SCI: Teragrid Resource Partners

Mpc Corporation, Pittsburgh PA

Investigators

Abstract

The Extensible Terascale Facility (ETF) is the next stage in the evolution of NSF large-scale cyberinfrastructure for enabling high-end computational research. The ETF enables researchers to address the most challenging computational problems by utilizing the integrated resources, data collections, instruments and visualization capabilities of nine resource partners. On October 1, 2004, the ETF concluded a three-year construction effort to create this distributed environment called the TeraGrid (TG) and we are now entering the production operations phase. The TeraGrid resource partners include: the University of Chicago/Argonne National Laboratory, the San Diego Supercomputer Center at UCSD, the Texas Advanced Computing Center at UT-Austin, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at UIUC, Indiana University, Purdue University, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center. A separate proposal was submitted to NSF on October 19, 2004 for the TeraGrid Grid Infrastructure Group (GIG). Under the direction of Charlie Catlett at UC/ANL, in general, the GIG will be responsible for coordination of development activities for the TeraGrid with subcontracts to the partner sites. The resource partners (RP) will each have independent cooperative agreements with NSF, but will work closely with the GIG to implement the vision of the TeraGrid. This proposal outlines the plan at PSC to participate as a resource partner in the TeraGrid team to provide the expanding user community with ongoing access to this computational science facility. This proposal covers the period November 1, 2004 through October 31, 2009. The TeraGrid is one of the first large-scale grids to fully integrate grid capabilities with the policies and procedures of both autonomous open national computing centers and universities. As we move from construction to operation, the TeraGrid resource partners will work with users to ensure that TeraGrid is delivering the promise of convenient, reliable, persistent capabilities, and to promote a set of user priorities that include new Grid services such as co-scheduling, meta scheduling, parameter search tools and advances in data management and handling, and to implement and support a variety of tools and capabilities for science gateways. The PSC is dedicated to the TG goal of promoting breakthrough science by U.S. researchers through the use of advanced IT capabilities. Our highly skilled staff will continue to make substantial contributions to TG in many areas of long-standing PSC excellence including user support, systems, networking, security and dissemination and with particular emphasis on the creation of a leadership class computing capability, within the NSF TG program, to implement the NSF HPC+X. strategy. Our strong, longstanding and ongoing relationships with many of the best computational scientists in the country are an integral part of our approaches both to provide service and to improve that service. We support their scientific endeavors by enhancing their applications to exploit very large parallel computing resources and by deploying and operating the best available of these resources to maximize they're scientific Output We focus on the most demanding applications. For the past six months, more than half of the TCS processor hours delivered was for jobs using at least 1,024 processors. For the month of September, 30% of the work used at least 2,048 processors. Over the past year fifty-one PIs ran jobs which required at least 1,024 processors. These impressive results are achieved through our intense focus on the user requirements for high-end computing. This has many aspects including user and applications support staff tightly associated with the research groups, flexible and responsive scheduling and carefully considered systems design. This focus has served the community well and will be applied to the expanding TG efforts. PSC has been selected to install, evaluate and operate a new prototype system, which has the potential to become a Leadership Class resource for the NSF program. We are confident that our continued concentration and emphasis on high-end computing will bring success to this endeavor. We eagerly anticipate the opportunity to advance U.S. Scientific and engineering research through our unique capabilities and contributions to the TeraGrid. This proposal covers plans for the support, further development, and tight integration of our systems into a unified resource for the support of computational science research and the integration of that resource into the TG but it also covers the further development of the TG. In addition, we describe the user support required for the growing productive use of all these resources in support of the distributed, national base of IT-dependent research in science and engineering. We cover this very broad ground starting from the local PSC level and working to the national, distributed TG level. The prescribed headings that follow may suggest that each of the activities stands on its own. In fact, PSC devotes considerable effort to integrating these efforts to be more responsive to users. At all levels, we address the existing capabilities, their continual augmentation and improvement, their assembly into an integrated whole and the efforts required to make that whole responsive to the needs of the client, the scientific and engineering research communities. Our activities are highly efficient. Our staff and budget are significantly smaller than other organizations with comparable responsibilities. In part, this is achieved by targeted development of new technology approaches rather than accepting higher-cost commercial offerings designed for enterprises with different requirements.