Project Overview
The Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) is NASA's most important solar physics mission of this decade. It was launched 11th February 2010 and the three primary instruments on board are i) the Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager (HMI), ii) the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA), and iii) the Extreme ultraviolet Variability Experiment (EVE). The data will be predominantly used to learn about solar magnetic activity. SDO transmits 1-2 TB of data per day, thereby flooding the solar scientific community with high-resolution data and corresponding (higher-level) science data products. Thus, the necessity for an advanced data management system to effectively deliver rapid and simple access to users and developers throughout Germany is inevitable.
The German Aerospace Center (DLR) is providing support to establish a German Data Center for SDO (GDC-SDO) that will manage, maintain, archive and process the enormous volume of anticipated data. This is a long term project that commenced on the 1st August 2007 and has been granted until the end of 2012. The GDC-SDO is hosted by the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS) in Katlenburg-Lindau, Germany. The data is being made available from the Joint Science Operations Center (JSOC) headquartered at Stanford University in the USA.
There are several important hardware and software components. DLR have funded 4 Sun Fire servers (each with 48TB), and a preprocessing machine (8 quad-core, 256 GB memory) to prepare SDO data for scientific analysis. The Data Record Management System (DRMS) is software developed at JSOC that is used to handle all aspects of SDO data management. NetDRMS is a specific distribution of the DRMS that is designed to run on sites external to JSOC, and furthermore, it encompasses the notion of several netDRMS locations communicating and sharing SDO data. NetDRMS is currently running at the GDC-SDO. The DRMS is built around the advanced open-source database software PostgreSQL. DRMS users communicate to the PostgreSQL database to search through metadata and also to a Storage Unit Management System (SUMS) to access the physical data. Finally, the PEGASUS workflow management system, along with the CONDOR job scheduler and GLOBUS grid technologies, will be used to automate GDC-SDO data workflows.
The preprocessed data made available by the GDC-SDO, will subsequently, be used for a different project, Seismic Imaging of the Solar Interior (SISI). SISI is focused on achieving higher-level scientific data products from both data processing and numerical modeling.
The Kiepenheuer-Institut fuer Sonnenphysik (KIS, Freiburg) and the Astrophysikalisches Institut Potsdam (AIP) are additional partners in this project.