“Grids and eScience” Mark Hayes Technical Director - Cambridge eScience Centre GEFD Summer School 2003

eScience - a definition “eScience is about global collaboration in key areas of science and the next generation of infrastructure that will enable it.” Dr.John Taylor, Director General of the Research Councils

In the beginning… "The collection of people, hardware, and software... will become a node in a geographically distributed computer network…. Through the network... all the large computers can communicate with one another. And through them, all the members of the community can communicate with other people, with programs, with data, or with a selected combination of those resources.” J.C.R.Licklider, “The Computer as a Communication Device” Science and Technology, April 1968 The ARPAnet in 1970

International connectivity

International connectivity

International bandwidth From “3D geographic network displays” - Cox et al, ACM Sigmod Record - December 1996

What does the Internet look like?

The World Wide Web Invented at CERN by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989 as a tool for collaboration and information sharing in the particle physics community.

Early distributed computing 1.2 million CPU years so far... Brute force attempt to crack strong encryption Protein folding

The Grid Editors: Foster & Kesselman 700 pages 22 chapters 40 authors Analogy with the electrical power grid - just plug in.

The Grid Editors: Berman, Hey, Fox 1000 pages 43 chapters 116 authors Applications, data sharing and virtual communities.

It’s not just compute cycles... An exponential growth in data from many areas of science.

The Grid in the UK Pilot projects in particle physics, astronomy, medicine, bioinformatics, environmental sciences... Contributing to international Grid software development efforts 10 regional “eScience Centres”

Some UK Grid resources Daresbury - loki - 64 proc Alpha cluster Manchester - green proc SGI Origin 3800 Imperial - saturn - large SMP Sun Southampton - iridis proc.Intel Linux cluster Rutherford Appleton Lab - hrothgar - 32 proc Intel Linux Cambridge - herschel - 32 proc Intel Linux cluster... coming soon: 4x >64 CPU JISC clusters, HPC(X)

Applications on the UK Grid Ion diffusion through radiation damaged crystal structures (Mark Calleja, Earth Sciences, Cambridge) Monte Carlo simulation lots of independent runs small input & output more CPU -> higher temperatures, better stats access to ~100 CPUs on the UK Grid Condor-G client tool for farming out jobs

Applications on the UK Grid Reality Grid (Stephen Pickles, Robin Pinning - Manchester) Fluid dynamics of complex mixtures, e.g oil, water and solid particles (mud) Used CPU at London, Cambridge Remote visualisation using SGI Onyx in Manchester (from a laptop in Sheffield) Computational steering

Applications on the UK Grid GENIE - Grid Enabled Integrated Earth system model (Steven Newhouse, Murtaza Gulamali - Imperial) Ocean-atmosphere modelling How does moisture transport from the atmosphere effect ocean circulation? ~1000 independent 4000year runs (3 days real time!) on ~200 CPUs Flocked condor pools at London & Southampton Coupled modelling

Questions?