The UNOSAT-GRID Project: Access to Satellite Imagery through the Grid Environment

UNOSAT is a United Nations activity to provide access to satellite images and geographic system services for humanitarian operations for rescue or aid activities. UNOSAT is implemented by the UN Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR) and managed by the UN Office for Project Services (UNOPS). In addition, partners from different organizations constitute the UNOSAT consortium. Among these partners, CERN participates actively providing the required computational and storage resources. The critical part of the UNOSAT activity is the storage and processing of large quantities of satellite images. The fast and secure access to these images from any part of the world is mandatory during these activities. Based on two successful CERN-GRID/UNOSAT pilot projects (data storage/compression/download and image access through mobile phone), the GRIDUNOSAT project has consolidated the considerable work undertaken so far in the present activity. The main use case already demonstrated is the delivery of satellite images from the Grid to a portal (web and portable devices). This use case, applied for the moment to UNOSAT, can also be used by many communities requiring a fast and reliable access to geographical images from any portable device. During the project development we have enabled the selection and download of satellite images starting on a portable device (using the GPS coordinates provided by the devide itself). The system provides seamless access to valuable satellite images while preserving the security requirements of the data provider and of the EGEE infrastructure (using X509 certificates). The system uses EGEE services already used by other applications and in this presentation we show how we have orchestrated them. The satellite images are catalogued by the AMGA (metadata) and LFC (location) services. The image processing is provided by the computational GRID resources via the EGEE workload management system. This work is being performed in close collaboration with the NICE Company, providing their EnginFrame technology (used also by Genius EGEE portal, for a development and deployment environment for portal applications) The fast access and processing of the images is the key point for the UNOSAT project. It requires building the support for a reliable storage and workload management system in the EGEE production is system to be ready in case of peak activity.