TACC to Lead Development of UT Grid
released 03.23.04
Contact
Merry Maisel
Science Writer
maisel@tacc.utexas.edu
512.475.9465
AUSTIN, TX —
The University of Texas at Austin, in collaboration with IBM, has announced plans for an ambitious grid computing project that will make tremendous power available to the university's researchers.
UT Grid, led by the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at UT Austin, will unite the vast computational resources of the nation's largest university campus, which has more than 50,000 students and some 20,000 faculty and staff members.
TACC will lead the construction of UT Grid in partnership with the university's Information Technology Services department, the Institute for Computational and Engineering Sciences, the Center for Instructional Technologies, and the College of Engineering.
Juan Sanchez, the university's vice president for research, hailed the initiative as "an important step forward for the campus as a whole and the many scientists and engineers at UT for whom grid-based computing is becoming the best way of accessing information and collaborating with researchers around the world. UT Grid is a model of world-class academic and industry organizations collaborating for goals that will benefit society."
Grid computing unites tens, hundreds, or even thousands of computers at different locations. The result is a "virtual" system that dramatically changes the landscape of research by boosting compute power and speed to previously unattainable levels.
UT Grid will connect computing resources across the university, from the high-end supercomputers at TACC down to personal computers. Researchers, educators, and students will have unprecedented access to massive computing power for simulations, data sharing, and data-intensive calculations in scientific areas ranging from climate modeling, petroleum exploration, and environmental remediation to genomics. UT Grid users will be able to tackle the most challenging computational problems.
In addition to computers, UT Grid will integrate access to research databases, educational materials, Web servers, and scientific instruments such as imaging scanners, microscopes, and telescopes. By virtualizing such diverse resources, UT Grid will enable significant scientific advances and foster innovative educational programs.
"UT Austin researchers are world leaders in many areas of science and engineering. We look forward to seeing what new problems they can solve using UT Grid, as well as what new paradigms faculty and students will develop to use UT Grid in education," said TACC director Jay Boisseau.
Unique Features
UT Grid incorporates a number of unique features developed by UT and IBM researchers. GridFlow, software developed by TACC, will help campus researchers visualize data wherever they may be, in real time. Another capability is "Roundup," a sub-grid of ordinary PCs across the campus and "volunteered" PCs belonging to faculty, staff, and students. Software supplied for Roundup by United Devices enables the smooth collaboration of any number of these machines, whose spare cycles are in effect a loosely coupled supercomputing resource that can be devoted to scientific problems requiring myriad repetitive computations. Within several years, Boisseau expects that tens of thousands of PCs, laptops, and other devices may be linked by Roundup into UT Grid.
The UT Grid Portal, based on TACC's GridPort 3.0 grid portal toolkit, will enable direct use of all UT Grid systems. GridPort 3.0 will also be used to construct specialized science portals that let campus researchers and educators harness the power of UT Grid for their specific applications and visualization needs.
IBM and TACC will co-develop grid application software using the Web Services Resources Framework and Web Services Notification specifications announced recently at GlobusWorld in San Francisco.
Execution
UT Grid will have a production layer for applications researchers, who may run simulations, conduct analyses, or access data without worrying about the underlying grid infrastructure, and a development layer for computer scientists and software developers exploring new grid technologies.
The first UT Grid activities will be to interconnect the campus's high-performance computing clusters for high-throughput parallel computing, then to integrate the standalone PCs into Roundup for high-throughput serial computing.
"We will be optimizing clusters across the campus to enable people to solve big problems more rapidly," said Chris Hempel, TACC Associate Director for Resources and Services. Software developed by TACC, Platform Computing, and collaborators nationwide will manage the clusters as a single resource. "On UT Grid, scientists will have wide latitude in orchestrating the distribution of computations, access to data, and visualization of results," Hempel said.
Later, UT Grid will create and integrate remote-user capabilities for a wide variety of large-scale scientific instrumentation on the campus, including microscopes, sensor networks, and telescopes.
Finally, The University of Texas at Austin plans to link UT Grid to other major grid projects, including the Texas Internet Grid for Research and Education (TIGRE) and the National Science Foundation's TeraGrid, the world's largest, most comprehensive, distributed infrastructure for open scientific research.
