Special Features:
NCSA, UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA DEVELOPING DEPENDABLE GRIDS
The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and the University
of Virginia have received a National Science Foundation Information Technology
Research grant of more than $2 million to research and develop technologies
for dependable Grid computing.
Grid computing is already widely used to facilitate advances in science and
engineering, but its use in consumer services and critical infrastructure
applications has so far been limited because Grids have not achieved the
required dependability.
Grids face threats from equipment or software failures, physical damage from
natural disasters, and cyberattacks. Engineering a system to withstand all
such attacks would be prohibitively expensive and complex. Instead, the
NCSA/Virginia team aims to develop a survivable system, one that provides one
or more alternate services in the event an attack or failure disrupts the
primary service.
As they work toward that goal, the team will test its innovative techniques
and technologies using a Grid Dependability and Survivability Architecture.
This architecture will be continuously monitored by a series of instruments,
providing a wealth of data to assess the results of different approaches.
NCSA senior researcher Jim Basney will lead the center's participation in the
project, including establishing a "Grid dependability lab" for evaluating
software as well as developing dependable software components based on the
Globus Toolkit.
Testing and experimentation will span the test labs at Virginia and NCSA, and
the project will develop software based on multiple Grid software toolkits,
with Virginia focusing on WSRF.NET (developed at Virginia) and NCSA focusing
on the Globus Toolkit.
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