A detailed description of the computational and software resources available at SOPAC/CSRC and from its parent agencies follows:
SOPAC/CSRC computer facilities consist of several servers used for data collection, archiving, software development, and analysis. GPS processing analysis is performed on 24 Intel and AMD-based dual-processor PC's. The primary systems are maintained in a high availability environment including fault tolerant sub-systems, RAID arrays, redundant storage, and battery backup.
IGPP has installed a visualization system in the Revelle Conference Room with the support of Cal-(IT)2. The Cal-(IT)2 Control Room provides advanced graphical views of data streams that will aid in the assessment of the GPS network's performance. Furthermore, many of the data streams will be converted to information, which can also be visualized. To strike a balance between graphics acceleration, CPU horsepower, and the ability to remotely export visualization via graphic pipes, we have acquired a SGI Onyx 3400 server with group visualization on a Panoram GVR-120 E cylindrical wall display that is some 24 feet in width. This graphical supercomputer is driven by at least 8 processors (R12000 CPUs) (likely 16 processors) with visual output through 2 graphic pipes. This system is based on the new SGI NUMA architecture, which increases memory bandwidth and reduces memory latency thereby enhancing graphical and computation output. The modular "brick" design of the new Onyx 3400 will enable easy upgrades to graphic, CPU, I/O and other sub-systems when the need arises. This system is located on the Scripps campus, with the immersive environment sited at the IGPP Revelle Conference Room. A collaborative effort between Panoram Technologies, Cox Cable and TeraBurst will allow immersive images to be exported via an ultra-high speed network to other campuses or agencies, such as San Diego State University or Caltrans, for real-time interaction.
Mass Store
CSRC
SOPAC/CSRC's archiving facility consists of four tiers of storage. The first tier is designed for speed and consists of 2 TB of on-line disk space in RAID sets comprised of three Sun A1000 hardware RAID arrays and four Dell PowerVault 201/211 disk arrays controlled by Dell PERC RAID controllers. The second tier is designed for high on-line capacity, but with a slower access speed and consists of 30 mirrored firewire and IDE drives attached to four hosts supporting 3.5 TB of older data. The third tier consists of 600 GB near-line data on a HP 600FX eight-drive MO jukebox. The fourth tier consists of an 8 TB six-drive DLT tape library. The MO jukebox and the DLT (Digital Linear Tape) tape library are being used in cooperation with the IGPP Digital Library.
IGPP
The core of the IGPP Digital Library comprises a 20 TB DLT mass storage device from StorageTek, a SUN Enterprise 250 server, and GbE network connections throughout IGPP and to/from SDSC. The Library software consists of AMASS (copyrighted through the Advanced Digital Information Corporation - ADIC), and various library users superimpose a variety of database applications (for example, SOPAC/CSRC uses Oracle as a relational database). The Library is well suited for large datasets with large file sizes.
HPWREN
In August 2000 the National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded a $2.3 million, three-year research grant to UC San Diego to create, demonstrate, and evaluate a non-commercial, prototype, high-performance, wide-area, wireless network for research and education. The project involves a multi-institution collaboration led by Hans-Werner Braun of the NLANR group at SDSC and Frank Vernon of the Cecil H. and Ida M. Green Institute for Geophysics and Planetary Physics (IGPP) at SIO, and includes researchers from other institutions such as Paul Etzel, Director of Mount Laguna Observatory and Chair of the San Diego State University (SDSU) Astronomy Department, and Sedra Shapiro, Acting Director of the Field Stations at San Diego State University.
HPWREN is creating a wireless backbone network in southern California that currently includes nodes on the UC San Diego campus and several mountaintops in San Diego County including Mt. Woodson, North Peak, Stephenson Peak, Mt. Laguna, and Mt. Palomar (Figure 1). To increase network robustness, and to provide additional coverage, new network links will be installed on Red Mountain and Toro Peak in Riverside County. Researchers in various disciplines and educational communities will be able to gain Internet connection through this backbone network.
CSRC
The California Spatial Reference Center is located at the Cecil H. and Ida M. Green Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics (IGPP). A group of surveyor activists started a grass roots movement to leverage the GPS infrastructure established for earthquake research in California as the basis for defining and maintaining a statewide geodetic reference frame. They felt that California had special geodetic needs because of its tectonic setting, extensive land subsidence, and natural hazards, along with one of the largest economies in the world. This effort eventually coalesced into the California Spatial Reference Center, a major outreach program of the geophysical community in California.
The CSRC has the following mandate in California, in partnership with the National Geodetic Survey (NGS) at NOAA (National Oceans and Atmosphere Administration) and the California Dept. of Transportation (Caltrans):
1. Provide the necessary geodetic services to ensure the availability of accurate, consistent, and timely spatial referencing data.
2. Establish the legal spatial reference system for California.
3. Monitor temporal changes in geodetic coordinates due to tectonic motion, volcanic deformation and land subsidence.
For more information see http://csrc.ucsd.edu/
SOPAC
The Scripps Orbit and Permanent Array Center (SOPAC) is located at the Cecil H. and Ida M. Green Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics (IGPP). SOPAC's primary scientific role is to support high precision geodetic and geophysical measurements using Global Positioning System (GPS) satellites, particularly for the study of earthquake hazards, tectonic plate motion, plate boundary deformation, and meteorological processes.
SOPAC investigators conduct research on the implementation, operation and scientific applications of continuously monitoring GPS arrays and Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) interferometry.
SOPAC is a major participant in the International GPS Service for Geodynamics (IGS), serving as a Global Data Center and a Global Analysis Center, the Southern California Integrated GPS Network (SCIGN), and UNAVCO. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), National Science Foundation (NSF), U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), the Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the William M. Keck Foundation fund these activities.
SOPAC provides the following services and products to the scientific community:
1. Precise near real-time and predicted GPS satellite orbits,
2. Precise polar motion and Earth rotation variations,
3. On-line data archive of continuously operating GPS tracking stations, for data collected since 1990,
4. Time series of daily three-dimensional positions for the global and California stations with respect to the International Terrestrial Reference Frame (ITRF),
5. Software for remote downloading of continuous GPS data,
6. Consultation on installation and operations of continuous GPS arrays.
7. Web-based user applications based on Oracle 8.1 RDBMS.
Data from the SOPAC archive may be retrieved via anonymous ftp, http, or through the SOPAC home page:
ftp://garner.ucsd.edu; http://garner.ucsd.edu
login: anonymous; password: your email address
For more information see http://sopac.ucsd.edu/
GPS in Orange County
The California Spatial Reference Center has been awarded $1M in FY2001 from the National Geodetic Survey, to support two primary tasks: height modernization and real-time GPS networks.
Building upon the database and web interface of the Scripps Orbit and Permanent Array Center (SOPAC), CSRC has become a full-service online data portal for GPS coordinates and metadata in California. CSRC has demonstrated a real-time three-dimensional GPS network capability in collaboration with the Geomatics/Land Information Division of Orange County's Public Facilities and Resource Department (PFRD). The central telemetry sites receive data continuously from the 12 continuous GPS sites in the county and relay the data to a central facility at the CSRC Operational Center in La Jolla and to a mirror facility at PFRD. The data are analyzed for integrity, stored on data servers, and GPS real time kinematics (RTK) data are streamed via the Internet at both facilities. Surveyors are able to receive RTK data through cellular modems and obtain real-time three-dimensional position fixes with cm-level horizontal precision and 5-cm vertical precision. Longer occupations at a site will allow improved precision in both the horizontal and vertical coordinates. PFRD has matched the CSRC contribution to this effort ($300,000) with $80,000 of funds necessary to purchase the telemetry equipment for installation in Orange County.
Software
SDSC
SRB
The SDSC Storage Resource Broker (SRB), implemented at SDSC, is client-server middleware that provides a seamless, uniform interface for connecting to heterogeneous data resources over a network and accessing replicated data sets. SRB, in conjunction with the Metadata Catalog (MCAT), provides means for accessing data sets and resources based on their attributes rather than their names or physical locations. The SRB provides access to archival resources such as HPSS, UniTree and ADSM, file systems such as Unix File System, NT File System and Mac OSX File System and databases such as Oracle, DB2, and Sybase. The SRB provides a logical representation for storage systems, digital file objects, and collections and provides several features for use in digital libraries and persistent archive or collection management systems. SRB also provides capabilities to store replicas of data, for authenticating users, controlling access to documents and collections, and auditing accesses. The SRB can also store user-defined metadata at the collection and object level and provides search capabilities based on these metadata.
The SRB has been implemented on multiple platforms including IBM AIX, Sun, SGI, Linux, Cray T3Eand C90, Windows NT, Mac OSX, etc. The SRB has been used in several efforts to develop infrastructure for GRID technologies, including the Particle Physics Data Grid (NSF/DOE), Information Power Grid (NASA) and GrPhyN (NSF). The SRB also has been used for handling large-scale data collections, including the Digital Sky Survey Collection for 2MASS data (10 TB of 5 million files), NPACI datasets (over 150 TB),and the Digital Embryo collection (20 TB leading up to 500 TB) and LTER hyper-spectral datasets. More details on the SRB can be found at: http://www.npaci.edu/DICE/SRB/.
IGPP
Seamless Archive
UNAVCO is developing a seamless archive for the GPS Geodesy/Geophysics community, called the GPS Seamless Archive Center (GSAC). SOPAC is the leader in this development. GSAC is a collection of GPS data archives and their operating agencies that agree to exchange information about their individual data holdings in order that users need not contact each archive separately to locate desired information. The Scripps Orbit and Permanent Array Center (SOPAC) is actively participating in the GSAC as a functioning Wholesaler, creating Data Holdings Records (DHRs) in a regular and automated fashion for both Data Holdings Files (DHFs) and Monument Catalog (MC) holdings. SOPAC will begin implementing GSAC functionality into its regular data collection processes shortly, making use of other GPS archive centers' GSAC participation. SOPAC will also serve as a GSAC Retailer, providing a gateway for the GSAC to GPS users around the world.
A large part of SOPAC's participation in the GPS Seamless Archive Center is to develop and support Perl-based software for the GSAC's functioning. SOPAC is providing the following software components:
Wholesaler GSAC Data Holdings Publication
Retailer GSAC Data Holdings Collection
Retailer GSAC Data Holdings Serving
Wholesaler & Retailer GSAC Database Management
Wholesaler & Retailer GSAC Database Reporting
