The DINMA-University of Trieste and the DISTER-University of Milano will be jointly responsible for applying for 30 days Urania ship time for 1997 and 1998. They will be also responsible for organizing the cruises. The scientific program of the cruises will, however, be jointly agreed by the entire group (with inputs from other scientists too) to produce the optimum data acquisition program. We shall arrange ship-shearing to reduce transit time between the two target areas and port calls. Ship time has been allocated to SINAPSI for the 1997 cruise, if the proposal will rise funding for the remaining expences.
B) Task B.5.1
The experimental phase of this study (Task B.5) has to cover the period following the field measurements carried out during the spreading of ADW in the framework of MATER EU programme (spring 1998). Full depth station measurements with high resolution CTD casts equipped with O2, in-situ fluorescence and transmissometry are deemed both essential and practical at every station. These measurements will supply basic information on spatial variability in biological and chemical properties.
The general survey in the Ionian will take place on the general 0.5 degree grid stations over 30 days of ship-time, whereas the Sicily Strait will take place on a denser grid stations over 15 days of ship-time. The total requested time of 45 days will be applied in two or three legs by two research groups.
SUPERCOMPUTING
The Inter-University Consortium for the management of the electronic computing center of Northeastern Italy -CINECA- was founded in 1969 in order to make the most advanced tools for scientific calculation available to academic users and public and private researchers. Since its institution, the consortium has acquired the most powerful and state-of-the-art high-performance computer models available on the market, investing in equipment for scientific computing which has proven to be particularly effective and of great commercial success. CINECA's advanced policy in continuously up-dating the available equipment, as well as the high degree of professionally in management and user support have allowed for a high degree of technological transfer to both public and private environments.
Top line of computers available at CINECA are a vector supercomputer CRAY C92 2128 / SSD 128 and two parallel architecture system, a CRAY T3D MCA128 and a IBM 9076 SP2 32. Those computers make it possible to provide a supercomputing service to a vast community of users, spread out over the entire national territory, and with different affiliations such as the University, the public Research associations, and some of the most important Italian industries. By Summer 1996 the CRAY T3D will be replaced by a CRAY T3E, as already defined in the contract with Cray Research.
The usability of the service provided by CINECA is guaranteed by a capillary and powerful network of data transmission. CinecaNet, in fact, is joined to the High-speed GARR Network (the national Research communication network), which allows each national user to submit work for execution directly from his or her location and via techniques with which he or she is most familiar.
The annual amount of service provided is in the order of 15.000 CRAY C90 equivalent hours of CPU time delivered to CINECA users community, 30% is provided to internal and Consortium University users, 50% is provided to other national users and 20% is provided to European users.
For the scope of the project SINAPSI, CINECA will provide to the scientific user community 1500 hours/yr. of C90 equivalent CPU time at a cost of 150 ML/yr., that is considerably less of nominal price list applied to the unstructured users.
Moreover, considering that the scientific visualization and data archiving of the results obtained by the computation activity is a key factor in the day by day operation, CINCH, for the same amount of financial support, within the project will also provide access to the resources available in its Visualization lab for a countervalue of 25ML yr. (that means up to 45 day of hospitality and up to 150 hours of execution on server SGI Challenge L) and the availability of archive space on its mass storage systems for a countervalue of 25Ml yr. (up to 20 Gbyte of archive space).
The global service defined by the availability of previous resources will include the support for user and resource management and specialistic support for scientific visualization.
Different data sets will be exchanged between participants during the project and several data bases will be constructed which will be shared between partners.
Meteorological data set.
CINECA has acquired surface and higher altitudes meteorological parameters from the reanalyzes Project of ECMWF. This is a 15 years data set covering Jan 1980 until December 1995 and it would be an extremely powerful data set to be used for climatological and modeling studies (see Task B.2, B.3, C.1, C.2, C.3, C.4 and D’s). CINECA will serve as a data bank for the distribution to SINAPSI partners of this data set. Higher horizontal resolution surface meteorological parameters from operational analyses of ECMWF will be available at IMGA-CNR, as part of the Task B.2.4 work.
Plankton Time series data
The different data sets used for phyto and zooplankton analysis will be made available and accessible to all participants. A standard format will be chosen including sample description (date, location, depth, species abundance). Species lists will be reviewed and standardized following the most recent taxonomic literature and the use of a common language to indicate supraspecific groups of species will be agreed upon.
Paleo-Oceanographic data set
DISTER-Milano will be the reference for these data, it will start to build a specific data base for the paleo-oceanographic indicators.
Heat Flow data set
The DINMA-Trieste archived heat flow and temperature data collected within the MEDRIFF project in the Ionian Sea. The heat flow data collected here will be archived with the same system and made available to the scientists interested.
Multidisciplinary data set
OGS-Trieste will be the data centre for the archiving of physics and bio-geochemistry data related to the parameters measured in sea water and particulate suspended matter; as well as the time series collected by means of moored current meters and sediment traps. The above mentioned data will be archived in the same common format as they will be used by the whole MATER community, for which the OGS has been charged of regional data centre to maintain the data collected in Adriatic, Ionian and Central Mediterranean basins. The data will be made available to the scientists interested according to the data exchange policy among the partners of SINAPSI.
