Transcript What’s new?
“Grids and eScience”
Mark Hayes
Technical Director - Cambridge eScience Centre
GEFD Summer School 2003
eScience - a definition
“eScience is about global collaboration in key
areas of science and the next generation of
infrastructure that will enable it.”
Dr.John Taylor, Director General of the Research Councils
In the beginning…
"The collection of people, hardware, and software...
will become a node in a geographically distributed
computer network…. Through the network... all the large
computers can communicate with one another. And through
them, all the members of the community can communicate
with other people, with programs, with data, or with a selected
combination of those resources.”
J.C.R.Licklider, “The Computer as a Communication Device”
Science and Technology, April 1968
The ARPAnet in 1970
International connectivity - 1991
International connectivity - 1997
International bandwidth
From “3D geographic network displays” - Cox et al, ACM Sigmod Record - December 1996
What does the Internet look like?
http://www.cybergeography.org/
The World Wide Web
Invented at CERN by
Tim Berners-Lee in
1989 as a tool for
collaboration and
information sharing in
the particle physics
community.
Early distributed computing
1.2 million CPU years so far...
Brute force attempt to crack strong encryption
Protein folding
The Grid - 1998
Editors: Foster & Kesselman
700 pages
22 chapters
40 authors
Analogy with the electrical
power grid - just plug in.
The Grid - 2003
Editors: Berman, Hey, Fox
1000 pages
43 chapters
116 authors
Applications, data sharing and
virtual communities.
It’s not just compute cycles...
An exponential growth in data from many areas of science.
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
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
Questions?