Physics/IT: Data Management for Ab-Initio Nuclear Calculations

Let's say that you run a few hundred CPU-hours to determine some properties of a particular nucleus. When the calculation is done, you get the one bit you care about, say the transition probabilities of the nucleus. Do you delete the other resultant data that you don't need but may still be useful to others? Many people would say "store it", but how? We created a system to do just that.

"A Data Management System for Ab-Initio Nuclear Physics Applications", Fang Liu, Ritu Mundhe, Masha Sosonkina, Chase Cockrell, Miles Aronnax, Pieter Maris and James P. Vary. High Performance Computing Symposium (HPC 2011), Boston, MA, Apr. 3-7, 2011

To see our system, visit http://nuclear.physics.iastate.edu/info/. Please forgive the lack of artistic flourish. This is a case of rapid development so end-user design took a backseat to ease of programming. We expect the layout to grow "organically" as we find things we missed, things we don't need, and better ways to do things.

If you compare the screenshots from the paper to the live site, you will find several things have already been updated such as search, navigation, and record display. Use of jQuery allowed us to do this quickly, but sadly not before the paper was submitted.

View the submitted paper.