Grids Opening the Door to Open Science

Grid computing and open science both got a financial shot-in-the-arm with the announcement that the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Department of Energy's Office of Science are funding a five-year, $30 million program to operate and expand upon the two-year-old national Open Science Grid.

This project taps into the power of thousands of processors distributed across more than 30 participating universities and federal research labs. Among the universities participating are the universities of Wisconsin-Madison, Boston, Columbia, Cornell, and Indiana ; the California Institute of Technology; and the universities of Florida, California-San Diego, Chicago, Iowa, and North Carolina. Federal research centers include Fermi, Brookhaven National Lab, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, and the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center.

Each member of the OSG consortium is supplying computing power to the shared facility, which runs the gamut from small clusters of computers to thousands of networked processors. Some of the OSG sites offer petabytes (1000 terabytes) of data storage. That level of power is especially useful for large-scale science in particle physics and genomics.

According to UW-Madison computer scientist Miron Livny, a principal investigator of the project, "Grid computing ... has the capability to revolutionize research, but the tools remain challenging for many scientists. Projects such as OSG are working to lower the barrier to individual scientists using advanced computing."

"Grid computing ... has the capability to revolutionize research, but the tools remain challenging for many scientists," Livny goes on to say. "Projects such as OSG are working to lower the barrier to individual scientists using advanced computing."

Livny has participated in two major distributed computing projects at UW-Madison. The Condor Project, as described in this Dr. Dobb's Journal article, uses a network of more than 3500 processors on the UW-Madison campus to support high-throughput computing challenges, while the Grid Laboratory of Wisconsin(GLOW) is a campus-wide facility deployed to serve the Wisconsin scientific community, providing more than 30,000 computer hours a day to researchers.

Posted by Jon Erickson at 09:31 AM  Permalink