERN)
        Slides
      • 12:00
        Automatic Extraction of Extended Named Entities from Wikipedia for Conversation Analysis 30m
        In recent years, AI assistants have been developed and these are increasingly helping humans at work and at home. Among them, voice assistances technologies are particularly attractive. They are not limited only to smart phone applications, such as Apple Siri and Google Assistance. Recently Amazon Alexa is used at work and Google Home and LINE Wave are used at home. These voice assistance technologies also help in the business places as well as at home. As described above, a voice assistant is active in various situations, but there are many operating steps to complete. These steps are quite complicated because they require the use of complex techniques. The steps can be roughly divided into two parts. The first step is to get a voice assistant to understand the human language and to recognize the conversational situation and context. The second step is to create the contents of the next dialogue to continue conversation based on the results obtained in the first step, and then choose a suitable response among from possible choices of responses. In this research, focusing on the first step we propose a method for capturing and structuring human words in more detail. To explain more concretely, this method automatically extracts the extended named entity from the Wikipedia articles, and it structures the contents of the sentences and the dialogues based on the extracted information. There are seven types of named entities. They are human, organization, location, date, time, money and rate described by MUC (Message Understanding Conference) and used for classification and analysis of sentences. However, the scope of these classifications is ambiguous, and it does not reach the practical level in actual sentence classification and analysis. Therefore, an extended named entity which improved the named entity has been proposed. Nevertheless, even though it has expanded from seven types to more than 200 types of named entities, it is necessary to deal with vast datasets manually in order to actually perform the classification work. To solve this problem, this research introduces a way to construct datasets of extended named entity from Wikipedia and classify sentences with more detailed granularity.
        Speaker: Mr Daiki Ishizuka (Kanazawa Institute of Technology)
    • 11:00 13:00
      eScience Activities in Asia Pacific Session: III Conference Room 2, BHSS

      Conference Room 2, BHSS

      Academia Sinica

      Convener: Dr Ludek Matyska (CESNET)
      • 11:00
        eScience Activities in Japan 20m Conference Room 2, BHSS

        Conference Room 2, BHSS

        Academia Sinica

        Speaker: Prof. Kento Aida (National Institute of Informatics)
      • 11:20
        eScience Activities in China 20m Conference Room 2, BHSS

        Conference Room 2, BHSS

        Academia Sinica

        Speaker: Dr Gang Chen (Institute Of High Energy Physics)
        Slides
      • 11:40
        eScience Activities in Korea 20m Conference Room 2, BHSS

        Conference Room 2, BHSS

        Academia Sinica

        Speaker: Dr Sang-Un AHN
        Slides
      • 12:00
        eScience Activities in Taiwan 20m Conference Room 2, BHSS

        Conference Room 2, BHSS

        Academia Sinica

        Speaker: Dr Eric YEN (ASGC)
      • 12:20
        eScience Activities in Mongolia 20m Conference Room 2, BHSS

        Conference Room 2, BHSS

        Academia Sinica

        Speaker: Mr Batzaya ENKHJARGAL (MAS)
      • 12:40
        Panel Discussion 20m Conference Room 2, BHSS

        Conference Room 2, BHSS

        Academia Sinica

    • 12:30 14:00
      Lunch 1h 30m 4F Recreational Hall

      4F Recreational Hall

      Academia Sinica

    • 14:00 15:30
      CryoEM Workshop Conference Room 1, BHSS

      Conference Room 1, BHSS

      Academia Sinica

      Convener: Dr Danny HSU (Academia Sinica)
      • 14:00
        Relion (part 2) 1h 30m
        Speakers: Cassie WU (Institute of Biological Chemistry, Academia Sinica) , Deli Irene LEE (Institute of Biological Chemistry, Academia Sinica) , Shih-Chi LUO (Institute of Biological Chemistry, Academia Sinica) , Tzu-Jing YANG (Institute of Biological Chemistry, Academia Sinica) , Wei-Cheng HUANG (Institute of Biological Chemistry, Academia Sinica)
    • 14:00 15:30
      Heritage Science Session: I Media Conference Room, BHSS

      Media Conference Room, BHSS

      Academia Sinica

      Convener: Simon C. Lin (ASGC)
      • 14:00
        E-RIHS’ DIGILAB: A data and service infrastructure 45m
        The European Research Infrastructure for Heritage Science (E-RIHS) incorporating and taking advantage of the long-term tradition of the heritage science research, the ability to combine with innovation, and the integration promoted by EU-funded projects such as ARIADNE and PARTHENOS exploits the synergy of the cooperation among the academy, research centers, and cultural institutions. E-RIHS will provide state-of-the-art tools and services to support cross-disciplinary research communities of users through its four access platforms: MOLAB, FIXLAB, ARCHLAB, and DIGILAB. The DIGILAB platform will rely on a network of federated repositories where researchers, professionals, managers and other heritage-related professionals deposit the digital results of their work. These data will not be kept internally. On the contrary, the platform will provide access to the original repositories where the data are stored. DIGILAB inspired by the FAIR principles (Findable-Accessible-Interoperable-Reusable) will provide online access and remote services to the heritage science research community. It will enable finding data through an advanced search system operating on a registry containing metadata describing each individual dataset. It will support access to the data through a federated identity system, while data access grants will be local to each repository. It will guarantee data interoperability by requiring the use of a standard data model. It will foster re-use by making services available to users, to process the data according to their own research questions and use requirements. The platform includes and enables access to searchable registries of specialized digital resources (datasets, reference collections, thesauri, ontologies, etc.). Furthermore, DIGILAB will set up guidelines for dataset recovery and assist researchers and research institutions, while as cloud-based infrastructure will support data interoperability through the creation of shared knowledge organization systems and provides tools to process them according to researchers’ needs and research questions. Overall DIGILAB facilitates virtual access to tools and data hubs for heritage research and is designed to be the privileged gateway to European scientific knowledge in heritage.
        Speakers: Mr Athanasios Koutoupas (The Cyprus Institute) , Dr Franco Niccolucci (Vast-Lab Pin S.C.R.L.) , Dr Luca Pezzati (Consiglio Nazionale Delle Ricerche) , Dr Sorin Hermon (The Cyprus Institute)
        Slides
      • 14:45
        Document Management with ConservationSpace 45m
        ConservationSpace is a web-based, open source software application to create, manage, and preserve conservation documents. With support of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the National Gallery of Art, Washington, has led the development effort in partnership with the Courtauld Institute of Art, Denver Art Museum, Indianapolis Museum of Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art (withdrew in late 2015), Statens Museum for Kunst, and Yale University. The conservation community realized many years ago that a digital solution for managing documents would increase access, improve discoverability, expand research opportunities, support workflow procedures, and reduce document loss. Several institutions sought grants to develop document management software tailored to the specific needs of their institution; however, it quickly became clear that this was an expensive approach that did not facilitate collaboration between institutions. In response to these concerns, the Mellon Foundation organized several meetings to discuss challenges and collaborative solutions for conservation documentation. These efforts resulted in the formation of the ConservationSpace partnership. In 2012, the National Gallery awarded a contract for software development to Sirma Enterprise Systems (formerly Sirma ITT). ConservationSpace utilizes the Sirma Enterprise Platform, a combination of multiple open source components designed to allow rapid development for diverse business requirements. While the system can be installed on institutional servers, it is primarily intended for a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) approach in which the application is centrally hosted and delivered over the Internet as a service. For many users, web-based software reduces costs and simplifies software maintenance. The database management system is constructed on semantic technology. Semantic repositories are an alternative to more traditional relational databases for storing, querying, and handling structured data. The semantic graph database utilizes an ontology that provides easier integration and reasoning capabilities with a large volume of diverse data. It enables searches that find complex relationships—ones that current standard data models would not discover. This benefit is particularly important for an application that must access and link highly heterogeneous data scattered in diverse systems, making it the ideal approach to gathering and storing information for conservators. In the summer of 2016 the National Gallery of Art was the first partner institution to implement ConservationSpace to create and manage new documents. The Gallery is now in the process of scanning hard copy legacy documents, with optical character recognition (OCR), and migrating existing digital records into ConservationSpace. The other partners are in various stages of implementation. The ultimate success of ConservationSpace will be measured both by the effectiveness of its document-management solutions and the ease in which the software application can be used and adapted by conservators and scientists in other institutions and private practice.
        Speaker: Mr Mervin Richard (National Gallery of Art)
        Slides
    • 14:00 15:30
      Networking, Security, Infrastructure & Operation Session: II Room 802

      Room 802

      Academia Sinica

      Convener: Dr Joy CHAN
      • 14:00
        Building a large scale Intrusion Detection System using Big Data technologies 20m Room 802

        Room 802

        Academia Sinica

        Computer security threats have always been a major concern and continue to increase in frequency and complexity. The nature and techniques of the attacks evolve rapidly over time, making the detection of attacks more difficult, therefore the means and tools used to deal with them need to evolve at the same pace if not faster. In this paper a system for intrusion detection (IDS) both at the network (NIDS) and host (HIDS) level is presented. The system is currently processing in real time approximately half a TB of data per day, with the final goal of coping with 2.5 TB. In order to accomplish this goal firstly an infrastructure to collect data from sources such as system logs, web server logs and the network based Intrusion Detection System logs has been developed making use of technologies such as Apache Flume and Apache Kafka. Once the data is collected it needs to be processed in search of malicious activity: the data is consumed by Apache Spark jobs which compare in real time this data with known signatures of malicious activities. These are known as IoC or Indicator of Compromise, they are published by many security experts and centralized in a local MISP (Malware Information Sharing Platform) instance. Nonetheless, detecting an intrusion is not enough. There is a need to understand what happened and why. In order to gain knowledge on the context of the detected intrusion the data is also enriched in real time when it is passing through the pipeline. For example DNS resolution and IP geolocation are applied to the it. Therefore, a system generic enough to process any kind of data in JSON format is enriching the data in order to get full context of what is happening and finally looking for indicators of compromise to detect possible intrusions, making use of the latest technologies in the Big Data ecosystem.
        Speaker: Mr Liviu Valsan (CERN)
        Slides
      • 14:20
        Security Situation Assessment Method Based On States Transition 20m Room 802

        Room 802

        Academia Sinica

        With the development of demands in the network security operation, how to assess the network security situation becomes a research hotspot. In order to solve the problem that the security situation of current network cannot be reflected by the alarm information from security equipment, the security situation assessment model based on state transition was built with HMM, by re-searching hosts states and analysing events affected states transition. This method is effective in training the parameters of the model, and it can analyse the security situation quantitatively and qualitatively. At last, the result validates the method by the historical security data in CSTNET.
        Speaker: Mr Hanji Shen (Computer Network Information Center of Chinese Academy of Sciences)
        Slides
      • 14:40
        Design and Development of the Platform for Network Traffic Statistics and Analysis 20m Room 802

        Room 802

        Academia Sinica

        Huge amount of experimental data are produced by large scientific facilities of IHEP, such as Daya Bay, JUNO, LHASSO and CSNS. The performance and efficiency of the data exchange are playing an important role in these scientific research activities. The quality of data exchange among the members relies heavily on the stability and reliability of the network. The statistics and analysis for the network traffic is a way to know the network status and also very useful for the network performance optimization and the strategy plan for network architecture. The paper describes the design and development a network traffic statistics and analysis platform based on PMACCT and KAFKA. The functional modules of this platform include data acquisition, data storage, data analysis and visualization. The data acquisition module is developed based on an open source software ‘PMACCT’, which collects network traffic data from the routers. For data storage module, KAFKA is used as a message queue to subscribe traffic records from PMACCT and save these records to MongoDB with high efficiency. Data analysis module is responsible for the classification and statistics of traffic data according to the requirement parameters pre-configured. Visualization module serves for network administrator which provides customized graphic reports via HTTP. Partial functions of the platform have been finished and deployed to analysis IHEP network traffic, and more features will be released in the future.
        Speaker: Ms Hao Hu (Institute of High Energy Physics)
        Slides
      • 15:00
        Simulation approach for improving the computing network topology and performance of the China IHEP Data Center 20m Room 802

        Room 802

        Academia Sinica

        The goal of the project is to improve the computing network topology and performance of the China IHEP Data Center taking into account growing numbers of hosts, experiments and computing resources including cloud computing environment.The analysis of the computing performance of the IHEP Data Center in order to optimize its distributed data processing system is a really hard problem due to the great scale and complexity of shared computing and storage resources between various IHEP divisions. Therefore, we decide to utilize the simulation approach and adopt as a simulation tool the simulation program CloudSim Plus [2] which enables researchers rapidly evaluate the efficiency, performance and reliability of their computing network. The simulation uses input parameters from the data base of the IHEP computing infrastructure, besides we use some data of the BESIII [3] experiments to indicate workflow and data flow parameters. The first simulation results show that the proposed approach allows us to make an optimal choice of the network topology improving its performance and saving resources.
        Speaker: Ms Li Wang (IHEP)
        Slides
    • 14:00 15:50
      Physics & Engineering Session Conference Room 2, BHSS

      Conference Room 2, BHSS

      Academia Sinica

      Convener: Prof. Hiroshi Sakamoto (The University of Tokyo)
      • 14:00
        Studies on Job Queue Health and Problem Recovery 20m Conf. Room 2

        Conf. Room 2

        Academia Sinica

        In a batch system, the job queue is in charge of a set of jobs. Job queue health is determined by the health status of these jobs. The job state can be queuing, running, completed, error or held, etc. Generally jobs can move from one state to another. However, if one job keeps in one state for too long, there might be problems, such as worker node failure and network blocking. In a large-scale computing cluster, problems cannot be avoided. Then some jobs will be blocked in one state, and cannot be completed in time. This will delay the progress of the computing task. For the previous situation, this paper studies on the abnormal job state reason, problem handling and job queue stability. We aim to improve the job queue health, so that we can raise job success rate and speed up users’ task progress. Abnormal reasons can be found from job attributes, queue information and logs, which can be analyzed in detail to acquire better solutions. These solutions are grouped into two categories. The first one is automatic job recovering that associated with the monitor system. When a job is recovered, it can be rescheduled in time. The second one is automatically informing users to recover jobs by themselves. Depending on the analysis results, feasible recommendations are pushed to users for quick recovering. As described above, a queue health system is designed and implemented at IHEP. We define a series of standards to determine abnormal jobs. Various information is collected and analyzed in association. According to the analysis results, automatic recovery measures are applied to abnormal jobs. In case of invalid automatic recovery, recommendations are sent to users by emails, WeChat, etc. The status of this system shows that it’s able to improve the job queue health in most conditions.
        Speaker: Mr Xiaowei Jiang (Institute of High Energy Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences)
        Slides
      • 14:20
        Construction of real-time monitoring system for Grid services based on log analysis at the Tokyo Tier-2 center 20m Conf. Room 2

        Conf. Room 2

        Academia Sinica

        The Tokyo Tier-2 center, which is located in the International Center for Elementary Particle Physics (ICEPP) at the University of Tokyo, is providing computer resources for the ATLAS experiment in the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG). The official site operation in the WLCG was launched in 2007 after several years of development. The site has been achieving a stable and reliable operation since then. We replaced almost all hardware devices in every three years in order to satisfy the requirement of the ATLAS experiment. The latest hardware upgrade was done in January 2016, and the new system (so-called 4th system) is stably running. In the 4th system, 6144 CPU cores (256 worker nodes) and 7392 TB disk storages are reserved for the ATLAS experiment. For the Grid middlewares, the ARC-CE is deployed as the computing element in front of the HTCondor batch job scheduler. The disk storage consists of 48 sets of a disk array and a file server, which is managed by the Disk Pool Manager (DPM). Logs produced by these Grid services provide useful information to determine whether the services are working correctly. For example, the job slot occupancy, the job success rate, the job duration and so on can be measured by parsing log files in the ARC-CE + HTCondor system. Therefore, we are constructing a new real-time monitoring system based on log analysis using the ELK stack in order to detect the problem of the Grid services. The ELK stack provides an efficient way of log processing, storing, query and visualization. In this poster, the status of construction of this new real-time monitoring system based on log analysis at the Tokyo Tier-2 center will be described. Improvements in terms of flexibility and reliability of the site operation by introducing the new monitoring system will also be discussed.
        Speaker: Mr Tomoe Kishimoto (University of Tokyo)
        Slides
      • 14:40
        Extending WLCG Tier-2 Resources using HPC and Cloud Solutions 20m Conf. Room 2

        Conf. Room 2

        Academia Sinica

        Available computing resources limit data simulation and processing of LHC experiments. WLCG Tier centers connected via Grid provide majority of computing and storage capacities, which allow relatively fast and precise analyses of data. Requirements on the number of simulated events must be often reduced to meet installed capacities. Projection of requirements for future LHC runs shows a significant shortage of standard Grid resources if a flat budget is assumed. There are several activities exploring other sources of computing power for LHC projects. The most significant are big HPC centers (supercomputers) and Cloud resources provided both by commercial and academic institutions. The Tier-2 center hosted by the Institute of Physics (IoP) in Prague provides resources for ALICE and ATLAS collaborations on behalf of all involved Czech institutions. Financial resources provided by funding agencies and resources provided by IoP do not allow to buy enough servers to meet demands of experiments. We extend storage resources by two distant sites with additional finance sources. Xrootd servers in the Institute of Nuclear Physics in Rez near Prague store files for the ALICE experiment. CESNET data storage group operates dCache instance with a tape backend for ATLAS (and Pierre Auger Observatory) collaboration. Relatively big computing capacities could be used in the national supercomputing center IT4I in Ostrava. Within the ATLAS collaboration, we explore two different solutions to overcome technical problems arising from different computing environment on the supercomputer. The main difference is that individual worker nodes do not have an external network connection and cannot directly download input and upload output data. One solution is already used for HPC centers in the USA, but until now requires significant adjustments of procedures used for standard ATLAS production. Another solution is based on ARC CE hosted by the Tier-2 center at IoP and resubmission of jobs remotely via ssh. We will also report on our experience with resource extensions via Open Nebula Cloud provided by CESNET.
        Speaker: Dr Jiri Chudoba (Institute of Physics of the CAS, Prague)
        Slides
      • 15:00
        A brief history of distributed computing at the LHC 30m Conference Room 2, BHSS

        Conference Room 2, BHSS

        Academia Sinica

        Since the inception of the MONARC model and of the Grid paradigm at the turn of the millenium, our views on how to organize distributed computing for the LHC experiments has considerably evolved. There have been several generations of tools (Grid middleware) as well as a lot of conceptual and technical developments within the experiments in order to optimize the efficiency of data management and data processing. The rigid MONARC model has evolved towards a more versatile usage of computing resources, and new resource providers have emerged, in particular cloud providers, institutional clusters outside the Grid and volunteer computing. in this presentation we shall review the main stages of evolution of distributed computing at the LHC during these 18 years and try and give an outlook on the possible further evolution, in view of the upcoming upgrades of the LHC and of the experiments during the next 10 years.
        Speaker: Dr Philippe Charpentier (CERN)
        Slides
      • 15:30
        Exploit the massive Volunteer Computing resource for HEP computation 20m Conference Room 2, BHSS

        Conference Room 2, BHSS

        Academia Sinica

        Exploit the massive Volunteer Computing resource for HEP computation
        Speaker: Prof. Wenjing wu (IHEP)
        Slides
    • 15:30 16:00
      Coffee Break 30m
    • 16:00 17:30
      CryoEM Workshop Conference Room 1, BHSS

      Conference Room 1, BHSS

      Academia Sinica

      Convener: Dr Danny HSU (Academia Sinica)
      • 16:00
        cryoSPARC 1h 30m
        Speakers: Cassie WU (Institute of Biological Chemistry, Academia Sinica) , Deli Irene LEE (Institute of Biological Chemistry, Academia Sinica) , Shih-Chi LUO (Institute of Biological Chemistry, Academia Sinica) , Tzu-Jing YANG (Institute of Biological Chemistry, Academia Sinica) , Wei-Cheng HUANG (Institute of Biological Chemistry, Academia Sinica)
    • 16:00 17:30
      Distributed & Parallel Computing Applications Session Conference Room 2, BHSS

      Conference Room 2, BHSS

      Academia Sinica

      Convener: Dr Tomoaki Nakamura (KEK)
      • 16:00
        Science Gateway on GARUDA GRID for Open Source Drug Discovery (OSDD) community 30m
        Scientific applications are moving to the distributed environment like grid computing and cloud to take advantage of the high-end computational power availability with reduced cost. Large datasets and compute intensive analysis needs compute infrastructure. The researchers/users want a platform/gateway where they have ease of submitting their experiments accessing a web browser to run them on high end computational resources and if required to share them with other researchers. Science gateways allow science & engineering communities to access shared data, software, computing services, instruments, educational materials, and other resources specific to their disciplines. In this paper we describe, how the open source Galaxy Workflow is customized to provide a science gateway for Open Source Drug Discovery community on GARUDA GRID. GARUDA grid is an aggregation of heterogeneous resources which aims to bridge gaps between the researchers and accessibility to high computational power. Galaxy is an open source web based workflow system for data intensive biomedical research. Open Source Drug Discovery (OSDD) is a CSIR led team India Consortium and platform for drug discovery which brings together informaticians, scientists and research organizations. Galaxy based Science Gateway for OSDD is enabled with secure access to GARUDA through in-house developed Login Service, job runner for the Gridway metascheduler, seamless access to the storage server, web services of bio-informatics tools that are added as tools and deployed and hosted on GARUDA over internet. Firstly, we describe extending the pluggable architecture of Galaxy workflow for execution on the grid with the grid middleware-Gridway. Gridway metascheduler is the GARUDA workload manager that performs job execution management and resource brokering. For managing jobs submission with Garuda grid, a Gridway runner was developed which will be managing the execution of jobs. It will include, preparing the jobs for submission and creating a job wrapper, putting it in a queue to be submitted, capturing the Job Id, monitoring the Job Id – watches the jobs currently in the queue and deals with the state change (queued to running and job completion), and finishing the job - Get the output/error for a finished job, pass to JobWrapper class finish method and cleanup all the temporary files. The paper also talks about the integration of Garuda Login service with the Science Gateway and how the authentication is managed by the Digital certificates for rights delegation. Science Gateway for OSDD community is designed to support the large distributed community involved in drug discovery. The users are freed from the issues of maintenance and cost and can focus on large data analysis experiments more. There has been substantial increase of resources after the release of gateway mainly due to ease of usage. Also, the implementation of job runner was specifically done for the Gridway metascheduler, but can be extended to support other types of grid systems.
        Speaker: Mr Santhosh J (C-DAC)
        Slides
      • 16:30
        DevOps adoption in scientific applications: DisVis and PowerFit cases 30m
        The DevOps methods emphasize the commitment to software Quality Assurance (QA) procedures during the development phase to avoid disruptions when the new software releases are deployed into production. Automation drives the whole process of testing, distribution and, eventually, deployment to allow prompt and frequent software releases, resulting in more reliable software. INDIGO-DataCloud project progressively adopted DevOps practices that ruled the development (continuous integration) and distribution (continuous delivery) of the core services. The successful experience was exported to the scientific communities participating in the project, by prototyping a continuous deployment scenario for the Python-based DisVis and PowerFit applications. The implementation provides a test and validation suite that ensures the viability of any change in the application’s source code, by the automatic and sequential execution of the 1) code inspection, 2) software packaging, and 3) application validation tasks. The source code inspection tries to detect issues at early stages in the development phase, otherwise tougher to resolve once the software has been released. Any type of source code testing (style, unit, functional, integration) can fit at this stage.The QA checks executed for the prototype are devoted to guarantee the readability and sanity of the code by making it compliant with Python’s PEP8 standard. The application packaging phase deploys the application, packages it as a container image and publishes it to the INDIGO-DataCloud’s online repository. The uploaded image is tagged with the current code version, so it does not overwrite any previous one. The recently created version is then fetched and tested as the final step in the pipeline. The application validation phase executes the container with a set of defined inputs and the results obtained are programmatically compared with reference results. The adoption of DevOps methods has proven to be an effective and suitable solution for the development and distribution of scientific software. DisVis and PowerFit application developers can detect promptly design issues or bugs in their code, while the users of these applications are provided with more frequent software versions, validated through the automated pipeline, being able to safely explore the latest features of the software.
        Speaker: Dr Alexandre M.J.J. Bonvin (Utrecht University)
        Slides
    • 16:00 17:30
      Heritage Science Session: II Media Conference Room, BHSS

      Media Conference Room, BHSS

      Academia Sinica

      Convener: Dr Luca Pezzati (CNR INO)
      • 16:00
        Spectral Database Application for Color Compensation Process in Painting 30m
        Color compensation is an important step in painting conservation process that actual pigments are re-applied on the original art works. The process of color compensation is a challenging task since most media used in East Asian paintings are water-soluble and are not protected by any surface coating. To maintain the originality of the art works, it is desirable to make the color compensation work identifiable and reversible. Consequently, the area of the newly compensated colors should be easily identified, yet still visually d agreed with the original colors. There are new synthetic pigments that showing similar colors as the traditional mineral pigments in the visible band (380-730 nm), however exhibiting totally different spectral reflectance characteristics in the infrared region than the natural mineral pigments. It is then possible to maintain the color similarity visually and to establish the identifiable difference for reversible purpose if necessary in the color compensation process. To accomplish this unique task, a spectral database is proposed to record the spectral characteristics of the synthetic and natural pigments both in visible and near-infrared bands. Through the indexing in the CIELAB color space, a color match can be searched for the natural mineral pigment to the corresponding synthetic pigment in the visible band. Furthermore, the difference among spectral characteristics can also be assured and observed through the spectral data in the infrared region in the database. With such information in the database, it is much easier to achieve the identifiability and reversibility in color compensation for East Asian paints.
        Speaker: Prof. M. James Shyu (Chinese Culture University)
        Slides
      • 16:30
        A DIGITAL MAPPING OF THE MALAY PENINSULA: ISLAM, HINDU AND BUDDHIST PLACES OF WORSHIP 30m
        At the University of Malaya a digital humanities project was conducted to locate and map places of worship built in the Malay Peninsula before 1960. This presentation is part of a major project on constructing a digital cultural atlas featuring the location of mosques, Hindu and Buddhist temples that were constructed before the independence of Malaya in 1957. Fieldwork was conducted to obtain and verify GIS information at sites around the states of West Malaysia. Information gathered from document analysis, interviews and oral history formed part of the methodology employed and transferred to a digital map of the Peninsular Malaysia. The digital map system used in this project is based on the widely used Open Source Leaflet mapping toolkit which supports using a range of publicly available base maps and overlay layers. The mapping component can operate either as a standalone interface or be integrated into other services, can be easily adapted to display a range of information and styled to match the project. Using a simple template for information entry, styled markers are used to represent each site with colour designating the time period. The coming of Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam to the Malay Peninsula has been established to have spread throughout the Malay Archipelago even before the 1st Century. Based on the dates these religious sites were built, we hope to show the pattern of distribution of these places of worship and investigate the direction how these religions spread in the Malay Peninsula based on the mapping of these sites.
        Speakers: Mr Andrew Howard (National University of Australia) , Dr Faridah Mohd. Noor (University of Malaya)
        Slides
    • 16:00 17:30
      Networking, Security, Infrastructure & Operation Session: III Room 802, BHSS

      Room 802, BHSS

      Academia Sinica

      Convener: Dr David Kelsey (STFC-RAL)
      • 16:00
        A Study of Credential Integration Model in Academic Research Federation Supporting a Wide Variety of Services 30m
        Single Sign-on mechanism raises usability of Information Communication Technology (ICT) service and is currently an essential technology. It is an ideal situation for users to be able to receive the desired services with only one credential. However, there is still a situation where they need to use each appropriate credential according to services. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the situation where users must use each credential according to the desired services, and to clarify the problems in the situation and the addressed issues. Then, a credential integration model is considered. In Japan, there is the GakuNin which is an academic access management federation. In the federation, if the negotiation between an identity provider (IdP) and a service provider (SP) have been completed regarding a use contract for the service which the SP offers, all constituent members of the academic institution which operates the IdP will be able to receive the services with the credential issued by the IdP. The restricted services, for example, a service for the staff of the academic institution only, can be offered by specifying the attributes which the IdP manages. Also, Japan has the HPCI project that is a national project and offers high performance computing infrastructure (HPCI) to not only academic researchers but also industrial ones. In order to use HPCI, first, researchers must apply a research project proposal. If the proposal is accepted, the researchers will obtain HPCI credential after initial identity vetting based on a face-to-face meeting. The HPCI credential is issued by an IdP in the HPCI federation. Since the HPCI opens the door to not only academia but also industry the IdPs in the HPCI federation cannot be simply replaced with the IdPs in the GakuNin. However, if the HPCI user belongs to an academic instituion the user will be compelled to manage both the GakuNin and the HPCI credentials. Such credential management burden is one of the issues addressed in this paper. In this paper, based on the situation in Japan mentioned above, we discuss a credential integration model in order to more efficiently use a wide variety of services. We first characterize services in an academic federation from point of view of authorization and investigate the problem that users must use each credential issued by different IdPs. Then, we discuss the issues to integrate user's credentials, and consider a model that solves the issues.
        Speaker: Dr Eisaku Sakane (National Institute of Informatics)
        Slides
      • 16:30
        WLCG Tier-2 site at NCP, Status Update and Future Direction 30m
        National Centre for Physics (NCP) in Pakistan, maintains a large computing infrastructure for scientific community. Major portion of computing and storage resources are reserved for CMS experiment of WLCG project, and small portion of the computing resources are reserved for other non EHEP scientific experiments. For efficient utilization of resources, most of the scientific organizations have migrated their resources on Cloud. NCP has also taken initiative last year, and migrated most of their resources on scientific cloud. HT-condor based batch system has been deployed for local experimental high energy physics community, to perform their analysis task. Recently we deployed HT-Condor Compute element (CE) as a gateway for CMS jobs. On a network side, our Tier-2 site is completely accessible and operational on IPv6. Moreover, we recently deployed Perfsonar node, to actively monitor the throughput and latency issues between WLCG sites. This paper discusses status of NCP Tier-2 site, current challenges and future direction.
        Speaker: Dr Muhammad Imran (National Centre for Physics)
        Slides
      • 17:00
        Best practises and experiences in user support –A case study at GARUDA 30m
        To improve quality of user support GARUDA Help Desk (GHD) extends single point gateway to Indian national grid computing initiative – GARUDA users. All operational, usage and computing related issues from scientists, academicians, system administrators and network service providers are effectively managed and addressed. GHD has unified portal to receive queries from users. Over all focus of GHD is to provide suitable and efficient support structure. Objective of this paper is to share our experience/best practices which is successfully being adopted in user support. Various facts and figures are presented. User can report to GARUDA Help Desk (GHD) through any mode of communication like telephone, email and web portal. All the reported issues are converted as ticket at web portal named Request Tracker. Within 24 hours, a user will receive an e mail notification about ticket owner and the status. Same will be updated in web portal also, intermediate status of the ticket will be updated in the web portal until it is closed. The challenges involved in GARUDA user support and how GHD (ticketing system) helps to better services is discussed in this paper. In GARUDA, the resources are heterogeneous in nature and spread across India. Maintaining grid availability and reliability is highly challenging in a federated environment. Some of the challenges to mention are: remote ssh access, sudden cluster down time, faster support to users, provisioning of large home areas for user, lack of cooperation from remote system administrators, slow response time for reported ticket, routing the tickets to right affiliate, tracking the progress of ticket, tracking the ticket status, so on. Most of the issues are related to remote cluster, where remote system administrators’ support was required to resolve the issues. To mitigate suitable tools are deployed, but hard to find a tool to work as per the need. Hence in-house developed automatic scripts were deployed. Another best practice is all the issues reported by users are recorded. Like nature of ticket, its category, methodology used in solving, actual solution etc are documented, preserved and made available for reference. We have found that proper monitoring methodology, highly transparent and interactive work culture and adhering to quality standards gives good results in effective user support. Another key practice followed is collecting “Annual user feedback”, which helps us to restructuring of GHD guidelines and processes. Hence we are able to progressively improve user support. It is proudly said that transformed ordinary user support to extraordinary successfully. GHD handles 400 to 500 requests (tickets) per month. Average ticket handling time by respective owner is 8 Hrs. All the ticket handling operations are adhering to ISO 9001:2008 quality management standards. GHD has reduced redundancy of ticketing and improved the capability of sharing problem and solutions among the administrators.
        Speaker: Mr Santhosh J (C_DAC)
        Slides
    • 19:45 21:45
      Gala Dinner 2h
    • 09:00 10:30
      CryoEM Workshop Conference Room 1, BHSS

      Conference Room 1, BHSS

      Academia Sinica

      Convener: Dr Danny HSU (Academia Sinica)
      • 09:00
        Introduction to Appion and Leginon tools 1h 30m
        Speaker: Dr Chi-Yu Fu
        Slides
    • 09:00 10:30
      Infrastructure Clouds & Virtualisation Session: I Conference Room 2, BHSS

      Conference Room 2, BHSS

      Academia Sinica

      Convener: Dr Ludek Matyska (CESNET)
      • 09:00
        Harvesting dispersed computational resources with Openstack: a Cloud infrastructure for the Computational Science community 30m
        Harvesting dispersed computational resources is nowadays an important and strategic topic especially in an environment, like the computational science one, where computing needs constantly increase. On the other hand managing dispersed resources might not be neither an easy task not costly effective. We successfully explored the usage of OpenStack middleware to achieve this objective, aiming not only at harvesting resource but also at providing a modern paradigm of computing and data usage access. The deployment of a multi-sites Cloud [1] implies the management of multiple computing services with the goal of sharing resources between more sites, allowing local data centers to scale out with external assets. The cited scenario immediately points out portability, interoperability and compatibility issues, but on the other side this opens really interesting scenarios and use cases especially in load balancing, disaster recovery and advanced features such as cross-site networks, cross-site storage systems, cross-site scheduling and placement of remote VMs. Moreover, a cloud infrastructure allows the exploitation of Platform as a Service, and software as a server solutions which in the end it is what really matter for the science. The main goal of the present work is to illustrate a real example on how to build a geographically distributed cloud to share and manage computing and storage resources, owned by heterogeneous cooperating entities. We put together four different entities namely: Department of Physics and Geology - I.N.F.N. Sez. Perugia, Department of Chemistry (UNIPG) also located in Perugia, Department of Pharmacy (UdA) located in Chieti and ASI-SSDC (Space Science Data Center at the Italian Space Agency) located in Rome. The involved sites are, not only geographically dislocated but also a good representatives of the research interest diversity we want to explore in our Cloud infrastructure. We report about the porting of concrete use cases exploiting the available PaaS solutions provided by INDIGO-DataCloud project and following the upcoming EOSC directives. We identified: ab-initio quantum chemistry applications and AMS-02 (Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer on the International Space Station) experiments. The sites are connected via a SDN[2] technology through encrypted point-to-point channels being the “backbone” for the overlay networks. Specifically openVPN and IPsec have been used, depending on specific networking constraints. Over the point-to-point mesh, OSI L2 Ethernet frames of both the OpenStack management and projects VLAN networks have been encapsulated using the VXLAN [3] protocol. The networking structure has been deployed for the specific purpose of creating a distributed overlay L2 Ethernet to be used by OpenStack. Finally, to fine tune the network setup and avoid cross site unnecessary traffic, different sites have been logically separated using different availability zones, with VMs on every zone having the capability of independently accessing the Internet through the site where they are physically running. Mell, Peter, and Tim Grance. "The NIST definition of cloud computing." 28 (2011). Kreutz, Diego et al. “Software-defined Networking: A comprehensive Survey” arXiv:1406.0440v3. Mahalingam et al. “Virtual eXtensible Local Area Network (VXLAN): A Framework for Overlaying Virtualized Layer 2 Networks over Layer 3 Networks” - RFC 7348
        Speaker: Mr Mirko Mariotti (Department of Physics and Geology, University of Perugia)
        Slides
      • 09:30
        Curriculum in the Cloud: Using OpenStack to Transform Computer Science Education 30m
        We explore the question of relying on OpenStack as critical infrastructure for the instructional requirements of the ABET-accredited Bachelor of Computer Science program in the Computer Science department at the University of Kentucky. The Computer Science department (established in 1966) has seen its instructional capabilities change dramatically over the past fifty years of computing, from time-shared access to mainframe computers in the 1970s to the personal computer labs of the 1980s to the now ubiquitous use of portable and mobile computing. In some ways OpenStack harks back to the centralized main frames of the 1970s but with many evolved user conveniences. Key among these are the access through portable and widely distributed computing platforms connected to the OpenStack cloud services through broadband network infrastructure, and the evolution of the OpenStack “Big Tent” project model to provide a wide array of self provisioned capabilities to users. At last the OpenStack architecture promises real advances for instructional programs and the institutions responsible for running them, offering freedom from the dedicated space and hardwired computer lab environments of the past, and leveraging all the convenience of mobile and personal computing with the power of large scale virtualized compute, storage, and networking resources. But perhaps even more important is the tailored experience that the OpenStack transformation promises for the student: a virtual machine with resources and software allocated specifically to their course load and their place in the timeline of a curriculum designed for progressive instruction and learning. We will discuss the issues in moving to an instructional program that is fully dependent on OpenStack for teaching a computer science curriculum, including provisioning requirements and goals, and monitoring issues and solutions that lead to improved scaling and tuning. We share our experiences integrating with the broader institutional authentication requirements and tailoring environments at per-student granularity for almost 1000 students. Finally, we will discuss the practical issues of roll-out, proprietary environments, and the continuous onboarding of new faculty, researchers, and students.
        Speakers: Dr Brent Seales (University of Kentucky) , Dr Cody Bumgardner (University of Kentucky)
        Slides
      • 10:00
        Integration and optimization of cloud computing within the BNL workload management system 30m
        The Scientific Data and Computing Center (SDCC) oversees all scientific computing activities at BNL, and a primary goal is to provide resources to a heterogeneous and geographically dispersed user community. The SDCC currently supports HEP, NP, Astrophysics, Photon Sciences, Material Sciences, Biology and other communities. This presentation describes the SDCC on-going activities in the high-throughput and high-performance computing (HTC and HPC) domains at BNL, including workload management changes that allow HTC applications to use HPC resources (local and remote), integration of virtualization containers technologies to enable seamless access to institutional resources, BNLBox (a cloud-like storage service that allows users to share and synchronize data across devices) and enabling cost-optimized access to cloud (commercial and private) resources for time-sensitive applications. The presentation also discusses timelines and near-term activities to increase flexible and timely access to computing resources for the BNL user community.
        Speaker: Ms iris wu (Brookhaven National Lab)
        Slides
    • 09:00 10:30
      Networking, Security, Infrastructure & Operation Session: IV Auditorium, BHSS

      Auditorium, BHSS

      Academia Sinica

      Convener: Dr Gang Chen (Institute Of High Energy Physics)
      • 09:00
        Provenance as a Building Block for an Open Science Infrastructure 30m
        In science, results that are not reproducible by peer scientists are valueless and of no significance. Good practices for reproducible science are to publish used codes under Open Source licenses, perform code reviews, save the computational environments with containers (e.g., Docker), use open data formats, use a data management system, and record the provenance of all actions. This talk focuses on provenance of scientific processes as a foundation of open reproducible science and a building block of a distributed trustful open science infrastructure. The concept of provenance is introduced and the W3C standard model PROV is presented. PROV gives an ontology, a data model, and specifications for provenance notations, for accessing and querying, and for mapping to other standards. For practical use of provenance in science processes, the talk gives strategies for recording and storing provenance from scientific workflow systems. Also recording provenance from scripts and from the generation of documents are presented. For storing provenance, the talk shows how to facilitate graph databases (such as Neo4j), since the provenance of processes is a directed acyclic graph (DAG). Based on graph query languages such as Cypher or GraphQL, these provenance information can be analyzed. For example, the provenance can be used to proof the compliance of a scientific process, to collect all data that contributed to to scientific results such a journal paper, or detect any issues regarding privacy, security, and trust of the scientific data. To assure trust in the scientific process, we present a technology for storing provenance and related data in blockchains and blockchain-like databases. Using blockchains for storing (provenance) graphs, one can detect if the graphs have been manipulated. This gives a higher degree of confidence that the scientific data has been produced using the described processes. We describe how provenance graphs are mapped to blockchains and show how to used blockchains implementations for storing this provenance graphs practically.
        Speaker: Mr Andreas Schreiber (German Aerospace Center)
        Slides
      • 09:30
        CernVM-FS - status and latest developments from RAL Tier-1 perspective 30m
        The CernVM File System (CernVM-FS) was developed to assist WLCG High Energy Physics (HEP) collaborations to deploy software on the worldwide distributed computing infrastructure used to run data processing applications. CernVM-FS has been the primary method for distributing WLCG experiment software and condition data for the last 7 years, and in the same period the use of CernVM-FS outside WLCG has been growing steadily and an increasing number of Virtual Organizations (VOs), both within the HEP and in other communities (i.e. Space, Natural and Life Sciences), have identified this technology as a more efficient way of maintaining and accessing software across Grid and Cloud computing environments. This presentation will give an overview of the CernVM-FS infrastructure deployed at RAL Tier-1 as part of the WLCG Stratum-1 network, but also as the facility provided to setup a complete service - the Release Manager Machine, the Replica Server and a customized uploading mechanism - for the non-LHC communities within EGI and that can be used as a proof of concept for other research infrastructures and communities looking to adopt a common software repository solution. The latest developments to widen and consolidate the CernVM-FS infrastructure as a global facility (with main contributors in Europe, North America and Asia) are reviewed, such as the implementation of the 'confidential' CernVM-FS repositories, a requirement for academic communities willing to use CernVM-FS technology. The presentation will include a case study of a Life Science research community, describing the design of their production models around 'public' and 'confidential' CernVM-FS repositories and we examine how a common mechanism to access the latter is developed using Robot X.509 Grid certificates.
        Speaker: Mr Catalin Condurache (STFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory)
        Slides
      • 10:00
        Explore New Computing Environment for LHAASO offline data analysis 30m
        The exploitation of a new computing environment has become an urgent practice to overcome a series of challenges with the development of the new generation of High Energy Physics(HEP). LHAASO(Large High Altitude Air Shower Observatory) is expected the most sensitive project to studies the problems in Galactic cosmic ray physics, and requires massive storage and computing power. Efficient parallel algorithms/frameworks and High IO throughput are key to meet the scalability and performance requirements of LHAASO offline data analysis. Though Hadoop has gained a lot of attention from scientific community for its scalability and parallel computing framework for large data sets, it is still difficult to make LHAASO data processing tasks run directly on Hadoop. In this paper we explore ways to build a new computing environment using Hadoop to make LHAASO jobs run on it transparently. Particularly, we discuss a new mechanism to support LHAASO software to random access data in HDFS. Because HDFS is streaming data stored only supporting sequential write and append. It cannot satisfy LHAASO jobs to random access data. This new feature allows the Map/Reduce tasks to random read/write on the local file system on data nodes instead of using Hadoop data streaming interface. This makes HEP jobs run on Hadoop possible. We also develop diverse MapReduce model for LHAASO jobs such as Corsika simulation, ARGO detector simulation (Geant 4) and MK2A data processing. And we wrap the models to make them transparent to users. In addition, we provide the real-time cluster monitoring in terms of cluster healthy, number of running jobs, number of finished jobs and number of killed jobs. Also the accounting system is included. This work has been in production for LHAASO offline data analysis to gain about 40,000 CPU hours per month since September, 2016. The results show the efficiency of IO intensive job can be improved about 46%. Finally, we describe our current work of data migration tools to serve the data move between HDFS and other storage system or Tape.
        Speaker: Dr Qiulan Huang (Institute of High Energy of Physics, Chinese Academy Sciences)
        Slides
    • 10:30 10:50
      Coffee Break 20m
    • 10:50 12:20
      CryoEM Workshop Conference Room 1, BHSS

      Conference Room 1, BHSS

      Academia Sinica

      Convener: Dr Danny HSU (Academia Sinica)
      • 10:50
        Computation resources for cryoEM in Academia Sinica and their benchmark 1h 30m
        Speakers: Dr Eric YEN (ASGC) , Mr Felix LEE (ASGC)
        Slides
    • 10:50 12:20
      Infrastructure Clouds & Virtualisation Session: II Conference Room 2, BHSS

      Conference Room 2, BHSS

      Academia Sinica

      Convener: Dr Tomoaki Nakamura (KEK)
      • 10:50
        Data intensive ATLAS workflows in the Cloud 30m
        From 2025 onwards, the ATLAS collaboration at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN will experience a massive increase in data quantity as well as complexity (High-Luminosity LHC). Including mitigating factors, the prevalent computing power by that time will only fulfil one tenth of the requirement. This contribution will focus on Cloud computing as an approach to help overcome this challenge by providing flexible hardware that can be configured to the specific needs of a workflow. Experience with Cloud computing exists, but there is a large uncertainty if and to which degree it can be able to reduce the burden by 2025. In order to understand and quantify the benefits of Cloud computing, the "Workflow and Infrastructure Model" was created. It estimates the viability of Cloud computing by combining different inputs from the workflow side with infrastructure specifications. The model delivers metrics that enable the comparison of different Cloud configurations as well as different Cloud offerings with each other. A wide range of results can be obtained - from the required bandwidth over the workflow duration to the cost per workflow - making the model useful for fields outside of physics as well. In the High Energy Physics (HEP) use case, a workload is quantifiable by individual bunch crossings within the detector ('events'). A powerful metric that can be derived from that is EC = 'Events per Cost'. Comparing EC values with each other immediately points to the best Cloud offering for HEP workflows, maximising the physics throughput while minimising the cost. Instead of using generic benchmarks, the model uses reference workflows in order to obtain infrastructure parameters. The workflow parameters are obtained from running the workflow on a reference machine. The model linearly combines different job aspects such as the machine specific CPU time in order to get the results for one workflow on one machine, which is then extrapolated to a whole Cloud infrastructure. Limiting factors to the predictions of the model are therefore fluctuations within the workflows (varying data complexity, software updates) as well as within the infrastructure ("noisy neighbours"). Finally the usefulness and accuracy of the model will be demonstrated by the real-world experience gathered during the latest CERN Cloud procurement, which included several commercial Cloud providers. The results encompass recommendations regarding the desirability to commission storage in the Cloud, in conjunction with a simple analytical model of the system, and correlated with questions about the network bandwidth and the type of storage to utilise.
        Speaker: Mr Gerhard Rzehorz (CERN, University of Göttingen)
        Slides
      • 11:20
        Dynamic extension of INFN-CNAF Tier1 Data Center 30m
        INFN CNAF hosts the INFN Tier-1, the main data center of INFN, the Italian National Institute for Nuclear Physics; it provides resources and services to more than 30 scientific collaborations, each utilizing a different computing model. The largest supported collaborations are the four WLCG experiments while the remaining are mainly astro-particle experiments. INFN CNAF currently deploys resources in excess of 200 kHS06 of Computing Power, 25 PB of disk and 50 PB of tape, the latter two interconnected via a GPFS-TSM SAN. Recently, we has started to elastically extend the data center farm to resources provided by commercial clouds. This will prepare the center for future upgrades and could allow to cope with burst activities. The adopted approach is via the use of VPN tunnels to remote resources, in order to serve users in a completely transparent way. The storage can be accessed via a XrootD fallback on CNAF storage when available or using the GPFS/AFM caching system. In this talk, we are presenting our experimentation with Microsoft Azure public cloud for the CMS specific use case, using an academic grant for experimentation. We will report on the system setup, from testing to its deployment into production, and on performance obtained while utilizing Azure’s remote resources.
        Speaker: Dr Antonio Falabella (INFN)
        Slides
      • 11:50
        Integration of GPU and Container with Distributed Cloud for Scientific Applications 30m
        Speaker: Mr Edward WU (ASGC)
        Slides
    • 10:50 12:20
      Networking, Security, Infrastructure & Operation Session: V Auditorium, BHSS

      Auditorium, BHSS

      Academia Sinica

      Convener: Dr Kenny HUANG (TWNIC)
      • 10:50
        A Simplified SDN-Driven All-Campus Science DMZ 30m
        Data-intensive computational techniques such as machine learning, data analytics, and visualization, increasingly require data sets at unprecedented scale - massive sizes that are orders of magnitude larger than previous work. This presents challenges for computer networks. This problem is particularly acute for universities where researchers are increasingly using big data in their research, but the campus network infrastructure is not designed for high-throughput communication. Moreover, north/south traffic to cloud storage providers such as Amazon and Google is growing at an explosive rate, and it is now common for researchers to move terabytes of data to/from the cloud. The result is nothing short of a dire need for high-throughput campus network infrastructure. To complicate matters, campus networks, which are designed to support common institutional business functions (web browsing, email) are also intended to support high-end research endeavors. Is it possible for the network to do both? As designed, these networks are almost always littered with so-called middle-boxes that perform services such as intrusion detection, rate limiting, firewalling, and other forms of deep packet inspection. These middleboxes play an important role in ensuring security and stability of the campus network, but sacrifice network performance. Though the resulting decline in network performance may be acceptable for common low-bandwidth applications, large data transfers that rely on higher bandwidth suffer greatly. To meet this challenge, we proposed a new approach to the design of campus networks based on software defined networks (SDN) — specifically OpenFlow. We began by replacing certain building distribution routers with OpenFlow-enabled switches that operate in a hybrid mode, providing normal routing and switching to our standard campus core by default. However, using OpenFlow, we are able to redirect high-throughput flows from approved researchers to an all-new SDN core. The SDN core then forwards packets directly to our campus edge router, bypassing all middleboxes north of the standard campus core infrastructure. A major benefit of our approach is that individual flows from a machine can receive high-speed (middlebox free) paths while all other flows from the same machine travel the standard campus path through policy-enforcing middleboxes. Consequently, transparent to the end user, a host can perform a high-speed file transfer to the cloud while at the same time streaming rate-limited video content. This effectively creates a virtual all-campus DMZ, granular to protocol port level, that can be turned on or off programmatically as needed by researchers.
        Speaker: Mr Charles Pike (University of Kentucky)
        Slides
      • 11:20
        Optical Interconnects for Cloud Computing Data Centers: Recent Advances and Future Challenges 30m
        Internet traffic has been increasing exponentially over the last few years due to the emergence of new end user applications which are based on cloud computing infrastructure. These applications run on the servers deployed in the data centers and require huge network bandwidths. The data centers are getting more and more importance in our lives because the cloud computing has shifted computation and storage away from desktops to large scale datacenters. Traditional cloud computing data centers architecture is based on a hierarchical design and comprises several layers of electrical switches at the edge and the core. There are significant challenges to meet the growing performance requirements with current data center architectures. For example, high power consumption, high traffic locality, support of higher data rates, scalability, latency and network oversubscription. Effective optical interconnect is a fundamental requisite to realize Internet-scale data centers due to the capabilities and benefits of optical devices. An optical interconnection system can meet the above mentioned challenges due to the properties of optical components. Basic fundamental elements in optical networks are optical switches, optical transceivers and optical fibers. Optical switches are power efficient and consume less power than electrical switches. Optical interconnects can provide high capacity links to meet requirements for traffic locality and higher bit rates by using optical fibers and optical transceivers. This paper presents a brief overview on optical interconnects for data centers. Furthermore, the paper provides a qualitative categorization and comparison of the proposed schemes based on their main features. Moreover, various types of optical switches and optical switching techniques that can be considered in designing an optical interconnection system for data center networks are presented. In the end, future research direction, challenges and opportunities of optical interconnect for data centers are discussed.
        Speaker: Dr Muhammad Imran (National Centre for Physics)
        Slides
      • 11:50
        Modern security landscape in Taiwan 30m
        Speaker: Dr Joy CHAN
        Slides
    • 12:20 13:15
      Closeing Keynote & Ceremony Auditorium, BHSS

      Auditorium, BHSS

      Academia Sinica

      Convener: Simon C. Lin (ASGC)
      • 12:25
        Non-Linear Earthquake Simulation on Sunway TaihuLight 40m
        Speaker: Dr Haohuan FU (Tsinghua University)
        Slides
      • 13:05
        Closing Ceremony 10m
    • 13:15 14:00
      Lunch 45m