Content about Infrastructure

Feature - Massive new digital storage library for atmospheric research  The Nested Regional Climate Model is an initiative of the NCAR in collaboration with university, government and private-industry colleagues. With added support the NRCM will be able to simulate a variety of 21st-century climates, from which statistical portraits of the future atmosphere can be produced. The simulations can give a better idea of how and where weather patterns are likely to shift from decade to decade and how specific high-impact weather events, such as hurricanes, may change in frequency, intensity, size and rainfall. Images courtesy of UCAR;NASA-GSFC, NOAA GOES The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) recently installed a massive new digital storage library planned to hold nearly 30 petabytes of data— the equivalent of more than 6 million DVDs. The new system, AMSTAR (Augmentation of the Mass Storage Tape Archive Resources), will be one of the largest archives in the world dedicated to geoscience research, and will store

Link of the week - We'll always have Paris: ESFRI meets grid Research Infrastructures are at the core of the knowledge triangle. From Hervé Pero′s presentation Utilizing the full potential of research infrastructures for strengthening the European Research Area (ERA). Image courtesy of H Pero Less intimate than Ilsa and Rick, close to 100 participants attended a Reflection Group (e-IRG) workshop in Paris on 21-22 October to discuss management of massive data sets, access for users to these data sets, and access to computing resources. Projects from ESFRI, the European strategy forum on research infrastructures, representing many scientific disciplines, are important potential grid users. This was the first event where the ESFRI and cyberinfrastructure (CI) worlds came together.  ESFRI, formed in 2002 at the behest of the European Council, works to strengthen the scientific integration of Europe and its international outreach.  ESFRI facilitates policy-making on research infrastructures, the faciliti

Announcement - OnTheMove federated conference, Mexico, 9-14 Nov Image courtesy of starlab.vub.ac.be  Dates: 9-14 November 2008Location: Monterrey, MexicoWeb page Registration OnTheMove (OTM) returns to the North American continent co-locating five related and complementary conferences: DOA: infrastructure, ODBASE: meaning of data, CoopIS: application in organizations, GADA: grid computing, high-performance and distributed applications, IS: information security. All five conferences share the scientific study of the distributed, conceptual and ubiquitous aspects of modern computing systems, and share the resulting application-pull created by the Web. For DOA'08, the primary emphasis will be on the distributed objects underlying the required archtitectures; ODBASE'08 concentrates on the knowledge bases and methods required for enabling semantical use; CoopIS'08 will report on the state of the art on interaction of such technology and methods within an enterprise or networked organization; and for GADA'08, the fo

Feature - Office of Cyberinfrastructure at NSF: the first two years Daniel Atkins is a professor in the School of Information and the College of Engineering at the University of Michigan and Associate Vice President for Research Cyberinfrastructure.Image courtesy of Daniel Atkins. Cyberinfrastructure (CI) has become a vital tool for scientific research and discovery.  A system of distributed computing, storage, software and management using the network as its backplane, and for which the complexity is largely hidden from the user, CI has the potential for revolutionizing the way science and engineering research is conducted, says Daniel Atkins, former and initial director of the National Science Foundation’s  Office of Cyberinfrastructure.With an initial annual budget of $185 million, the office coordinates and supports the development of CI resources, tools, and services. In its conception, the office focused almost exclusively on high performance computing. Over the course of Atkins’ tenure, its vision bro

Feature - BNL takes a cue from nuclear physics Deep in the bowels of Brookhaven's RACF. Image courtesy of BNL Even though real data from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has yet to touch the Grid, scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory’s ATLAS Tier-1 center already have their hands dirty. Working on a daily basis with the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) – a massive particle accelerator that smashes together beams of gold atoms to explore the complex world of nuclear physics – the almost 40 staff members at Brookhaven’s RHIC and ATLAS Computing Facility (RACF) are no strangers to storing and distributing large amounts of data. “The benefit of an integrated facility like this is the ability to move around highly skilled and experienced IT experts from one project to the other, depending on what’s needed at the moment,” said RACF Director Michael Ernst. “There are many different flavors of physics computing, but the requirements for these two facilities are very sim

  Opinion - What clouds and grids can learn from each other Cloud computing adds an extra dimension of flexibility.Image courtesy of Ben Rhydding, sxc.hu  During the past 10 years, hundreds of grid projects have come and gone, passing away after funding ran dry. Most didn’t have a realistic strategy for sustainability, let alone a viable business model for their infrastructures, tools, applications or services. Often, the only asset left after the project’s end was the hands-on expertise gained by those involved, which is certainly valuable in the long run, but doesn’t justify the effort and funding. So far, in my opinion, grids didn’t keep up to their full promise.What went wrong?Sure, grids, by their very nature, are complex to design, build and maintain; and applications are cumbersome to run. It might take another 10 years of trial and error (and re-writing grid middleware?) to navigate the labyrinth of new technologies and paradigms, such as Utility Computing, Autonomic Co

Bonus Feature: Readers talk back about standards —Paul Strong, e-Bay “For all of us, standards are a means to an end: interoperability that enables integration, collaboration, choice of vendor products/components and reduced costs. As scientists, government bodies or businesses, all of us have slightly differing priorities, but ultimately we all need the benefits that standards bring. The real challenge is how to deliver relevant standards in a timely fashion. My belief is that community-driven standards are the way forward and that standards driven through implementation are the most likely to be successful for those of us driven by quarterly and yearly results. We need interoperability and we need it fast!” —Mario Campolargo, European Commission "The e-infrastructures initiative of the European Commission delivers cutting-edge ICT-based infrastructures and services to solve real-worldproblems. Already today, there are more than 300 different organizationsparticipating in the e-infr

Feature - CMS readies network links for LHC data CMS data transfer rate in MB/s during the data transer debugging task, from September through November 2007.Image courtesy of CMS. Transfer 300 thousand million bytes (300 Gigabytes) per day for six out of seven consecutive days and move a total of 2.3 Terabytes during that same seven-day period—that’s 2.3 million million bytes—these are the criteria that each major network link in the Compact Muon Solenoid’s computing structure must satisfy when the Large Hadron Collider turns on this summer. Together they will transfer tens of Terabytes a day.The CMS computing structure comprises an internationally distributed system of services and resources that interact over the network through the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG). The three-tiered architecture, fetchingly illustrated in a Flash animation from the GridCafe, functions as a single coherent system. Data collected at CERN, the top tier (dubbed Tier-0), is distributed to a set of seven

  iSGTW Announcement - UK National Grid Service Applications Repository released The National Grid Service Applications Repository is designed to help users already familiar with specific applications to get started using grid resources. This image was produced using the AMBER or Assisted Model Building with Energy Refinement application, which is featured in the NGS repository.Image courtesy of AMBER and Matt Lee The UK National Grid Service (NGS) recently released the NGS Applications Repository, a new and easy way to access NGS computing resources and installed applications. “We would like to open up the grid to a whole new community of users,” explains Dave Meredith, the lead developer. “Researchers who want to use the software they are familiar with can now use the portal to describe, publish and submit their job, without the need for middleware commands or grid knowledge.”The Repository offers users access to the expertise of domain-experts and resource providers. No certificate or account is req

Image of the week - European Grid Initiative steps out with EGEE crowd Delegates from the EGEE ’07 conference are enjoying a packed program of sessions covering grid operations, applications, security, interoperability, middleware and more. The European Grid Initiative Design Study workshop attracted many and marked a concrete step towards realization of the EGI project.Images courtesy of Toth Csilla This week’s EGEE ’07 conference attracted more than 600 delegates and it felt like most of them attended Tuesday’s workshop on the status of the European Grid Initiative. The room was bulging before the session had even started. When Dieter Kranzlmüller of Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria, opened proceedings with an overview of the EGI Design Study (EGI_DS) project, he was speaking to an audience straining to see more.Vision for a pan-European grid infrastructureThis first EGI_DS workshop marked a very concrete step towards realization of the EGI project: an endeavor that has already garnered the

  Feature - ATLAS: the data chain works Tracks recorded in the muon chambers of the ATLAS detector can now be expressed to physicists all over the world, enabling simultaneous analysis at sites across the globe. The European and U.S. sites are connected via the Enabling Grids for E-sciencE and Open Science Grid infrastructures.Image courtesy of ATLAS This month particle physics experiment ATLAS went “end-to-end” for the first time. Buried in Switzerland, 90 meters under the ground at the base of the French Jura mountains, ATLAS (A Torroidal LHC ApparatuS) is one of four high energy physics experiments attached to the Large Hadron Collider, a 27-kilometer particle accelerator nearing the final stages of completion.When the LHC is turned on, physicists worldwide will be waiting by their computers. They’ll be expecting express and non-stop delivery of massive amounts of data, streamed in a virtually seamless sequence direct to their doorstep.And this month, for the first time, ATLAS proved that this data dist

  Announcement - CNRS launches Institut des Grilles The new Institut des Grilles will federate CNRS work on production and research grid computing. Image courtesy of CNRS The French Centre National De La Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) has just announced the creation of a new Institut des Grilles (Grids Institute), which federates all CNRS actions concerning computing grids and distributed computing systems. More than 15 CNRS laboratories from four scientific departments and two national institutes are taking part in the new institute, which aims to consolidate the existing grid production infrastructures, to reinforce research in grid computing and to increase synergy between the various stakeholders.