BXGrid: Biometrics Research Grid

bxgrid.cse.nd.edu

BXGrid is an online repository and experimental management system for biometrics research at Notre Dame. With a few clicks, a user can browse and process hundreds of thousands of images and movies of irises, faces, and other biometric data, and dispatch large scale experiments to our Condor pool. This project is a collaboration between the Computer Vision Research Lab and the Cooperative Computing Lab at Notre Dame.

BXGrid uses relational database to manage biometrics properties of a recording (image or movie). Metadata: recording id, subject id, facial expression, camera sensor equiment, lightning condition... are sotred using a strong schema. Using database to manage metadata of a large number of images and videos makes searching much easier.

BXGrid utilizes an array of Active Storage Cluster to store biometrics data: images and movies. BXGrid backend storage system includes 42 Chirp servers. Biometrics data is replicated throughout BXGrid storage servers. BXGrid maintains three copies of each images or movies in three diffrent Chirp servers. Location of each replica is store in BXGrid database. Other informations regrading a recording such as size and checksum are also kept. These informations are used in aiding audit and repair process.

BXGrid is connected to a Computing Grid. BXGrid makes use of Condor pool at Notre Dame. Condor pool provides BXGrid much needed computational power. BXGrid helps biometrics researchers conduct a wide range of experiment, for example: to evaluate an iris comparison algorithm on 60,000 irises.

User interacts with BXGrid using a web portal. User can navigate the system, browsing irises and faces, validating metadata, creating datasets and sharing datasets with each other. The web portal is only accessible within Notre Dame campus network.

BXGrid was the feature story in an issue of International Science Grid This Week.

Publications

  • Hoang Bui, Peter Bui, Patrick Flynn and Douglas Thain,
    ROARS: A Scalable Repository for Data Intensive Scientific Computing,
    The Third International Workshop on Data Intensive Distributed Computing at ACM HPDC 2010, June, 2010. DOI: 10.1145/1851476.1851587

  • Hoang Bui, Diane Wright, Clarence Helm, Rachel Witty, Patrick Flynn and Douglas Thain,
    Towards Long Term Data Quality in a Large Scale Biometrics Experiment,
    Managing Data Quality for Collaborative Science at ACM HPDC 2010, June, 2010. DOI: 10.1145/1851476.1851559

  • Christopher Moretti, Hoang Bui, Karen Hollingsworth, Brandon Rich, Patrick Flynn, and Douglas Thain,
    All-Pairs: An Abstraction for Data Intensive Computing on Campus Grids,
    IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, 21(1), pages 33-46, January, 2010. DOI: 10.1109/TPDS.2009.49

  • Hoang Bui, Michael Kelly, Christopher Lyon, Mark Pasquier, Deborah Thomas, Patrick Flynn, and Douglas Thain,
    Experience with BXGrid: A Data Repository and Computing Grid for Biometrics Research,
    Journal of Cluster Computing, 12(4), pages 373, April, 2009. DOI: 10.1007/s10586-009-0098-7

  • Hoang Bui, Deborah Thomas, Michael Kelly, Christopher Lyon, Douglas Thain, and Patrick J. Flynn,
    Poster: BXGrid: A Data Repository and Workflow Abstraction for Biometrics Research,
    IEEE International Conference on e-Science, pages 394-395, December, 2008. DOI: 10.1109/eScience.2008.135

  • Douglas Thain and Patrick Flynn,
    Towards a Data Analysis Grid for Biometrics Research,
    University of Notre Dame, Computer Science and Engineering Department, Technical Report 2008-05, April, 2008.

  • Christopher Moretti, Jared Bulosan, Douglas Thain, and Patrick J. Flynn,
    Poster: All-Pairs: An Abstraction for Data Intensive Computing,
    IEEE/ACM Grid Computing, September, 2007.

  • Christopher Moretti, Timothy Faltemier, Douglas Thain, and Patrick J. Flynn,
    Challenges in Executing Data Intensive Biometric Workloads on a Desktop Grid,
    Workshop on Large Scale and Volatile Desktop Grids at IEEE IPDPS, pages 481-489, April, 2007. DOI: 10.1109/IPDPS.2007.370671

    • BXGrid Documentation

    This research was supported by the National Science Foundation under grant 0621434

    Cooperative Computing Lab - CSE Department - Notre Dame