1. e-Science Centre of Excellence 1 The White Rose Grid Peter Dew Chair of the White Rose Grid Executive

2. e-Science Centre of Excellence 2 Overview About the White Rose Grid WRG activities WRG plans Concluding remarks

3. e-Science Centre of Excellence 3 About the WRG The White Rose Grid (WRG) is an association of the three research Universities - Leeds, York & Sheffield WRG works under the auspices of the White Rose University Consortium (featured as a model of collaboration and enterprise in the HEFCE White Paper) It employs complementary skill bases to support both: larger projects than can be delivered by any one University, and a broad research agenda It aims: –to strengthen e-Science research (using experience gained from e- Science projects such as DAME, or gViz) initial focus –decision support (engineering, health, social science) –scientific visualisation –to access inter-enterprise computing resources via grid portals –to assess, in collaboration with Yorkshire Forward, regional demand for Grid technology

4. e-Science Centre of Excellence 4 Commitment Senior staff White Rose Grid Executive –White Rose Martin Doxey: md21@cs.york.ac.uk –University of Leeds Peter Dew: dew@comp.leeds.ac.uk Ken Brodlie kwb@comp.leeds.ac.uk –University of York Jim Austin: jim.austin@cs.york.ac.uk –University of Sheffield Peter Fleming: p.fleming@sheffield.ac.uk IT Vendors –Esteem –Sun & Streamline WRG Project teams

5. e-Science Centre of Excellence 5 WRG systems To offer both: –local HPC services (75% resources) –the Grid infrastructure (25% resources) Each node specialises in the provision of a distinct service Purposely acquired - with over £3M investment - 4 HPC nodes (in total nearly 500 CPUs) To be extended with the additional £1.8M investment A heterogeneous facility comprising 3 clusters of Sun shared-memory systems and 2 Intel processor-based Beowulf clusters 75% 25% WRG resource allocation

6. e-Science Centre of Excellence 6 The WRG architecture General Purpose HPC node Computer Science node CFD node Engineering Application node

7. e-Science Centre of Excellence 7 WRG project teams Architecture Team Authentication, Authorisation & Accounting Team Technical Team Training Team Business Outreach Team WRG USERS Globus, MyProxy, portals stable service user management, usage account. X.509 digital certificates HPC techniques, Grid access & applications working with regional companies & universities Joint support teams across the three universities

8. e-Science Centre of Excellence 8 WRG research projects The White Rose Grid system is used to compute 3D convection in the Earth’s mantle using a numerical model. This figure shows a snapshot of the temperature field from one such calculation; depicting a cold isosurface in blue and a hot one in yellow. Courtesy of Julian P Lowman, School of Earth Science, University of Leeds.

9. e-Science Centre of Excellence 9 The GOSPEL e-Science project combines the numerical solver and the optimisation work into one Grid-enabled application run in parallel Built inside a Problem Solving Environment (PSE) in IRIS Explorer Achievements include: –largest EHL calculations undertaken with meshes of 8000x8000 leading to 64 million dense nonlinear equations Research undertaken by: M Berzins, C Goodyer, P Jimack & L Scales Funded by Shell and the e-Science Core Programme Roughness Film Thickness Grid Optimisation Software for Problems of Elastohydrodynamic Lubrication

10. e-Science Centre of Excellence 10 Visualization middleware for e-Science The gViz project, led by Prof K Brodlie, aims to provide today’s e-Scientist with visualization software that works within modern Grid environments Figure: Grid-enabled distributed IRIS Explorer

11. e-Science Centre of Excellence 11 DAME Grid Services

12. e-Science Centre of Excellence 12

13. e-Science Centre of Excellence 13 Struts-based Portal using OGSI Centralise request handling and decision points, e.g. security Avoid “cut & paste” code distribution Separate business logic from views Easier to maintain, update and extend functionality

14. e-Science Centre of Excellence 14 Dependable, secure quality service secure quality service

15. e-Science Centre of Excellence 15 Business benefits The WRG underpins a variety of e-Science projects e.g. DAME, HYDRA, gViz The WRG has engaged on a two-year outreach project (funded by YF) to assess the value of a regional Grid infrastructure. These activities include: –assessment of regional interest –development of a business plan identifying the type of services, and the role – supported by both accountants Deloitte & Touche and solicitors Hammonds –provision of a trial infrastructure for company incubators at the Innovation Centres/Science Parks of the three Universities

16. e-Science Centre of Excellence 16 WRG Evolution e-Science Grid & National Grid Service WUN Grid Companies WRG Out- reach Academic Service Infrastructure C C C Buy On-demand Services ” WRG EDG/EGEE

17. e-Science Centre of Excellence 17 Concluding remarks The WRG focus is on : –distributed diagnostics –collaborative visualisation –High Energy Physics Underpinned by –Research: dependable, secure quality service Future tasks: –increase the cross-site usage –to develop further Grid portals –to continue to work with regional companies

18. e-Science Centre of Excellence 18 References White Rose University Consortium - http://www.whiterose.ac.uk http://www.whiterose.ac.uk WRG web site - http://www.wrgrid.org.uk/http://www.wrgrid.org.uk/ DAME XTO portal – http://iri02.leeds.ac.uk:8080/damexto/damexto http://iri02.leeds.ac.uk:8080/damexto/damexto P M Dew, J G Schmidt, M Thompson, P Morris The White Rose Grid: practice and experience – in the proceedings of the All Hands conference

19. e-Science Centre of Excellence 19 Thank you for your attention