Scientific
Applications:
TeraGrid DOMINATES NPACI
MEETING
By Merry Maisel
The announcement of DataStar was one of the highlights of the 2003 NPACI
All-
Hands Meeting held at UCSD March 19-21, as was a talk given by Peter Freeman,
associate director of the Computer and Information Science and Engineering
directorate at NSF. The talk was an important description of NSF's current
plans for the future of PACI and the long-term cyberinfrastructure
development.
But there were many other high spots, in both the plenary sessions and the
parallel working sessions. "It was really a working meeting," said NPACI/SDSC
Executive Director Richard L. Moore. "Our objectives included consolidating
and extending the achievements of NPACI into the new epoch in which we are all
working to build a national cyberinfrastructure for scientific research."
SDSC/NPACI Director Fran Berman speaks on "From PACI to
Cyberinfrastructure"
The work took many forms, ranging from an Executive Committee meeting held on
Tuesday, March 18, to the Education, Outreach, and Training colloquy held on
Friday, March 21. Some of the most important interactions took place among
NPACI participants and people from other institutions who are all working on
the $87 million NSF TeraGrid; the NPACI All-Hands Meeting was preceded by a
TeraGrid All-Hands Meeting on March 18, held at SDSC precisely to facilitate
those interactions.
A day of tutorials on Tuesday, March 18, was devoted to cyberinfrastructure
technologies (middleware and data management) and best practices (education
and outreach, security). Two days of plenary and parallel sessions continued
these themes, and the final day, Friday, March 21, featured a full day of
sessions on education and outreach and a satellite meeting on grid
portals.
"From the opening talk, I was impressed by the clarity of vision," said
Peter
Beckman of Argonne National Laboratory, who also spoke as the engineering
leader of the TeraGrid. "The NSF and NPACI are working hand in hand to join
scientific applications and key middleware software components -- and the
TeraGrid is the proving ground for that strategy."
Moore and AHM co-chairs Tinsley Oden (UT Austin) and Joel Saltz (Ohio State
University) and their program committee took care to present a broad view of
the current landscape of progress in the computer and computational sciences,
with many sessions devoted to the experiences not only of NPACI projects but
also of projects conducted at a variety of centers at the national (NASA, DOE,
NIH) and state levels.
One of the most interesting plenary presentations, given by Mark Ellisman
of
UCSD, concerned the experience of building the Biomedical Informatics Research
Network (BIRN), which unites neuroscientific project groups at 12 institutions
across the country in an effort to understand human brain disorders. The BIRN
effort is mainly supported by a grant from the NIH National Center for
Research Resources, and it represents a strategy of using neuroimaging
applications to drive the integration of technologies required for
suprainstitutional shared science endeavors. Another fascinating plenary talk,
given by Mary Wheeler of UT Austin, focused on grid computing for energy and
environmental applications, involving collaborators from UT Austin, Ohio
State, and U. Maryland, with cooperation from Rutgers and U. Chicago, who have
been developing a grid computing portal to enable simulators of subsurface
flow and geophysical conditions to interact with data, with each other, and
with a variety of visual and quantitative tools. A final session focused on
the experiences of the DOE Advanced Simulation and Computing Initiative, with
speakers from U. Utah, Sandia, and Los Alamos.
|
