All issues

The Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) is a high-performance general-purpose detector at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. More than twenty institutes from Russia and Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR) are involved in Russia and Dubna Member States (RDMS) CMS Collaboration. A proper computing grid-infrastructure has been constructed at the RDMS institutes for the participation in the running phase of the CMS experiment. Current status of RDMS CMS computing and plans of its development to the next LHC start in 2015 are presented.

The present paper discusses an approach to the efficient satellite image processing which involves two steps. The first step assumes the distribution of the steadily increasing volume of satellite collected data through a Grid infrastructure. The second step assumes the acceleration of the solution of the individual tasks related to image processing by implementing execution codes which make heavy use of spatial and temporal parallelism. An instance of such execution code is the image processing by means of the iterative Perona–Malik filter within FPGA application specific hardware architecture.

ARC Compute Element is becoming more popular in WLCG and EGI infrastructures, being used not only in the Grid context, but also as an interface to HPC and Cloud resources. It strongly relies on community contributions, which helps keeping up with the changes in the distributed computing landscape. Future ARC plans are closely linked to the needs of the LHC computing, whichever shape it may take. There are also numerous examples of ARC usage for smaller research communities through national computing infrastructure projects in different countries. As such, ARC is a viable solution for building uniform distributed computing infrastructures using a variety of resources.

Road network infrastructure is the basis of any urban area. This article compares the structural characteristics (meshedness coefficient, clustering coefficient) road networks of Moscow center (Old Moscow), formed as a result of self-organization and roads near Leninsky Prospekt (postwar Moscow), which was result of cetralized planning. Data for the construction of road networks in the form of graphs taken from the Internet resource OpenStreetMap, allowing to accurately identify the coordinates of the intersections. According to the characteristics of the calculated Moscow road networks areas the cities with road network which have a similar structure to the two Moscow areas was found in foreign publications. Using the dual representation of road networks of centers of Moscow and St. Petersburg, studied the information and cognitive features of navigation in these tourist areas of the two capitals. In the construction of the dual graph of the studied areas were not taken into account the different types of roads (unidirectional or bi-directional traffic, etc), that is built dual graphs are undirected. Since the road network in the dual representation are described by a power law distribution of vertices on the number of edges (scale-free networks), exponents of these distributions were calculated. It is shown that the information complexity of the dual graph of the center of Moscow exceeds the cognitive threshold 8.1 bits, and the same feature for the center of St. Petersburg below this threshold, because the center of St. Petersburg road network was created on the basis of planning and therefore more easy to navigate. In conclusion, using the methods of statistical mechanics (the method of calculating the partition functions) for the road network of some Russian cities the Gibbs entropy were calculated. It was found that with the road network size increasing their entropy decreases. We discuss the problem of studying the evolution of urban infrastructure networks of different nature (public transport, supply , communication networks, etc.), which allow us to more deeply explore and understand the fundamental laws of urbanization.

To determine movements of infrastructure objects on Earth surface, SAR interferometry is used. The method is based on obtaining a series of detailed satellite images of the same Earth surface area at different times. Each image consists of the amplitude and phase components. To determine terrain movements the change of the phase component is used. A method of persistent scatterers detection and estimation of relative shift of objects corresponding to persistent scatterers is suggested.

This article presents a classification of cities, taking into account their spatial planning and possible transport solutions for cities of various types. It also discusses examples of various strategies for the development of urban public transport in Russia and the European Union with a comparison of their efficiency. The article gives examples of the impact of urban planning on mobility of citizens. To implement complex strategic decisions, it is necessary to use micro and macro models which allow a comparison of situations “as is” and “as to be” to predict consequences. In addition, the authors propose a methodology to improve public transport route network and road network, which includes determining population needs in working and educational correspondences, identifying bottlenecks in the road network, developing simulation models and developing recommendations based on the simulation results, as well as the calculation of efficiency, including the calculation of a positive social effect, economic efficiency, environmental friendliness and sustainability of the urban transport system. To prove the suggested methodology, the macro and micro models of the city under study were built taking into account the spatial planning and other specifics of the city. Thus, the case study of the city of Naberezhnye Chelny shows that the use of our methodology can help to improve the situation on the roads by optimizing the bus route network and the road infrastructure. The results showed that by implementing the proposed solutions one can decrease the amount of transport load on the bottlenecks, the number of overlapping bus routes and the traffic density.

А new cloud center of parallel computing is to be created in the Laboratory of Information Technologies (LIT) of the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research JINR) what is expected to improve significantly the efficiency of numerical calculations and expedite the receipt of new physically meaningful results due to the more rational use of computing resources. To optimize a scheme of parallel computations at a cloud environment it is necessary to test this scheme for various combinations of equipment parameters (processor speed and numbers, throughput оf а communication network etc). As a test problem, the parallel MPI algorithm for calculations of the long Josephson junctions (LDJ) is chosen. Problems of evaluating the impact of abovementioned factors of computing mean on the computing speed of the test problem are solved by simulation with the simulation program SyMSim developed in LIT.

The simulation of the LDJ calculations in the cloud environment enable users without a series of test to find the optimal number of CPUs with a certain type of network run the calculations in a real computer environment. This can save significant computational time in countable resources. The main parameters of the model were obtained from the results of the computational experiment conducted on a special cloud-based testbed. Computational experiments showed that the pure computation time decreases in inverse proportion to the number of processors, but depends significantly on network bandwidth. Comparison of results obtained empirically with the results of simulation showed that the simulation model correctly simulates the parallel calculations performed using the MPI-technology. Besides it confirms our recommendation: for fast calculations of this type it is needed to increase both, — the number of CPUs and the network throughput at the same time. The simulation results allow also to invent an empirical analytical formula expressing the dependence of calculation time by the number of processors for a fixed system configuration. The obtained formula can be applied to other similar studies, but requires additional tests to determine the values of variables.

As the population of cities grows, the need to plan for the development of transport infrastructure becomes more acute. For this purpose, transport modeling packages are created. These packages usually contain a set of convex optimization problems, the iterative solution of which leads to the desired equilibrium distribution of flows along the paths. One of the directions for the development of transport modeling is the construction of more accurate generalized models that take into account different types of passengers, their travel purposes, as well as the specifics of personal and public modes of transport that agents can use. Another important direction of transport models development is to improve the efficiency of the calculations performed. Since, due to the large dimension of modern transport networks, the search for a numerical solution to the problem of equilibrium distribution of flows along the paths is quite expensive. The iterative nature of the entire solution process only makes this worse. One of the approaches leading to a reduction in the number of calculations performed is the construction of consistent models that allow to combine the blocks of a 4-stage model into a single optimization problem. This makes it possible to eliminate the iterative running of blocks, moving from solving a separate optimization problem at each stage to some general problem. Early work has proven that such approaches provide equivalent solutions. However, it is worth considering the validity and interpretability of these methods. The purpose of this article is to substantiate a single problem, that combines both the calculation of the trip matrix and the modal choice, for the generalized case when there are different layers of demand, types of agents and classes of vehicles in the transport network. The article provides possible interpretations for the gauge parameters used in the problem, as well as for the dual factors associated with the balance constraints. The authors of the article also show the possibility of combining the considered problem with a block for determining network load into a single optimization problem.

The Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) is a high-performance general-purpose detector at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. A distributed data analysis system for processing and further analysis of CMS experimental data has been developed and this model foresees the obligatory usage of modern grid-technologies. The CMS Computing Model makes use of the hierarchy of computing centers (Tiers). The Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR) takes an active part in the CMS experiment. In order to provide a proper computing infrastructure for the CMS experiment at JINR and for Russian institutes collaborating in CMS, Tier-1 center for the CMS experiment is constructing at JINR. The main tasks and services of the CMS Tier-1 at JINR are described. The status and perspectives of the Tier1 center for the CMS experiment at JINR are presented.

Cloud technologies are already wide spread among IT industry and start to gain popularity in academic field. There are several fundamental cloud models: infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and software as a service (SaaS). The article describes the cloud infrastructure deployed at the Laboratory of Information Technologies of the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (LIT JINR). It explains the goals of the cloud infrastructure creation, specifics of the implementation, its utilization, current work and plans for development.