Montage: a grid-enabled engine for delivering custom science-grade mosaics on demand

Abstract

This paper describes the design of a grid-enabled version of Montage, an astronomical image mosaic service, suitable for large scale processing of the sky. All the re-projection jobs can be added to a pool of tasks and performed by as many processors as are available, exploiting the parallelization inherent in the Montage architecture. We show how we can describe the Montage application in terms of an abstract workflow so that a planning tool such as Pegasus can derive an executable workflow that can be run in the Grid environment. The execution of the workflow is performed by the workflow manager DAGMan and the associated Condor-G. The grid processing will support tiling of images to a manageable size when the input images can no longer be held in memory. Montage will ultimately run operationally on the Teragrid. We describe science applications of Montage, including its application to science product generation by Spitzer Legacy Program teams and large-scale, all-sky image processing projects.

DynamicCloudSim: Simulating heterogeneity in computational clouds

“…We constructed an evaluation workflow using the Montage toolkit [31]. Montage is able to generate workflows for assembling high-resolution mosaics of regions of the sky from raw input data.…”

On the Use of Cloud Computing for Scientific Workflows

“…Using virtualization in conjunction with Grid computing, known as "cloud computing" or Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), has been recognized as a potential solution to these problems [8,9]. This paper looks at the differences between running scientific workflows on the cloud and running them on the Grid, using the Montage [10] application and Pegasus-WMS, a scientific workflow software [11,12]. Our perspective is not that of a computer scientist trying to analyze detailed performance metrics, but rather that of a domain scientist who can use a number of different computing environments to perform computations.…”

Many-task computing for grids and supercomputers

“…Another related application in astronomy is MONTAGE [49,50], a national virtual observatory project [51] that stitches tiles of images of the sky from various sky surveys (e.g. SDSS [19], etc) into a photorealistic single image.…”