Riding the Crest:High-End Cyberinfrastructure

Experiences and Opportunities on the NSF TeraGrid

A Panel Presentation by

Laura McGinnisRadha Nandkumar

Katie Vargo Nancy Wilkins-Diehr

What is the TeraGrid?

Technology + Support = Science

TeraGrid Vision

• TeraGrid creates integrated, persistent, and pioneering computational resources that significantly improve our nation’s ability and capacity to gain new insights into our most challenging research questions and societal problems. This integrated approach to the scientific workflow includes– Access– Application Development and Execution– Data Analysis– Collaboration– Data Management

TeraGrid Objectives

• DEEP Science pushing the petascale level– Make science more productive through an integrated set

of very-high capability resources which address key challenges prioritized by users

• WIDE Impact to empower communities– Bring TeraGrid capabilities to the broad science

community by partnering with science community leaders to build “Science Gateways”

• OPEN Infrastructure and OPEN Partnerships– Provide a coordinated, general purpose, reliable set of

services and resources leveraging partnership with campuses and other high performance computing facilities

TeraGrid Technology

Data

18.8 Petabytes StorageMemory Intensive

Resources

Computation Visualization

100+ Teraflops Computation

40gigabit/second cross-country network

Technology

•Katie – add your slides here

Support

•Nancy – add your slides here

I hope you are enjoying your time in our beautiful city

A Little Bit About Me

•Currently– Area director for TeraGrid Science Gateways program– Director for consulting, documentation and training at

the San Diego Supercomputer Center

•Background– At SDSC since 1993, involved in user support and

project management during that time• Prior to that, engineering work for General Dynamics and

General Atomics in San Diego

– Many changes since 1993!– M.S. Aerospace Engineering, San Diego State, 1992– B.A. Mathematics and Philosopy, Boston College, 1984

A Little Bit About the TeraGrid

•NSF-funded program to offer high end compute, data and visualization resources to the nation’s academic researchers

•Proposal-based, researchers can use resources at no cost

•Variety of disciplines

TeraGrid PI’s By Institution as of May 2006

TeraGrid PI’s

Blue: 10 or more PI’sRed: 5-9 PI’sYellow: 2-4 PI’sGreen: 1 PI

Gateways are part of TeraGrid’s 3-pronged strategy to further science

• DEEP Science: Enabling Terascale Science– Make science more

productive through an integrated set of very-high capability resources• ASTA projects

• WIDE Impact: Empowering Communities– Bring TeraGrid capabilities to

the broad science community• Science Gateways

• OPEN Infrastructure, OPEN Partnership– Provide a coordinated,

general purpose, reliable set of services and resources• Grid interoperability working

group

Science GatewaysA new initiative for the TeraGrid

• Increasing investment by communities in their own cyberinfrastructure, but heterogeneous:

• Resources• Users – from expert to K-12• Software stacks, policies

• Science Gateways– Provide “TeraGrid Inside”

capabilities– Leverage community

investment• Three common forms:

– Web-based Portals – Application programs running

on users' machines but accessing services in TeraGrid

– Coordinated access points enabling users to move seamlessly between TeraGrid and other grids.

Workflow Composer

Gateways are growing in numbers• 10 initial projects as part of TG proposal• >20 Gateway projects today• No limit on how many gateways can use TG

resources– Prepare services and documentation so developers

can work independently

• Open Science Grid (OSG)• Special PRiority and Urgent Computing

Environment (SPRUCE)• National Virtual Observatory (NVO)• Linked Environments for Atmospheric Discovery

(LEAD)• Computational Chemistry Grid (GridChem)• Computational Science and Engineering Online

(CSE-Online)• GEON(GEOsciences Network)• Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation

(NEES)• SCEC Earthworks Project• Network for Computational Nanotechnology and

nanoHUB• GIScience Gateway (GISolve)• Biology and Biomedicine Science Gateway• Open Life Sciences Gateway• The Telescience Project• Grid Analysis Environment (GAE)• Neutron Science Instrument Gateway• TeraGrid Visualization Gateway, ANL• BIRN• Gridblast Bioinformatics Gateway• Earth Systems Grid• Astrophysical Data Repository (Cornell)

• Many others interested– SID Grid– HASTAC

What Did We Learn About Common Gateway Requirements?

•Accounting– Support for accounts with

differing capabilities– Ability to associate compute

job to a individual portal user– Scheme for portal

registration and usage tracking

– Dynamic accounts

•Security– Community account

privileges– Need to identify human

responsible for a job for incident response

– Acceptance of other grid certificates

•Web Services – Many will build on the Globus

Toolkit, but additional interfaces may be needed

– Web Service security– Interfaces to scheduling and

account management are common requirements

•Software– Interoperability of software

stacks between TeraGrid and peer grids

– Software installations for gateways across all TG sites

– Community software areas– Management (pacman, other

options)

National Virtual ObservatoryFacilitating Scientific Discovery

• Access to telescope images from around the world

• NVO provides access to combined sky surveys– Different views of the same

cosmological phenomenon can reveal new insights

• New science enabled by enhancing access to data and computing resources– Data correlation– Understanding of physical

processes– Identification of new

phenomenon• NVO is a set of tools used to

exploit the data avalanche

Linked Environments for Atmospheric Discovery

•Providing tools that are needed to make accurate predictions of tornados and hurricanes

•Meteorological data•Forecast models•Analysis and visualization tools

•Data exploration and Grid workflow

Would development of a gateway help your research?

• Think about your current bottlenecks– What would you like to explore if only you had

• Lots of disk• Lots of compute resources• Powerful analysis capabilities• A nice interface to information

• Talk to us– Biweekly telecons to get advice from others. – Potential assistance from TeraGrid staff

• www.teragrid.org– Details about current gateways– Video from June full day tutorial at TG06

• In depth presentations by LEAD, nanoHUB, RENCI, GIScience– Gateway wiki coming this fall

• Nancy Wilkins-Diehr, wilkinsn@sdsc.edu

• Thanks Mom!!

Science

•Radha – add your slides here

Contacts

•TeraGrid: www.teragrid.org•Allocation Requests

– teragrid.org/userinfo/access/dac.php– teragrid.org/userinfo/access/accounts.php

Thanks to Charlie Catlett and Scott Lathrop of Argonne National Lab for valuable input