Presentation of the DEISA project

DEISA perspectives

Workshop on Biomedical informatics, Brussels, March 18-19 2004

Victor Alessandrini

www.deisa.org

Institut du Développement et des Ressources en Informatique Scientifique

Distributed European Infrastructure for Supercomputing Applications - Consortium

IDRIS – CNRS, France (coordinator)

FZJ – Juelich, Germany

RZG – Garching, Max Planck Society, Germany

CINECA, Italy

EPCC (HPCx project), Edimburgh, UK

CSC, Helsinki, Finland

SARA, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

ECMWF (european organization), Reading, UK


DEISA : mission statement

To contribute to a significant enhancement of capacities and capabilities of HPC in Europe, by the integration of leading national supercomputing infrastructures.

To deploy and operate a distributed multi-terascale European computing platform, based on a very strong coupling of existing national supercomputers. DEISA plans to operate as a virtual European supercomputing centre.

To contribute to the deployment of an extended, heterogeneous Grid computing environment for HPC in Europe, needed to interface the DEISA research infrastructures with the rest of the European IT infrastructures.


DEISA management (operation as a virtual Europeansupercomputing centre)


Artist’s view of the facility

The DEISA super-cluster (the “core” project)

Site A Site B

Site C Site D

Dedicated network interconnect (reserved bandwidth)

National computingfacility

Extended Gridservices


DEISA and Grid technologies

Large scale integration of IT systems is, for DEISA, primarily an strategic issue

DEISA is technology neutral. Technology choices follow from their capability to adapt to a pre-established operational model, and to provide real services to end users.

Three criteria for technology choices:

● The necessity of disposing as soon as possible of a stable and reliable European production platform (the “core” platform). Grid technologies work in the background through global file systems and multi-cluster batch managers.

● The necessity interfacing this platform with other systems in Europe (the “outer” Grid environment). Deployment of traditional Grid environments, like the Globus Toolkit or Unicore.

● The preparation of their future evolution by the integration of new Grid technologies as they reach maturity (a specific JRA activity).


The first generation “core” infrastructure(operational early 2005)

125 cabinets like the ones shown above (IBM 690, 690+, 655+)4000 processors (5 – 8 Gigaflops per processor)About 10 Terabytes memoryA lot of useful teraflops.Inclusion of huge Linux and vector systems planned for 2005.


Global File Systems

Global file system

Sophisticated software environment,necessary to provide single systemimage if a clustered computingplatform.

They provide global data management.Data in the GFS is “symmetric” withrespect to all computing nodes.

GFS encapsulate sophisticated distributed computing and Grid technologies.Applications do not need to be modified to benefit from GFS services.

Grid technologies are working in the background, and they are not directlyseen by end users.


The DEISA integration concept (core infrastructure)

Global distributed GPFS file systemwith continental scope.Global resource pool is dynamic: nodescan enter and leave the pool withoutdisrupting the national services..

Site A Site B

Site C Site D

Network interconnect(reserved bandwidth)


The DEISA operational model

Global management of an “ European resource pool”, that will provide:

● An integrated supercomputing environment for trans-national collaborations, providing global data management through global file systems.

● No need to grid enable huge applications (unless they are grid enabled by design). Applications can benefit from important computational resources being run “as such”.

● Implementation of job migration across sites (transparent to end users) as a way of releasing significant resources in one particular site for demanding DEISA applications. We are load balancing computational throughput at a European scale.

● Support of distributed applications (grid enabled by design).

With this operational model, the European super-cluster is not very different from a huge local supercomputing cluster (which will be partitioned anyhow because of fault tolerance).


Scientific perspectives

We (the DEISA partners) have decades of experience in the production of leading edge computational science.

We dispose of competent staff for user support, system integration,…

Integration of human competences is as important as the integration of computing resources.

We have developed, over the years, very efficient interfaces with the different scientific communities (climat modeling, quantum chemistry, material sciences, …). Each one has its own specific requirements.

We are eager to develop special interfaces with the Bio-Medical community, in those areas in which we can provide added value to their research.

DEISA includes a Life Science Joint Research Activity.


Prospective services (first guess)

Using the global distributed file systems of the “core” facility to deploy shared data repositories.

Deploying distributed heterogeneous file systems with external organizations to dispose of “enhanced privacy” access to dada.

Fine tunning new generation BMI applications to clusters of large, high physical memory, SMP clusters. Our “intelligent” operating systems can use large memory address space to create memory mapped file systems and dramatically reduce input/output overhead in data driven applications.

Running very demanding applications in what concerns processing power and memory size.

Running very demanding applications in what concerns execution times (hundreds of hours). This requires process migration and checkpoint-restart facilities for QoS (which are present in our platforms).

Interfacing with other organizations, which may act as “portals” to the DEISA environment.

Deploying high level Web-like services that will allow computational monitoring and steering of complex applications, hiding the DEISA environment from end users.


Portals, Web-like services

The DEISA super-cluster (the “core” project)

Site A Site B

Site C IDRIS

InfoBioGen

Users are not IDRIS-DEISA aware

Demanding applicationsare rerouted to IDRIS

ASP services. Users connect to an application,not to the computing environment.

Provides computational monitoring andsteering services.

Technology already available for the DEISA users.


ASP services: three tier architecture (for computationalmonitoring and steering).

Gateway: bridgebetween the Internetclients and the legacyenvironment. Handlesall AA services.

Clients connect to J2EEapplication running on thegateway.

FirewallInternet Intranet

Back end server: runshigh performance “legacy” application


Extended, heterogeneous data management

Site A Site B

Site CSite D

Other organizations disposing ofconfidential data sets.

Global distributed file system with: - Single sign on - Intrinsic security model - Access control - Internal cryptographic mechanisms - Operating across firewalls - Web and NFS access to data.(candidate: AVAKI DataGrid)


Conclusion

DEISA is focused on European computational science.

Strong integration of national supercomputing infrastructures should be pursued, as the only way forward (today) for matching the US and Japanese efforts in this area.

The DEISA consortium is committed to enhance the production capabilities of HPC in Europe, and to search for a very large user consensus and for a high impact in everyday creation of scientific results. This is its only measure of success.

We are eager to work with the BMI community to identify the areas in which we can provide leading edge services adapted to their needs.

Documents

Presentation of the DEISA project