Content about Infrastructure

Announcement - Register now for Security Jam, to be held 4-9 Feb (on-line event)

Image courtesy Security Jam

The European Commission and NATO are joining together as co-sponsors of a worldwide online brainstorm — the Security Jam — with the aim of producing recommendations on how to make our world a safer place.
To be held online from 4 February to 9 February, this event will feature topics such as: Climate Change, Crisis Management, Afghanistan, Human Rights, Piracy, and Development. This format will allow stakeholders direct access to a broad level of input from NGOs, security & defence practitioners, political and military figures, think tanks, academics and journalists.
Several thousand participants will debate online over the 5-day period. And, as an online session, it allows participants to log in and log out at their convenience, from anywhere in the world, once they’re registered.
Security Jam is organized by a number of think-tanks, including t

Announcement - Invitation to comment on e-IRG Roadmap 2009 draft

The latest version of the e-Infrastructure Reflection Group (e-IRG) Roadmap has been released and has entered the public consultation phase. The document invites policy makers, service providers, and user communities to join in the discussion concerning the future of European e-Infrastructures.
The importance of e-Infrastructures for European research, innovation, and competitiveness is now almost universally acknowledged. Sustainable and integrated networking, grid, data, high performance, and commodity computing services will become essential tools for 40 million users in research and academia in Europe. The ongoing expansion of the e-Infrastructures user communities is already producing new and updated requirements for the common e-Infrastructures. The link between leading-edge research activities and the e-Infrastructures supporting them has been identified as an area where considerable socioeconomic benefits can be realise

Feature - The long view: A conversation with John Wood

John Wood, speaking at the EGEE 09 conference in Barcelona. Image courtesy EGEE 09

John Wood is one of the key people behind ESFRI (European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures), the organization charged with creating a “roadmap” that identifies the key infrastructure needs of researchers for the next 10- to 20- years. The roughly 44 projects that ESFRI singled out are typically pan-European; they require funding from many countries to build and operate; and require cyberinfrastructure to provide access to their data for their global user communities. The projects cover all types of subject matter, from studies of language use to greenhouse-gas monitoring, and typically require research infrastructures that can handle truly vast amounts of date. (For example, the astronomy project known as the Square Kilometer Array will transport over 5,000 times the total IP traffic of the entire AT&T US backbone.)At EGEE 09

Feature - Getting GPUs on the grid

Russ Miller, principal investigator at CI Lab, stands in front of the server rack that holds Magic, a synchronous supercomputer that can achieve up to 50 Teraflops. Image courtesy of CI Lab.

Enhancing the performance of computer clusters and supercomputers using graphical processing units is all the rage. But what happens when you put these chips on a full-fledged grid?
Meet “Magic,” a supercomputing cluster based at the University of Buffalo’s CyberInfrastructure Laboratory (CI Lab). On the surface, Magic is like any other cluster of Dell nodes. “But then attached to each Dell node is an nVidia node, and each of these nVidia nodes have roughly 1000 graphical processing units,” said Russ Miller, the principal investigator for CI Lab. “Those GPUs are the same as the graphical processing unit in many laptops and desktops.”
That’s the charm of these chips: because they are mass-manufactured for use in your

Project develops new standards for sharing between grids

Authorization Interoperability Project members , left to right, Oscar Koeroo (NIKHEF), Gabriele Garzoglio (Fermi National Accelerator Lab), and Frank Siebenlist (Argonne National Laboratory). Photo courtesy Open Science Grid.

Although the Grid is all about resource sharing, the software that governs individual grids has not always been capable of interacting well. The Grid Authorization Interoperability Project has created a new standard that could change that.
Grids make their computational and storage resources available online for use by others through software known as gateway middleware. To access a grid, a user presents her credentials—certification that she has rights to access that grid’s resources—to a resource gateway. The gateway in turn talks to an authorization system, local to the grid the user is accessing, in order to assign the appropriate privileges to the user.
Most grids have independently d

Feature - SAGrid: A view from the coordinator’s chair

SEACOM is a 1.28Tbps, 15,000 kilometer-long undersea fiber-optic cable system that will provide high-speed communication between East Africa, South Asia and Europe. As of press time, its promoters expect the system to be up and running in less than three weeks. Image courtesy SEACOM

Bruce Becker of the Meraka Institute in Pretoria is the Coordinator for planning the upcoming South Africa Grid initiative — which will draw upon the resources of South Africa’s Center for High Performance Computing and the country’s high-speed network, SANREN. Here, he gives an update of the status of the project.After over a year of training sessions and technical workshops in multiple countries, preparations are under way for a move to full production readiness of the South Africa Grid, or SAGrid.The testing and incubation phase is coming to an end; the high-speed national research network SANREN is under way and already ac

Feature - Coming: Sustained petascale computing for open science

Illinois' Petascale Computing Facility (PCF), which will house Blue Waters, is planned as a leading edge, energy-efficient facility capable of housing multiple Blue Waters-scale systems.  The PCF will provide up to 20,000 square feet (about 1900 m2)and 24 MW for computer equipment (not counting cooling infrastructure) and is  expandable  to two to four times that.
Some of the innovative, energy-saving technologies in the building include 480V power (saves 5-10% in transmission loss), liquid cooling for computational components, and outside ambient air cooling for most of the year to avoid using artificially chilled water.
Image courtesy of NCSF.

Computing capacity has grown dramatically over the last decade, allowing scientists to tackle much larger and more complex research problems. The first sustained petascale computing system for “open” science — science done using open source to

Link of the Week - The future of innovation

With e-infrastructures such as Geant2, astronomers are able to combine information from telescopes around the world to produce pictures of the universe that a 100 times more detailed than ever before. Image courtesy of Dante

What is the future of European e-infrastructures? What kinds of strategic investments and actions need to be taken to ensure their ongoing contributions and successes?
About 600 million Euros have been earmarked for investment in infrastructures. What directions will they go?
The latest GridBriefing, "The future of innovation: Developing Europe's ICT infrastructures," seeks to answer these and other questions.
It's based upon a March 5, 2009 communication from the European Commission entitled "ICT infrastructures for e-Science" - which aims to trigger discussions on actions needed to ensure the future of European infrastructures.
For more, check out the rest of the GridBriefing series on the GridTalk websit

Announcement - International conference on parallel and distributed systems Image courtesy of polyu.edu.hk  Event: 15th annual international conference on parallel and distriuted systems (ICPADS’09) Venue: Shenzhen, China Dates: Conference: 9-11 December 2009Submissions due: 1 June 2009Notifications of acceptance: 1 September 2009Camera ready version due: 1 October 2009Submission information: Format: two-column IEEE computer societySubmit by Web   Registration ICPADS 2009 will be held in Shenzhen, China, situated just across the border from Hong Kong. The conference provides an international forum for scientists, engineers, and users to exchange and share their experiences, new ideas, and latest research results on all aspects of parallel and distributed systems. Papers accepted for ICPADS 2009 conference and workshops will be published by the IEEE Computer Society.Topics of particular interest include, but are not limited to:High Performance Computational Biology and BioinformaticsMulti-core and Multithreaded Arch

Feature - Blue Gene for Africa Image courtesy of the Meraka Institute IBM donated a supercomputer to South Africa's Center for High-Performance Computing, as part of a $120 million investment in sub-Saharan Africa. Dubbed "Blue Gene" and designed and built in collaboration with the Department of Energy's NNSA/Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, it is capable of 11.5 teraflops, or 11.5 trillion floating point operations per second, or flops. ("Flops" are a standard measure of a computer's performance.) In other words, it is currently the fastest scientific computer on the entire African continent.The computer system is part of a larger initiative, known as "Blue Gene for Africa" (BG4A), that aims to build high-end computing capacity in the continent. The project aims to develop infrastructure, encourate collaborative science,  and promote Africa's human capital. As such, it will be available free of charge to any qualifying African institution for use on advanced

Feature - G-eclipse: easier interface to both grids and clouds The g-Eclipse interface in action.Image courtesy of g- Eclipse Consortium The g- Eclipse Consortium released the g- Eclipse framework, which developers claim will provide an easy-to-use workbench for accessing both grid and cloud infrastructures. The software provides a graphical workbench that enables seamless access with the same simplicity as accessing the Internet from a browser. "This enables interoperabilty between different grid and cloud infrastructures on the client side," said Harald Kornmayer, a researcher at NEC Laboratories Europe, who led the project.It currently supports EGEE's gLite grid middleware (aimed for scientific domains), and the GRIA middleware (used by industry and commerce), as well as AmazonWeb Services' cloud computing and storage offerings.A key feature of the g- Eclipse workbench is its independence from the underlying grid and cloud technology. "We started with the goal of accessing available scientific grid infra

Feature - LCG, a challenge in 4-D: size, complexity, adaptability, funding Image courtesy of Les Robertson Les Robertson, a key player behind the development of the LHC grid, retired in 2008 after 35 years at CERN. The following highlights a speech he gave at GridFest last October.In a few words, it is hard to say something about computing that can compete with the wonders of the machine and its detectors.Nevertheless, I shall try. I hope to give an overview of the project, where it has come from, the challenges we faced, the computational structures and human collaborations we built to overcome these challenges, and a map of where we intend to go in the future.As we have seen, this accelerator creates extremely high-energy particle collisions, which in turn create new particles that decay in very complex ways as they move through the detector. The detector registers the passage of these particles with a vast number of sensors and, finally, creates a digitized summary that is recorded as what we call an “event.” Physici