SURAGrid Project Meeting Washington, DC Wednesday, February 22, 2006 Barry Wilkinson Department of Computer Science UNC-Charlotte SURAGrid and Grid Computing Activities at UNC-Charlotte Grid Computing Course ( ) VisualGrid Project ( ) Bioinformatic Accelerator (2005-)

Grid Computing Course  Taught on North Carolina Research and Education televideo network that connects all 16 state campuses and also private institutions  Fall 2004: 8 sites  Fall 2005: 12 sites  Undergraduate course, some graduate students  Funded by NSF and UNC- Office of the President Course Home Page ITCS4010F05

Participating Sites, Fall 2005 Participating UNC campuses Private institutions Wake Tech. Community College Lenoir Rhyne College Elon University

Fall 2005 Course grid structure MCNCUNC-WUNC-ANCSUWCUUNC-CASU CA Backup facility, not actually used

Challenges - Technical Issues (grid computing)  Setting up the grid infrastructure – very “challenging”  Providing students with a stable distributed grid computing platform  Moving the students through a set of detailed programming assignments in the face of system and student problems. Relied heavily on faculty contacts at each site.

VisualGrid Project  Goal: Collaborative environmental visualization research using a grid computing infrastructure  Started Jan 2006 (a few weeks ago).  Involves three sites: – UNC-Charlotte – UNC-Asheville – Environment Protection Agency, Raleigh, NC (funding agency) EPA

VisualGrid Infrastructure Group  Responsible for developing grid infrastructure  Computing resources used for initial development: – Four node Dell server, coit-grid01 – coit-grid04 (dual 3.4 GHz Pentiums) – Currently divided into two grid nodes, grid01-02 and grid03-04, both with GT4 and SimpleCA.  Planned UNC-C resources to add: – University research 50-node Pentium cluster (GT4 installed) – Dept 48-node G5 cluster

Current Activities  Developing VisualGrid portal using OGCE2/Gridsphere  Customizing portlets  Users are not grid experts and know nothing about proxies, etc. All they want is an easy interface

As with SURAGrid, using OGCE2/gridsphere Login page

Usual portlets:

Proxy Manager

Job Submission

Grid-Enabling Bioinformatics Accelerator  Project to develop a grid-enabled a bio- informatics algorithm hardware accelerator  Principal Investigators: – Arun A Ravindran (EE dept) – Arindam Mukherjee (EE dept)  EE PhD student – Kushal Datta  NSF funding for hardware accelerator received.

Collaboration with SURAGrid  Integrate bioinformatics accelerator into SURAGrid – NSF proposal to fund this submitted  Integrating resources at UNC-C into SURAGrid – An action item Will be easier for us once we get further ahead with internal development – Maybe political issues  Develop and offer Grid course(s) using SURAGrid – Crosses state boundaries!! – Needs a course portal for students? – Getting it together will take a lot of work!!!!!!!!!!