The TVO Archive for Cosmological Simulations: Web Services and Architecture

Abstract

In order to offer an intuitive but effective access to a growing number of cosmological simulations, we have developed the Italian Theoretical Virtual Observatory project (ITVO), as described by Pasian and colleagues in 2006. In this work we describe two Web portals as two ways to access and share complex data coming from numerical astrophysical simulations. We present a set of Web services aimed at offering services such as Simple Numeric Access (ProtocolSNAPSimple Numeric Access Protocol), as described by Gheller and colleagues in 2006, and Randomizers dealing with different data formats. The Web services technology allows us to run a particular task (a SNAP job, for instance) close to its data, avoiding an expensive data transfer. © 2008. The Astronomical Society of the Pacific. All rights reserved.