Transcript What’s new? - University of Cambridge

The UK eScience Grid
(and other real Grids)
Mark Hayes
NIEeS Summer School 2003
The Grid in the UK
Pilot projects in particle physics,
astronomy, medicine, bioinformatics,
environmental sciences...
Contributing to international
Grid software development efforts
10 regional “eScience Centres”
Some UK Grid resources
• Daresbury - loki - 64 proc Alpha cluster
• Manchester - green - 512 proc SGI Origin 3800
• Imperial - saturn - large SMP Sun
• Southampton - iridis - 400 proc.Intel Linux cluster
• Rutherford Appleton Lab - hrothgar - 32 proc Intel Linux
• Cambridge - herschel - 32 proc Intel Linux cluster
• ...
• coming soon: 4x >64 CPU JISC clusters, HPC(X)
Applications on the UK Grid
Ion diffusion through radiation damaged crystal structures
(Mark Calleja, Earth Sciences, Cambridge)
• Monte Carlo simulation
lots of independent runs
• small input & output
• more CPU -> higher
temperatures, better stats
• access to ~100 CPUs
on the UK Grid
• Condor-G client tool
for farming out jobs
Applications on the UK Grid
GEODISE - Grid Enabled Optimisation & Design Search for Engineering
(Simon Cox, Andy Keane, Hakki Eres, Southampton)
• Genetic algorithm to find the best
design for satellite truss beams
• Java plugins to MATLAB for remote
job submission to the Grid
• Used CPU at Belfast, Cambridge, RAL,
London, Oxford & Southampton
Applications on the UK Grid
Reality Grid (Stephen Pickles, Robin Pinning - Manchester)
• Fluid dynamics of complex mixtures, e.g
oil, water and solid particles (mud)
• Used CPU at London, Cambridge
• Remote visualisation using SGI
Onyx in Manchester (from a laptop
in Sheffield)
• Computational steering
Applications on the UK Grid
GENIE - Grid Enabled Integrated Earth system model
(Steven Newhouse, Murtaza Gulamali - Imperial)
• Ocean-atmosphere modelling
• How does moisture transport from the
atmosphere effect ocean circulation?
• ~1000 independent 4000year runs
(3 days real time!) on ~200 CPUs
• Flocked condor pools at London &
Southampton
• Coupled modelling
Two years to get this far...
July 2001
-
Regional eScience Centres funded
October 2001 - First meeting of the Grid Engineering Taskforce
(biweekly meetings using Access Grid)
August 2002 - ‘Level 1’ Grid operational
(simple job submission possible between sites)
April 2003 - ‘Level 2’ Grid + applications
(security, monitoring, accounting)
July 2003
- ‘Level 3’ Grid: more users, more robust
The European DataGrid
• Tiered structure: Tier0=CERN
• Lots of their own Grid software
•Applications: particle physics,
earth observation, bioinformatics
http://www.eu-datagrid.org/
NASA Information PowerGrid
• First “production quality” Grid
• Linking NASA & academic
supercomputing sites at 10 sites
• Applications: computational fluid
dynamics, meteorological data
mining, Grid benchmarking
http://www.ipg.nasa.gov/
TeraGrid
• Linking supercomputers
through a high-speed network
• 4x 10GBps between SDSC,
Caltech, Argonne & NCSA
• Call for proposals out for
applications & users
http://www.teragrid.org/
Asia-Pacific Grid
• No central source of funding
• Informal, bottom-up approach
• Lots of experiments on
benchmarking & bio apps.
http://www.apgrid.org/
What does it take to build a Grid?
• Resources - CPU, network, storage
• People - sysadmins, application developers, Grid experts
• Grid Middleware - Globus, Condor, Unicore…
• Security - so you want to use my computer?
• Maintenance - ongoing monitoring, upgrades… and
co-ordination of this between multiple sites
• Applications and users!
How you can get involved...
• NIEeS
• National eScience Centre (Edinburgh)
http://www.nesc.ac.uk/
• NERC PhD studentships
• Your local eScience Centre
• Adopt an application!
Questions?