November 14, 2007
Opinion - Celebrating one year of International Science Grid This Week iSGTW celebrates one year of reporting on grid computing initiatives across the globe. In the last six months, visits to the iSGTW Web site have increased almost six-fold and are continuing to rise. Images courtesy of iSGTWThis issue, International Science Grid This Week celebrates its first anniversary. Since our launch last year, interest in grids, cyberinfrastructure and distributed computing has skyrocketed. As one indicator, visits to the iSGTW.org site have increased almost six-fold over the last six months. The number of scientists using grid computing is also increasing, as is the level of resources now available to them.In the last year, the number of jobs run on the UK’s GridPP has more than doubled to approach one million jobs during October 2007. Altogether, in the last twelve months GridPP computers have run the equivalent of 26 million normalized CPU hours.The Open Science Grid e-infrastructure is now averaging 80,000 jobs a day&md
October 31, 2007
Feature - Risk vs. return: grids reveal secrets of entrepreneurial success Anne Villamil and Stefan Krasa are using TeraGrid resources to study entrepreneurial success.Images courtesy of University of Illinois Economists have long debated entrepreneurial success: Are entrepreneurs uniquely optimistic and more willing to assume risks? Or are environmental factors—like bankruptcy laws and the availability of credit—more significant?Economics researchers Anne Villamil and Stefan Krasa of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have developed a model that considers individual differences in willingness to bear risk and optimism and that can evaluate the effect of bankruptcy rules on small firms. They applied the model to data from the Survey of Small Business Finance (SSBF). Using Teragrid computing resources at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, Krasa and Villamil were able to quickly determine if the behavioral predictions of a particular theory could be reconciled with economic data.&ldq
October 24, 2007
Feature - Ground-shaking research relies on Herculean computing Examining how and why different earthquake simulation programs produce different results is important for their validation. This shows the displacement from soil vibration in a quake simulated using Hercules (top) as compared to the same region simulated using TeraShake. (bottom). Image courtesy of Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center The basic goal of earthquake research is to know how the Earth will shake. Even from one city block to the next, the level of shaking can change dramatically due to subsurface soil and the nature of the seismic waves,” says Jacobo Bielak, professor of civil and environmental engineering at Carnegie Mellon University.Bielak and his colleague David O’Hallaron lead the Quake Project, a large collaborative research team that uses sophisticated computational methods to create realistic 3D models of earthquakes. In collaboration with the Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC), their work aims to provide information that w
October 17, 2007
Feature - Open Grid Forum maintains focus on the 2010 goal Grids are about scaling IT, and community organizations such as Open Grid Forum are essential to guiding and managing this growth process, says John Ehrig, Open Grid Forum enterprise and marketing program manager.Images courtesy of Open Grid Forum Now involving more than 300 organizations from 50 countries, the Open Grid Forum community has gathered at this week's OGF21 to continue progress towards grids standards development. Open Grid Forum Enterprise and Marketing Program Manager, John Ehrig, explains the goals and progress of this community-initiated not-for-profit organization.Driven by accelerating globalization, organizations and individuals are being challenged to work in new ways—often across departments, disciplines and large geographical areas. Technology silos that inhibit the flow of information, innovation and commerce are being broken apart and rebuilt to better serve this new business paradigm. Grid and grid-like technologies—including
October 17, 2007
Image of the week - Stellar performance Giant cell convection patterns like this are giving scientists an unprecedented view of the solar interior thanks to a new model powered using Teragrid.Image courtesy of Mark Miesch, NCAR and UCARFar beneath the Sun’s surface, scientists suspect there are churning masses of plasma up to ten times larger then Earth. These masses, known as giant cells, play a critical role in solar variability, influencing magnetic storms that take aim at Earth to affect satellites as well as power and communications systems.A new model developed by a team of scientists led by Mark Miesch of the National Center for Atmospheric Research is able to simulate the convection patterns of these giant cells, providing an unprecedented view of how the solar interior works.“It opens a window on a number of important solar processes, including the delicate balance of forces that causes the Sun’s equator to rotate faster than its poles,” says Miesch. “This is our first indication of what the c
October 3, 2007
Learn: Choose and start to use your grid
A few of the many grid projects available.Image courtesy of NorduGrid and Vicky White
Grid technology continues to improve and new grids and grid projects are appearing across the planet. From campus grids to massive international projects, opportunities to get involved with grids and e-science are growing.
But how do you get started? What jobs do the different grids support? Who can join? Will you need a computing degree to work it all out?
This article provides a quick snapshot of four very different grid infrastructures—Enabling Grids for E-sciencE, Open Science Grid, GridPP and TeraGrid—and provides an overview of what they’re doing and how you can get involved.
Enabling Grids for E-sciencE
Open Science Grid
GridPP
TeraGrid
Enabling Grids for E-SciencE
What do you do?
The Enabling Grids for E-sciencE project provides scientists and engineers from 48 countries with a seamless grid infrastructure for e-sc
September 19, 2007
iSGTW Animation of the week - Our evolving universe
Animation of the week - Our evolving universe The animation shows the universe evolving from about 200 million years after the big bang until about five billion years, approximately what it looks like today, with brightness corresponding to gas density.Image courtesy of Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center Despite their ubiquitous presence, black holes and the quasars they spawn have been absent from large-scale simulations of the universe, until now. Carnegie Mellon University theoretical cosmologist Tiziana Di Matteo and her colleagues can now include black holes in a simulation encompassing a sizeable fraction of the universe, thanks to the resources of TeraGrid.Perhaps one of the most exciting end products of this huge calculation is an animation showing how the universe evolved over 14 billion years. The simulation begins before galaxies have formed, and the early frames (each frame is about half a million years) show a virtually uniform universe, corresponding well with the picture provided by cosmic microwave background stud
September 19, 2007
iSGTW Announcement - David Moses joins PSC as executive director
Announcement - David Moses joins PSC as executive director Image courtesy of Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center David Moses, co-founder and former chief operating officer of Gaussian, Inc., has joined the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center as executive director.Moses fills the position vacated by the March retirement of Beverly Clayton, who was PSC’s executive director since its founding in 1986.Moses will manage the day-to-day internal operations of PSC, overseeing a scientific and technological staff of about 75 people.“I welcome the opportunity to be actively involved in this innovative and challenging work,” said Moses. “PSC is a leader in high-performance computing and networking and a vital resource in the Pittsburgh region and the state of Pennsylvania.”The Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center is a leading partner in TeraGrid and is a joint effort between Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh together with Westinghouse Electric Company.
September 5, 2007
iSGTW Announcement - High Performance Computing training survey
Announcement - High Performance Computing training survey Educators from around the country learn about 3-D scientific visualization at the SC06 Education Program at SC06 in Tampa. The HPC community are now gathering information to develop new HPC education and training programs.Image courtesy of TeraGrid The High Performance Computing community is initiating a study to develop education and training pathways to enable scientists and engineers to advance the pace of discovery by taking advantage of high performance computing and grids.To inform this study, they are conducting a survey in which participants are asked to evaluate the relevance of various categories of expertise to their work. Additional information about past HPC training experiences will also be collected.The study is being organized by TeraGrid with the support and involvement of many other organizations. All groups interested in HPC training and education are welcome to participate in the process. The survey is very short and should only take a few minute
September 5, 2007
iSGTW Image of the week - Solar magnetic fields
Image of the week - Solar magnetic fields A simulation of the 3D magnetohydrodynamics at play in the outer third of a star. Each “hair” represents a magnetic field line embedded in the stellar plasma flow. Near the equator, the convective flows tend to align with the axis of rotation; in higher latitudes the convection is more cyclonic. Image produced using VAPOR Complicated by wild convection occurring in the outer third of a star’s plasma, and by rotation that twists a star’s magnetic field into a spiral, stellar magnetohydrodynamics really is as complex as it sounds.Magnetohydrodynamics is the study of motion and magnetism in conducting fluids such as plasmas, liquid metals and seawater. The “hydro” bit refers to fluids, the “dynamics” bit means movement, and the “magneto” part comes into play because magnetic fields induce currents in moving conductive fluids, and are themselves amplified by the fluids’ motions.So when the moving conductive fluid you’re disc
August 29, 2007
iSGTW Feature - Joining the dots: creating interoperable grids
Feature - Joining the dots: creating interoperable grids Interoperability is now making grids bigger and more able than ever before.Images courtesy of OSG (top) and Marijke Unger (bottom)Pooling computers into grids is enabling scientific discoveries that would not otherwise be possible. Always looking to the future, grid developers are now asking: is there a compelling case for connecting these grids together?As grid usage grows and more researchers discover grid power, many predict that scientific appetite for this power will also grow. Already satisfying large appetites as individual ventures, two U.S.-based grids—Open Science Grid and TeraGrid—agree that interoperability between their infrastructures is the next step.The interoperative idealTo a scientist, grid interoperability should mean nothing beyond reliable and continuous access to highly responsive computing and data storage resources. These resources, provided by one or any number of computing grids, could ideally respond interchangeably to user requ
August 8, 2007
iSGTW Feature - Picture this: visualization as a tool for data analysis
Feature - Picture this: visualization as a tool for data analysis This is one image from a 3000-frame visualization showing air movement around Osprey rotors. It is one of visualization expert Kelly Gaither’s all-time favorites.Image courtesy of Kelly Gaither Transformers are no longer just toys from the 1980s.Bell-Boeing Ospreys are a real-life example of a transforming machine; they can begin flight as a helicopter, with rotors on top, and change mid-flight to operate like an aeroplane, with rotors in front. A few years ago, however, after two Osprey accidents, the United States government grounded the fleet. “The planes were having problems during the rotor transition,” says Kelly Gaither. “Our job was to figure out why.” Gaither is a visualization expert at the Texas Advanced Computing Center. She and her team simulated, visualized and created a 3000-frame movie to show air movement around the Osprey during transition.Where art meets science“When creating this movie, I had a chance to be jus
August 1, 2007
iSGTW Technology - GridWay: interoperability without the headache
Technology - GridWay: interoperability without the headache The GridWay metascheduler can schedule jobs across several grids, including Open Science Grid, EGEE and TeraGrid.Image courtesy of GridWay What looks and feels like your Local Resource Management system, but lets you submit jobs to multiple heterogeneous grids? Sounds like the beginning of a bad joke or pipe dream? You might need to upgrade your metascheduler.So says Tino Vazquez Blanco, a grid technology engineer working on the GridWay metascheduler project.“GridWay allows you to do much more than your local LRM system. You can of course use GridWay to submit, monitor, and control your jobs; the added bonus is that you can do this across several different grids.”GridWay is a scheduler for other schedulers, Blanco explains. “It simulates a familiar environment, so it’s as if you’re working on a local cluster, but in fact you’re working across grids formed by heterogeneous clusters. You don’t need to worry about where the cl
July 25, 2007
iSGTW Opinion - SOS for education: calling on grid people power
Opinion - SOS for education: calling on grid people power Rose presents at the TeraGrid ’07 conference, espousing the role of grid communities in education reform.Image courtesy of Marijke Unger at NCARIn the United States, educators proclaim we need to prepare our youth for life in the 21st century. Yet typical high school graduation requirements in the United States today are based on the recommendations of a group of ten men brought together in 1892 by the National Education Association.This means discussion about school reform today is basically focused on tweaking a program recommended over a century ago, for different times, and still based on an agrarian calendar. It’s time to think about a total redesign of the way we educate our citizens. Making your contributionGrid communities have been relatively silent on this issue. Why? You have a unique perspective on technology skills needed today and in the future. You understand the human resources and skills needed to maintain the high performance
July 11, 2007
iSGTW Feature - To bee, or not to bee? Bee society and the human condition
Feature - To bee or not to bee? Bee society and the human condition The honey bee’s “waggle dance” is the only symbolic language found beyond the primates. New genomic data yielded by grid-powered research could help reveal the basis for this and other social interactions.Stock image from sxc.hu The humble honey bee: pollinator, producer of honey, and potential key to unlocking the secrets of human social interaction. Why is it some bees can be queen? How can a nurse bee suddenly transform into a forager, just when foragers are needed most? And how can these furry flying insects cast light on our own human behaviors? The answers lie in the interactions of genes in the honey bee genome. And Saurabh Sinha needs grid computing to seek these answers out. “The honey bee can be a model to understand complex societies,” explains Sinha, a professor of computer science and affiliate of the University of Illinois’s Institute for Genomic Biology. “By studying the social regulation of gene ex
July 4, 2007
iSGTW Feature - Summer of learning: what's with all these schools?
Feature - Summer of learning: what’s with all these grid schools? Grid summer schools are a catalyst for the creation of long-lasting international and inter-disciplinary networks. This image was taken at the Biomed GRID School, held 14-19 May 2007, in Varenna, Italy.Image courtesy of David FergussonIt’s that time of year again: the snow melts, the skies turn blue, and grid summer schools appear across the planet. David Fergusson is something of an old hand when it comes to grid education: he has organised and attended numerous training events, workshops and summer schools; managed the NA3 Training Activity as part of EGEE; and is currently the deputy director for Training Outreach and Education at the National e-Science Centre, Edinburgh, UK, as well as the Manager of ICEAGE, a project dedicated to advanced grid education events. Fergusson found time between summer schools to chat with EGEE’s Alison McCall.Alison McCall: Why hold grid summer schools?David Fergusson: Grid summer schools bring together expe
June 27, 2007
Feature - Adaptive fault tolerance for improved reliability Image generated using cosmology modeling software Enzo. FT-Pro is designed to help programs like Enzo run for longer by adaptively selecting a best‐fit action in response to failure prediction. Image courtesy of Mike Norman at University of California, San Diego and Greg Bryan at Columbia University, New York, U.S. So there’s the good news. And then there’s the bad news. The good news is that high performance computing systems are getting bigger. And the bad news? As system size increases, Mean Time Before Failure is dramatically reduced: the number of hours you can run your application before everything grinds to a halt just keeps getting smaller. Yawei Li and Zhiling Lan of the Illinois Institute of Technology, U.S., want to change all that. They have developed an adaptive fault management scheme, called FT-Pro, which has already improved the robustness of several real-world applications run on the TeraGrid, including
June 20, 2007
iSGTW Feature - Should you have access to high end computing?
Feature - Should you have access to high end computing? TeraGrid ’07 conference: Anita Jones, champion of cyber-innovation and information technology, calls for increased accountability when making decisions about who recieves access to high-end computing resources.Image courtesy of Marijke Unger at NCARWhich would you choose? Broad access to middle-end computing resources? Or access for a select few, to the absolute cream of what computing has on offer? Anita Jones, a policy expert and leader in information technology in the United States, says the answers to these questions are vital if innovation is to continue.In her opening address at last week’s TeraGrid ’07 conference in Madison, United States, Jones challenged the TeraGrid community with the task of preserving stability at the high end of cyberinfrastructure.“You need to balance broad access with aggressive innovation at the high end,” Jones said in her address. “There is a limit to resources, and priority for access should be g
June 13, 2007
iSGTW Feature - A conversation with TeraGrid's Dane Skow
Feature - A conversation with TeraGrid’s Dane Skow “There is nothing like seeing what you’ve done result in improvement for the nation and the world. This keeps me motivated. This wonderful synergy energizes us all.” Dane Skow.Image courtesy of Danielle Venton Last week at TeraGrid '07 iSGTW sat down with director of TeraGrid's Grid Infrastructure Group, Dane Skow, to discuss the current state of TeraGrid and his hopes for its future. iSGTW: Thank you for sitting down with us, Dane. First, can you review for our readers the current state of TeraGrid’s activity? Dane Skow: Certainly. We are now comprised of nine resource providers, spread across the United States, all funded by the National Science Foundation. We now have over 280 teraflops worth of computing capability, over 30 petabytes of data storage, and over 25 different resources that we allocate through a national peer review process. The user community has continued to grow over the past year; we’ve doubled the inte
June 6, 2007
Feature - Indiana Universities Prepare for New Speed Record Indiana universities will soon be setting all new records for speed.Stock image from morguefile Many people associate Indiana with high-speed car racing. But universities in Indiana are working to build a new reputation: one for high-speed, high-throughput computing.As the world gears up for more speed records at the U.S. Formula 1 Grand Prix in Indianapolis this month, Indianan universities are gearing up to help create new records for handling data: they are part of an international collaboration preparing to manage the petabytes of data that will soon be generated by the largest physics experiment ever.The experiment has a name only a scientist could love: the CMS project, which stands for compact muon solenoid, a type of electromagnet. The CMS is currently being constructed at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. CERN is the Tier-0 site of the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid, from which all data produced by CMS will be distributed. This data will g
June 6, 2007
iSGTW Statistic of the Week - 26
Statistic of the Week - 26 Rubik's Cube was invented in the 1970s by Erno Rubik of Hungary and has more than 43 quintillion different states.Stock image from sxc.hu26: the number of moves required to solve any configuration of a Rubik’s cube. This is a new world record, announced last week, and beating the previous record by one move.Northeastern University Computer Science professor Gene Cooperman and graduate student Dan Kunkle used Teragrid and university resources to sort through 7 terabytes of data, covering 43 quintillion possible combinations. The result? A program that can solve any Rubik’s cube in around a second, and in 26 moves or less.And why?“The Rubik’s cube is a testing ground for problems of search and enumeration,” Cooperman explains. “Search and enumeration is a large research area encompassing many researchers working in different disciplines—from artificial intelligence to operations.” “The Rubik’s cube allows researchers from different disc
May 9, 2007
iSGTW Announcement - New TeraGrid Director
Announcement - TeraGrid Apppoints New DirectorDane Skow, new director of TeraGrid.Image courtesy of Katie YurkewiczDane Skow became TeraGrid’s new director on May 1. Skow had been deputy director of the TeraGrid’s Grid Infrastructure Group, a joint appointment with Argonne National Laboratory and The University of Chicago since 2005. Skow’s leadership in the grid community started during the 22 years he spent at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, first as part of the Particle Physics Data Grid. He later served on the Open Science Grid Council and Global Grid Forum Steering Committee.A profile of Dane Skow appeared in Science Grid this Week in 2005.
May 9, 2007
iSGTW Feature - Midwest Grid Workshop
Feature - Midwest Grid WorkshopMidwest prarie outside Chicago, Illinois, U.S.Stock image from sxc.huAdjacent to the skyscrapers that make up the Chicago skyline and overlooking the “Little Italy” neighborhood, about 70 participants convened at the University of Illinois at Chicago March 24 and 25 for the Midwest Grid Workshop. Organized by Open Science Grid, TeraGrid and their partners, the attendees ranged from undergraduates with a passing knowledge of grid computing to professionals who already use a grid for science applications and are interested in using it in more powerful ways. Professor Muhammad Ali of Tuskegee University in rural Alabama, United States, came to the school with three goals: to learn about grid computing in general; to bring back information for science applications at the university that could benefit from grid technology; and to find out if students in his parallel processing course could run their lab exercises on the grid, so that Tuskegee wouldn’t need to maintain a local c
March 28, 2007
Feature - Captured in Ice Sky map from the AMANDA neutrino telescope showing the 1,112 atmospheric neutrino candidates observed, plotted in coordinates of right ascension and declination. The locally produced atmospheric neutrino background detected to date is quite uniform, without strong sources. Scale on right reflects excess or deficit from mean background events. Image courtesy of Andrea Silvestri, AMANDA, UCI As scientists explore the most violent phenomena in the universe, the tiny, almost massless particles called neutrinos are valuable messengers, traveling unimpeded across the vast distances of space. “By analyzing neutrino data on the TeraGrid we’ve been able to validate a new kind of ‘telescope’ that gives a dramatic new view of the universe through the window of high-energy neutrinos,” says University of California at Irvine astrophysicist Andrea Silvestri. “This can help scientists unravel a number of longstanding mysteries about the origin and apparent surplus of the high
February 28, 2007
Link of the Week - nanoHUB.org Structure of a lipid bilayer computed by nanoGromacs, of nanoHUB.orgCourtesy of nanoHUB.org nanoHUB.org offers free online simulation tools and educational material for teaching and research in nanotechnology. Users can choose from almost 50 simulation tools, allowing them to simulate solar cells, networks of carbon nanotubes and nano-transistors, among many other structures. The tools appear to run as applets in a browser window, but they are powered by a remote HUB infrastructure. No software is installed or uploaded to a users computer. In order to run simulations, you must log in with a nanoHUB username and password. Initial testing is currently under way to enable end users to execute the most processing-intensive tools to both Open Science Grid and TeraGrid resources. In addition to online simulation tools, nanoHUB also hosts online classes and seminars on subjects including quantum transport, nanoelectronics and nanophotonics.nanoHUB is supported by the National Science Fo
