This is where you say something clever
So apparently, writely can now do blog posts too. If you can read this then it works with my Movable Type blog. I added some tags – let’s see if it manages to get those added to the blog post.
Writely is looking a whole lot better as an online word processor, too!
So apparently, writely can now do blog posts too. If you can read this then it works with my Movable Type blog. I added some tags – let’s see if it manages to get those added to the blog post.
Writely is looking a whole lot better as an online word processor, too!
Bob Jones from CERN is talking about EGEE, an EU initiative which has 91 partners in 32 countries, encompassing 13 federations. Asia is a new federation, and US Partners: U Chicago, USC, Wisconsin (Condor), and RENCI.
The objective is large-scale production-quality infrastructure for e-science.
The infrastructure operation includes sites in 39 countries. Monitoring of grid services and automated site configuration/management.
They distribute production-quality middleware (glite), which they plan to use Apache2 license to distribute.
interoperability between grids is essintial – EGEE works with national grid projects and peer projects around the world. There are excellent relations wiht OSG on technical, operational, and policy issues. Further work is needed and the Grid-Interoperability-Now is providing a good environment for this.
The WISDOM project used grid for drug discovery. http://wisdom.healthgrid.org
They calculate how much money they’re saving by doing this research “in silico” instead of in-vitro.
There’s an EGEE conference in Geneva 25-29 September.
Simon Lin from Academia Sinica, Taiwan is now talking about the TWGrid infrastructure in Taiwan. The consortium started in 2002. They now have 2 2.5 Gbps connections to Amsterdam, which they use to connect to CERN. One link lands in Chicago, another on the US West Coast. There’s a new link to Australia that reduces latency from 380 ms to 138 ms.
There are 12 LCG sites and 3 EGEE sites in Asia Pacific. Academia Sinica Grid Computing Centre(ASGC) is acting as the coordinator and the WLCG Tier-1 Centre and WLCG/EGEE operation Centre for Asia/Pacific.
16 sites in 7 countries: australia, japan, india, korea, pakistan, singapore, taiwan. 700 CPUs, growing to more than 1000 by end of year.
Konya Balazs from Lund Universityin Sweden is giving a tele-presentation on the NorduGrid. It started in 2001-2002 with a research project to enable Grid in the nordic countries. Since 2002 it’s a research collaboration, focusing now on middleware. It develops its own Grid middleware. There are 13 countries participating, with 50 sites and about 5000 cpus.
When the Scandinavian High Energy Physics Institutes wanted to share computing resources and jointly contribute to CERN/LHC computing – they needed a Grid and there was no production ready middleware.
Their design philosophy, followed Scandinavian design phlosophy – lighweight, portable & modular, non-intrusive on the resource side. They wanted something flexible and powerful on the client side – easily installable, trivial tasks must be trivial to perform, no dependency on central services.
The goal was to have no single point of faulure.
He goes on to give some details of the ARC middleware, which is being positioned as general purpose open source European grid middleware. Many national grids in Euripe are using this middleware.
He notes that the major grid middleware providers need to become more dedicated to creating standards for interoperability. – Standards are needed in JJob description language, representation of grid-related objects, a standard interface to computing resources.
Jayanta Sircar from Harvard is talking about the CrimsonGrid. CrimsonGrid is an attempt to bring a (school-based) IT organization approach to supporting grids for science.
The motivation – the future of the Univerity’s research vision is intimately connected to cyber-infrastructure. Interdisciplinary faculty collaborations are a high priority, and IT support must align itself to meet new needs. Research environments cannot be separated from personal productivity environment.
The approach: work at interface innovation and production. Build an ecosystem. Establish role of faculty as stakeholders. Build roles for industry. Serve as a ‘sandbox’ for campus technology test beds – zero penalty for failure.
But what is a campus grid? Many vertical grids? Every fluster tethered to a GT appliance? One fabric hosting many virtual organizations? All of the above, and then some. Last year had the first international workshop on campus grids as part of the global grid forum.
Aspirations – don’t re-invent the wheel whenever possible. Want to leverage the contributions of the OSG community to develop a model for building switched (virtualized) campus cyberinfrastructure – a campus grid.
Crimson Grid initiative started in April 2004 – to engineer a technology fabric. Though the Crimson Grid is housed in Engineering and Applied Sciences, they are reaching out to the rest of campus and bringing others in – the medical school grid is being established as part of the Crimson Grid. They are also collaborating with other campuses, including GLOW at Wisconsin. They’re running about ~750 procs in crimson grid, and linking up with GLOW who are running about 1000 procs for testing resource sharing.
There’s a question on how they determined the sizing of compute power for the campus grid, given the local processing power in departments and the global power available in the open grids. The question didn’t really get answered.
Jayanta Sircar from Harvard is talking about the CrimsonGrid. CrimsonGrid is an attempt to bring a (school-based) IT organization approach to supporting grids for science.
The motivation – the future of the Univerity’s research vision is intimately connected to cyber-infrastructure. Interdisciplinary faculty collaborations are a high priority, and IT support must align itself to meet new needs. Research environments cannot be separated from personal productivity environment.
The approach: work at interface innovation and production. Build an ecosystem. Establish role of faculty as stakeholders. Build roles for industry. Serve as a ‘sandbox’ for campus technology test beds – zero penalty for failure.
But what is a campus grid? Many vertical grids? Every fluster tethered to a GT appliance? One fabric hosting many virtual organizations? All of the above, and then some. Last year had the first international workshop on campus grids as part of the global grid forum.
Aspirations – don’t re-invent the wheel whenever possible. Want to leverage the contributions of the OSG community to develop a model for building switched (virtualized) campus cyberinfrastructure – a campus grid.
Crimson Grid initiative started in April 2004 – to engineer a technology fabric. Though the Crimson Grid is housed in Engineering and Applied Sciences, they are reaching out to the rest of campus and bringing others in – the medical school grid is being established as part of the Crimson Grid. They are also collaborating with other campuses, including GLOW at Wisconsin. They’re running about ~750 procs in crimson grid, and linking up with GLOW who are running about 1000 procs for testing resource sharing.
There’s a question on how they determined the sizing of compute power for the campus grid, given the local processing power in departments and the global power available in the open grids. The question didn’t really get answered.
Dogan Seber from SDSC is talking about the GEON geosciences grid. Geon’s vision is to enable new discoveries in teh geosciences by utilizing an easy-to-use “integration environment”. The requirements were developed by a group of geoscientists, and then they brought in the SDSC folks, which has been working well for them. They want to bring in multiple datasets and information to integrate and interpolate data in their analysis. The goal is to bring a system where people can register datasets and search across them. They wanted the system to be friendly for teachers at all levels.
Their Cyberinfrastructure Principles:
- An equal partnership: IT works in close conjunction with science. This turns out to be challenging in social environments where people speak different languages.
-The “two-tier” approach – Technology needs are now – so use what’s available now including commercial tools and standards where applicable (this keeps the community involved and helps solve real problems, even if you’re not doing things quite the right way)…
…while developing advanced technology, and doing CS research
There are nodes in the US, India, China, and Japan.
There is a portal (using GridSphere) that allows people to search and access resources. They have a resource registration service that allows people to describe data sets. Biggest research now is how to describe resources based on ontologies, not just text matching. I’m not sure whether he’s talking about tagging by users, or something deeper than that. The search allows textual, temporal, and geospatial searches.
GEON is a a TreaGrid science gateway. The example is how to build software that anybody can use to run seismic simulations. They built an app called SYNSEIS that does this, using a small cluster for 2d simple jobs or Teragrid for larger jobs, builds a Flash animation output.
I ran out of battery yesterday and didn’t get these posted, but here are some notes from a series of presentations on how people are actually doing science on grids. I probably got some of these details wrong, as about 90% of what was said was over my head – and people say us computer types are incomprehensible 
David Baker, a biochemist from U Washington, talked about the Rosetta@home project where they’re using distributed desktops to help create lowest-energy protein structures. There are about 100k machines currently enrolled in project.
Robert Riggleman from Wisconsin (the other UW), is talking about the use of distributed parallel computing on anti-plasticization of polymers. They’ve used over 75 years of CPU time since April of 2006. They use the GLOW facilities, a centralized high-performance computing facility at Wisconsin.
Margaret Romine, from PNNL, is talking about the problems of dealing with all the data generated by rapid sequencing of genomes. She’s using Gnare/Puma2 software developped at Argonne Lab. The software runs every genome that’s out there to gather evidence. Sequencing a genome is slow, annotating it is slow – typically a year by manual methods. Looking for ways to better automate the annotations, particularly in identifying possibly bad matches.
Oliver Gutsche from Fermilab is talking about high energy physics and the Large Hadron Collider used to study proton-proton collisions. They compare simulated data to real data – they’re talking about 6 petabytes of data in 2008. Core CMS infrastructure includes a data bookeeping service (DBS – catalog of available datasets) and a data location service (which data is stored at what site), and the Trivial File Catalog.
