Content about TeraGrid

Feature - In this case, it is brain surgery New, grid-based imaging technology has the potential to change neurosurgery. Image courtesy of Phil Beard, sxc.hu To the edge Branching through your brain, a complex system of arteries, capillaries and veins feeds the organ that allows you to think. While the shape of each person’s network is similar in the basics to everyone else’s, it is unique in the particulars. This presents a challenge for neurosurgeons. A new type of three-dimensional imaging and processing tool, based upon grid-computing, stands ready to change the way doctors perform neurosurgery. Called HemeLB, it won the Transformational Science Challenge Award at TeraGrid ’08 in Las Vegas, US, last month. The current technology neurologists use allows for a patient’s vasculature to mapped by the processing of MRI scans. These scans, created with magnetic resonance imaging, use magnetic fields and radio waves to create pictures of bodily tissues. Typically these are two-dimensional images:

Feature - GridFTP moves your data and your news Cluster-to-cluster data movement with GridFTP using up to 64 nodes on each end of TeraGrid’s 30 Gbit/s wide area network between Urbana, IL and San Diego, CA.Images courtesy of Raj Kettimuthu (plot) and Corky and Holly Siegel (duck). GridFTP, a data transfer protocol optimized for high-bandwidth wide-area networks, handles an average of more than 2.5 million data transfers a day.The Large Hadron Collider, the Southern California Earthquake Center, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory, the European Space Agency, the Disaster Recovery Center in Japan and even the British Broadcasting Corporation use it. Based on the old workhorse FTP, GridFTP supports reliable and restartable data transfers and provides extensions for high-performance operation and security. It is a specification (meaning anyone can write code to implement it) for which standards are defined within the Open Grid Forum. Globus Allianc

Feature - Optical network key to next-generation e-research Larry Smarr at TeraGrid 2008. Image courtesy of Shandra Williams, Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center. At the TeraGrid '08 conference, UC San Diego’s Larry Smarr urges university campuses to remove network bottlenecks to supercomputer users.“All the pieces are in place for a revolution in the usability of remote high-performance computers to advance science across many disciplines,” says Larry Smarr, director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2). Imagine scientists all over the world analyzing a complex dataset while interacting as if they were physically in the same room—it’s coming.“The last ten years have established the state, regional, national and global optical networks needed for this revolution, but the bottleneck is on the user’s campus,” says Smarr. He urges campuses to invest in local ‘data freeway’ systems —switche

  Feature – AmieGold, “ton amie” in TeraGrid Image courtesy of LONI It is now easier to add a computing resource to TeraGrid. Steven Brandt, a researcher with the Louisiana State University Center for Computation and Technology, developed a tool to help bridge local and central accounting data. End users want easy access to multiple sets of resources. This is only possible when account and allocation data from the sites are synchronized and uploaded to a central manager. AMIE, a tool that provides software and protocols for distributing account and allocation data, serves this function for TeraGrid.  Resource providers must install accounting systems locally, and integrate them to work with AMIE, not always a straightforward operation. The lucky TeraGrid resource providers that use the Gold Allocation Manager just got a break. "AmieGold provides a bridge between AMIE and Gold. TeraGrid sites can install both programs simultaneously and add their systems to the TeraGrid quickly and easily,&

  Link of the week - Old friends and new: iSGTW, GridCafé, GridTalk and more The GridTalk project harnesses the successes of existing grid communication projects International Science Grid This Week and GridCafé, creating a central hub for European grid communications. GridTalk will also tackle new missions dedicated to deciphering grid policy and showcasing the human face of grid computing.Images courtesy of GridTalk A new editorial team...A big welcome to Dan Drollette and Anne Heavey, who will be producing all-new editions of iSGTW as of next week. Dan comes from a strong background in science journalism and Anne has been an iSGTW contributing editor since our launch. Both are keen to hear your grid-related news and announcements so please drop them a line anytime.A new partner and project...And welcome to EU project GridTalk. Co-funded by the European Commission, GridTalk was launched last week and aims to create a unified and cohesive approach to European grid communications. The projec

Announcement - TeraGrid ‘08 Student Competitions deadline extended TeraGrid ’08, to be held in Las Vegas, Nevada in the U.S., encourages high school, undergraduate and graduate students to submit to and participate in two studentcompetitions.Image courtesy of Douglas Mansell The deadline for the TeraGrid ‘08 Student Competitions, to be held as part of the TeraGrid ‘08 conference, has been extended to 28 April 2008.In addition to paper presentations, tutorials, and demonstrations, the third annual TeraGrid conference, to be held 9-13 June in Las Vegas, U.S., will include two competitions for students: “The Impact of Cyberinfrastructure on Your World” and “TeraGrid Student Research” competitions. The student competitions are intended to provide a venue for students to share scholarly work, even in its early stages, as a visual display,” said Diglio Simoni, HPC scientist with RTI International and co-chair of the TG08 Student Competition. “The competitions provide opportun

Announcement - Virtual workshop available for TeraGrid’s Ranger The 504 teraflop Ranger is pictured here with Principal Investigator Jay Boisseau and Co-Principal Investigators Karl Schulz and Tommy Minyard. Read more about Ranger in iSGTW. Image courtesy of Texas Advanced Computing Center Online training for users of Ranger, the 504 teraflop supercomputer recently installed as part of the TeraGrid, is now available.“The Ranger Virtual Workshop is open to everyone, but there are advantages to being a TeraGrid user,” said Susan Mehringer, assistant director at the Cornell Center for Advanced Computing. “While the workshop is open to the general scientific community, TeraGrid users will receive special benefits such as consulting and support.” “The Ranger Virtual Workshop is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week as an alternative to ‘live’ Ranger classroom workshops,” Mehringer explained. “It’s ideal for users who need immediate information, who like to learn a

Image of the week - Stretching the polar vortex A rendering of the Polar Vortex, exaggerated 200 times along its vertical axis to better show its structure. This is the view when looking down from directly above the North Pole.Image produced using VAPOR The Stratospheric Polar Night Vortex is a pancake-thin region—only a few tens of kilometers thick—that can extend over much of the Northern Hemisphere.Once or twice each year, in the polar wintertime stratosphere, the polar vortex is torn apart, destroyed by an exponential increase in large-scale movements in the atmosphere, called Rossby waves.The polar vortex has recently attracted increased interest: its formation appears to be linked with the development of the wintertime ozone “hole”. Among the interested parties is a team of scientists from Sandia National Lab. They've developed a simulation to improve understanding of the polar vortex and its influence on ozone depletion, and are using an open source analysis and visualization package called VA

  Feature - Powering discoveries: Ranger set to fuel new era of scientific discovery The 504 teraflop Ranger is pictured here with Principal Investigator Jay Boisseau and Co-Principal Investigators Karl Schulz and Tommy Minyard.Image courtesy of TACC Researchers now have access to an unprecedented tool for extending knowledge: Ranger—the most powerful computing system in the world for open scientific research—entered full production on 4 February at the Texas Advanced Computing Center at the University of Texas at Austin, U.S. Ranger’s deployment marks the beginning of the Petascale Era—where systems will approach a thousand trillion floating point operations a second—and will greatly enhance the computing capacity of the TeraGrid, becoming the largest HPC computing resource on the U.S-wide high performance computing grid. Ranger will offer more computer cycles for calculations than all other TeraGrid HPC systems combined.“Ranger is an incredible asset for the University of Texas at Austin,

  Technology - Sustainable multi-scale simulations using Grid Remote Procedure Call The potential of GridRPC has been most recently demonstrated at SC07 in October 2007, where it was used in a 60-hour simulation distributed across 1129 TeraGrid and AIST processors on the Trans-Pacific Grid infrastructure. Image courtesy of AIST Scientific grid environments often rely on compute resources of varying capacity—scattered across multifarious locations—to process problems of miscellaneous size. So how can you write an application program that allows you to make effective use of such distributed computing resources, especially over months or even years? One way is to ensure your programming model is flexible, scalable and fault-tolerant. Your application must be able to request additional computing resources on-the-fly and according to availability; effectively manage a large number of parallel activities; and automatically recover from cluster node or interconnection failures. A solution that meets these cr

Image of the week - Journey to the center of the Sun Simulations of the action occuring on our Sun shows downflows: plumes of cooler gas that sink away from the surface of the Sun. Image produced using VAPOR Like many 2000 yotta-ton balls of hot gas, the Sun isn’t exactly 100 percent stable. In fact, its outer third is constantly on the move, a churning jumble of convective motion, driven by huge heat production in its interior and heat loss from its outer regions. And just as hot gas rises, cool gas sinks, resulting in the formation of downflow plumes: currents of cooler gas that move towards the solar interior.  These plumes play a crucial role in the dynamics of the convective flows occurring all over the solar surface.Very high resolution computer simulations suggest that these plumes interact to form larger convective scales, and that the cool gas sinks all the way to the base of the highly stratified solar convection zone. Their coherency suggests such downflows play a key role in the transport of heat, momentum and

Image of the week - In the beginning The filamentary structure in this simulation in a cube covering 1.5 billion light years per side is also seen in real life observations such as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. A particularly massive galaxy cluster, with a mass 2 quadrillion times that of the Sun can be seen in the center. Image courtesy of Matt Hall, NCSAAstronomers can “time travel” back into the universe’s early history using a number of “red shift” surveys that record objects in sections of the sky that are ever farther away—and therefore older, since their light travels billions of years to reach the Earth.To help understand these observations, UC San Diego cosmologist Michael Norman and collaborators are using TeraGrid to crunch a simulation that uses the ENZO cosmology code, a code that can simulate the universe from first principles, starting near the Big Bang. In work submitted to the Astrophysical Journal, the researchers have conducted the most detailed simulations ever of a regio