Abstract- 2008 Polar Grid Team
http://nia.ecsu.edu/ureomps2008/team-portal/index.html
Designing and Developing a Portal for the Polar Grid High Performance Computing System

Polar Grid is a National Science Foundation (NSF) Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) program funded partnership of Indiana University (IU) and Elizabeth City State University (ECSU) to acquire and deploy the computing infrastructure needed to investigate the urgent problems in glacial melting. The grid will be comprised of ruggedized laptops and computer clusters deployed in the field in the Polar Regions and two large scale computing clusters for detailed analysis in the U.S. – one to be installed at IU, and the other at ECSU. This installation will give ECSU a 5 Teraflop MSI High performance computing system, building on its distance education and undergraduate laboratory infrastructure to create tremendous outreach capabilities.

Accessing this computing cluster will entail the development of a grid portal to provide security, access to data, and the ability to process data along with education and outreach functions. Development of this portal will start with the documentation of terms, processes and software needed to develop a portal and understand what the grid is. The project will then progress to producing XML page structures to display processed data acquired during expeditions in Greenland and Antarctica. Another aspect will be the development of “IGoogle Gadgets” simulating the portal user environment and the process of converting that gadget into an RSS feed.

Abstract – 2007-2008 Multimedia Team
http://nia.ecsu.edu/ur/0708/teams/mmt/index.html
Redesign and Upgrade of the CERSER Website and Digital Image Library

The Center of Excellence in Remote Sensing Education and Research (CERSER) on the campus of Elizabeth City State University is currently tasked with the responsibility of receiving remotely sensed Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) and Sea Wide Field-of-View Sensor (SeaWiFS) data for research projects year round. This data is collected, processed, annotated, and transformed into images in the Tagged Image File Format (tiff). These tiff images are then uploaded to the CERSER archive library server located at http://cerser.ecsu.edu. Once uploaded, they are converted into various resolutions and their information is added to a tracking database maintained with Microsoft Access software. This database provides a searchable means for retrieving satellite image data through various parameters.

The current site and database architecture were developed in 2003 and modified in 2005. New capabilities and site requirements necessitated a redesign of the current site to include a more logical navigation scheme and flexibility to expand as needed. The image database required an update of the over four thousand images, many of which were corrupted or missing information. The database also required the implementation of product categories such as AVHRR color images, SeaWiFS chlorophyll images, and SeaWiFS sea surface temperature, as new satellite licenses have been acquired.