TIGRE A TEXAS COLLABORATIVE GRID Phil Smith Sr. Director, TTU HPCC February 22, 2007 Copyright Philip W. Smith This work is the intellectual property of the author. Permission is granted for this material to be shared for non-commercial, educational purposes, provided that this copyright statement appears on the reproduced materials and notice is given that the copying is by permission of the author. To disseminate otherwise or to republish requires written permission from the author.

What is a Grid? Policies and procedures to enhance shared use A reason (or reasons) to collaborate Middleware (Globus, VDT, SRM, etc.) to enable work to be done Resources  Computation  Storage  Network, etc. A grid typically has these components:

HiPCAT  Formed in 1999 for its members to share expertise and computing experiences  HiPCAT has 10 University members to date  TIGRE is a project of the HiPCAT consortium Rice UT Austin TTU TAMU UH UT Arlington UTEP UTSMC BCM UTHSCSA High Performance Computing Across Texas

HiPCAT Members

TIGRE Project Texas Internet Grid for Research and Education  Created as a HiPCAT project  Primary goal is to design and deploy a grid computing infrastructure that integrates computing, storage, visualization labs, displays, sensors, and instrumentation across Texas  Primary Members:  Provides support for other schools, organizations and enterprises  TIGRE is a Grid construction project to provide a mechanism for Institutional collaborations

TIGRE Grid Internet

HiPCAT/TIGRE Objectives  To build a nationally recognized infrastructure in advanced computing and networking  To enhance collaborations among Texas Institutions of higher education and Texas industry with national and international in science and engineering projects  To enable Texas Scientists and Engineers in academia and industry to pursue leading edge research in biomedicine, energy and environment, aerospace, materials science, agriculture, and IT  To help educate a highly competitive workforce that will allow Texas to assume a leadership role in the national and global economy

LEARN Lonestar Education And Research Network  LEARN is a cooperative effort of 33 TX Institutions of higher education  Manages relationships with Internet2, National Lambda Rail, and other regional and commercial ISPs  Targeted to provide Gbit (and higher) network speeds  More information at

LEARN Topology

TIGRE and LEARN Funding TIGRE and LEARN were awarded support from the Texas Enterprise Fund  $2.5 M for TIGRE as a grid software development effort  $7.8M for LEARN networking projects are the strategies for HiPCAT efforts

TIGRE Organization  Consists of a Steering Committee and a Developers Team  Two year project plan with activities defined to meet quarterly milestones  Official start date was Dec 1, 2005  Steering Committee sets overall directions (J. Boisseau, Lee Panetta, Lenart Johnsson, Jan Odegard, Phil S.)  Development Team Activities: Weekly Telecon, visits with potential users, collection of applications and resource requirements, deploying candidate applications, software component selection, outreach, and Grid middleware support  Software stack defined and already released  Currently building a gateway:

TIGRE Application Areas Steering Committee in consultation with researchers and developers has targeted applications to be supported in the following areas:  Bioscience and Medicine  Energy Exploration  Environmental/Air Quality Modeling Developers are working to implement applications in these areas

TIGRE Resources ( Parallel Computing Resources NameInstitutionDepartmentSystemCPUs Peak GFlops Memory GBytes Disk GBytes Cosmos Texas A&M University Texas A&M Supercomputing Facility SGI Altix Eldorado University of Houston Texas Learning and Computation Center Eldorado Itanium2 Cluster Lonestar The University of Texas at Austin Texas Advanced Computing Center Dell PowerEdge Linux Cluster Minigar Texas Tech University High Performance Computing Center Dell Linux Cluster RTCRice University Computer and Information Technology Institute HP Itanium II Linux Cluster Weland Texas Tech University High Performance Computing Center AMD Athlon MP Total:

TIGRE Timeline Dec 1, 2005 Q1 Q2 Q3Q4 Q5Q6Q7Q8 –Project plan –Web site –Certificate Authority –Test bed requirements –Driving applications TIGRE portal–TIGRE Software stack –Distribution Mechanism –Demonstrate one app Client software package Customer Mgmt Sys Demo 3 applications Today Global scheduler –Freeze SW features –TIGRE service requirements –Final Software, –Documentation, –Policies and –Procedures to join TIGRE –Demonstrate –TIGRE Grid at –SC07 Y2Y2 Y1Y1 Nov 30, 2007

Successes We have ported several applications to TIGRE including: UltraScan: Using ultracentrifugation to determine size and geometry of large molecules. Researcher: Borries Demeler at UTHSCSA. ENDyne: Quantum Chemical Dynamics. Researcher: Jorge Morales, TTU Proth: Number Theory. Researcher: Chris Monico, TTU Working on MCNPX and Geant4 for cancer radiotherapy modeling. Researchers: Wayne Newhauser, MDACC and Murali Nair, JACC in collaboration with TTU researchers. Pursuing Air Quality Data transfer in collaboration with TTU, TAMU and UH and Petroleum Engineering applications with UT, TTU and Rice faculty members.

Successes (2) TIGRE has high visibility on a national and International scale PTCOG45 (Particle Therapy Cooperative Group) Oct in Houston TAGPMA (The Americas Grid project management authority) Educause SURA and SURA GRID I2 OGF 19, Chapel Hill

Merits of TIGRE Vision TIGRE has already spawned new and interdisciplinary collaborations A model for higher education resource sharing Academic-industrial-government partnerships are possible Excellent resource for collaborations within and beyond institutional collaborations

TIGRE Challenges  Hardware Fewer free cycles now than three years ago Each University has to justify placing a resource on the Grid Heterogeneity of hardware

TIGRE Challenges (2) Applications Chicken and Egg principle Not all applications are appropriate Additional coding and porting required Commercial codes (licensing) Code compatibility Large Data sets (1-2 GBytes) Export controls

TIGRE Challenges (3)  Middleware Packaging Updating Web services  Follow on funding  It is our observation that, internal (intra-university) collaborations are (sometimes) much harder to foster than external collaborations

Questions?