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DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION
FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY /
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Systems/Enterprise:
GRID2003 FEATURES UB
SUPERCOMPUTING CENTER
Grid2003, an enormous display of thousands of processors running numerous
applications internationally, included the Center for Computational Research
(CCR) as a major participant.
CCR provided 464 processors and demonstrated the Shake-and-Bake molecular
structure determination algorithm, one of the ten application demos at
Grid2003, which is held alongside the Supercomputing 2003 convention.
CCR also provided the Grid community its ACDC Grid Monitoring tool, which
measures real-time Grid status information locally and worldwide.
A computational Grid is designed so that users won't have to worry about
where
scientific and engineering computations are being performed.
Locally controlled resources are bundled together through "middleware," a
type
of software, so that a universal compute platform is formed for users,
referred to as a Grid.
Future Grids will supply, in addition to computational resources, user
access
to data, to instruments and to people.
Grid2003 advocates hoped to integrate, deploy and apply a functional Grid
across various institutions, in and outside of the U.S.
Although UB was not a founding member of the Grid2003 project, CCR was
invited
to participate due to its strengths in providing critical monitoring
capabilities, significant computational power and a world- class application.
California Institute of Technology, Argonne National Laboratory, Harvard
University, The Johns Hopkins University, the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign and the University of California at San Diego are among the
other participants.
By participating in computational Grids such as Grid2003, and making
available
its computing resources to the international community, CCR, in turn, gains
access to the resources of the other participants. For example, during the
past month, CCR has been able to run tens of thousands of computations on this
Grid.
At Grid2003, UB researchers demonstrated Shake-and-Bake, the
protein-structure
determination software package now used throughout the world, which was
developed by scientists at UB and Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute
(HWI) in Buffalo, and which was listed as one of "The Top Algorithms of the
20th Century."
There's also a $2 million National Science Foundation grant to produce a
Grid-
enabled version of Shake-and-Bake. This includes developing the requisite
"middleware" tools and incorporating data warehousing and data mining for
parameter optimization, as well as developing a Grid- based, interactive, 3D
version of a tool to display the molecular structures that are determined by a
wide variety of methods, including Shake-and-Bake.
One of the greatest challenges in developing Grids is the ability to make
all
of the computational resources, which are at distinct locations and are
administered by distinct organizations, behave as though they are a single
resource.
CCR has provided excellent monitoring tools to the rest of the Grid
community.
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