No excuse for under-utilization, Clemson back-fills with BOINC

Clemson University in South Carolina is helping to tackle climate change, muscular dystrophy, cancer and a host of other world problems. The university’s School of Computing contributes the unused power of computers in instructional labs to the World Community Grid (WCG), a not-for-profit endeavor sponsored by IBM which uses the BOINC grid platform.

Before arriving at Clemson, Sebastien Goasguen, assistant professor in the School of Computing, had deployed a campus Condor pool at Purdue University and configured it as an Open Science Grid (OSG) site. Finding about 1500 Windows machines at Clemson, he got the first such pool for Windows running in January 2007.

This pool represents a unique mix of cyberinfrastructure technologies that bring together three types of computing grids—campus (Clemson), national (OSG) and volunteer (BOINC).

“Few grid jobs are tailored for Windows machines. We’re able to run some jobs for OSG’s ‘Engage’ Virtual Organization (used by many non-physics research teams) and NanoHUB,” says Goasguen who heads up the team of students, professors and Clemson Computing and Information Technology staff. But Clemson’s resources were still under-utilized, so his team set up Condor to back-fill with BOINC jobs from the WCG.

Feature - LHC Computing Grid

People behind the LHC grid: a Bird's eye view

Ian Bird is project leader for the Large Hadron Collider Computing Grid, where he is responsible for grid deployment and all of the technical work involved in setting up the grid infrastructure for the LHC.

ISGTW editor Dan Drollette interviewed him for this article.

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We must not be afraid of the future: EGEE to EGI

At last week’s Enabling Grids for E-sciencE conference in Istanbul, the audience received a piece of sound advice during the Monday morning welcome address from the European Commission, eScience grids: Where does Europe stand?, delivered by Mário Campolargo: “We must not be afraid of the future.”

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