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DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION
FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY /
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Special Features:
INT'L TEAM GETS BIG RESULTS WITH
TeraGrid
In a three-month project centered on the Supercomputing 2003 conference
last
November in Phoenix, a Boston-U.K. team of scientists linked more than 6,000
processors and 17 teraflops of computing at six different facilities on two
continents. Their Grid-based effort has led to significant new scientific
understanding and represents probably the most impressive example to date, say
scientists, of how Grid computing gives a powerful boost to large-scale
scientific computation.
"The Grid creates a tremendously powerful environment," said University of
London chemist Peter Coveney, who led the U.K. side of the TeraGyroid Project.
With a sophisticated approach called "computational steering" the researchers
launched multiple simulations from which they chose a set of dynamics on which
to focus at large-scale. As a result, said Coveney, "our productivity
skyrocketed."
"Because of the Grid," said Bruce Boghosian of Tufts University, "we've
been
able to address a large-scale problem of genuine scientific interest and
dramatically reduce the time to insight. We've made progress in three months
that would have taken more than a year by conventional methods." Boghosian, a
professor of mathematics, leads the stateside contingent of the TeraGyroid
effort.
For the November SC2003 effort, prepared in advance by two months of
computing
in the United Kingdom and at TeraGrid sites, the researchers linked the
National Science Foundation's TeraGrid with the U.K. E-Science Grid via
dedicated trans-Atlantic fiber. They tied together resources at Daresbury Lab,
United Kingdom, (IBM Power 4 Regatta) and Manchester, United Kingdom, (SGI
Origin 3800 & SGI Altix) and at four TeraGrid sites: Pittsburgh Supercomputing
Center (HP-Compaq TCS-1), the National Center for Supercomputing Applications
(Itanium 2), San Diego Supercomputing Center (Itanium 2) and Argonne National
Laboratory (visualization cluster).
Using the NSF Terascale Computing System (LeMieux) at Pittsburgh, they
carried
out the largest simulation of its type (lattice-Boltzmann method) to date,
with resolution of more than a billion lattice-sites. Their work focused on
complex materials shapes, known as gyroids, with properties in between liquid
and solid.
With follow-up computations into February 2004, they produced more than
three
terabytes of useful data. To gather and collate this quantity of data from
multiple sites was a large task in itself, and the team is still analyzing
results, which point to new understanding of the liquid-crystalline materials
they study, with several papers in preparation.
At SC2003, the TeraGyroid Project was recognized as the "Most Innovative
Data-Intensive Application." More recently, the project received a 2004 ISC
Award, the major supercomputing award in Europe, for "Integrated Data and
Information Management."
"The ability to explore over a billion lattice sites could be accomplished
only by sharing the processing horsepower at the U.K. and U.S. sites over a
transatlantic grid," said Jose Munoz, senior scientist at NSF's Division of
Shared Cyberinfrastructure. "The goal of the TeraGrid is to enable exactly
this sort of new science and the related scientific breakthroughs, and we
expect many innovative experiments to follow in the footsteps of the
TeraGyroid effort."
"The TeraGyroid Project exemplifies what's possible with Grid
technologies,"
said Rick Stevens of Argonne National Laboratory and the University of
Chicago, TeraGrid project director. "It's a major success for the NSF vision
of integrated national cyberinfrastructure, and it helps us to appreciate that
-- just as the economy is global -- with the Grid, science too has become
global."
Boghosian and Coveney emphasize that the vision of Grid computing --
"transparent" access to resources without regard to location -- is not yet
reality, and it was a large task to coordinate this ambitious project, which
involved about 30 organizations and more than 100 individuals.
The TeraGrid is a multi-year effort to build and deploy the world's
largest,
most comprehensive distributed infrastructure for open scientific research.
The TeraGrid also offers storage, visualization, database, and data collection
capabilities. Hardware at multiple sites across the country is networked
through a 40-gigabit per second backplane-the fastest research network on the
planet.
The TeraGrid sites are: Argonne National Laboratory; the Center for
Advanced
Computing Research (CACR) at the California Institute of Technology; Indiana
University; the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the
University of Illinois; Oak Ridge National Laboratory; the Pittsburgh
Supercomputing Center (PSC); Purdue University; the San Diego Supercomputer
Center (SDSC) at the University of California-San Diego; and the Texas
Advanced Computing Center at The University of Texas.
More information, including graphics:
www.psc.edu/science/2004/teragyroid
A report, "The TeraGyroid Experiment," by participating scientists:
www.zib.de/ggf/apps/meetings/ggf10/TeraGyroid-Case-Study-GGF10-final.pdf
The TeraGyroid Project was funded in part by the UK's EPSRC and used
capabilities developed in the RealityGrid project: www.realitygrid.org
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