1. Cliff Addison University of Liverpool Campus Grids Workshop October 2007 Setting the scene Cliff Addison

2. University of Liverpool Campus Grid Workshop October 2007 A Unique North-West Project: advancing Grid Technologies and Applications Top end: HPCx and CSAR Hooks to other Grid consortia: NGS, WRG Applications and industry Sensor networks and experimental facilities Technology “tuned to the needs of practicing scientists”. Pharma, meds, bio, social, env, CCPs User interfaces Desktop pools: Condor etc. Portals, client toolkits, active overlays Advanced Network technology Mid range: NW- GRID and local clusters

3. Cliff Addison University of Liverpool Campus Grid Workshop October 2007 The NW-Grid Project Aims and Partners ● Aims: – Establish, for the region, a world-class activity in the deployment and exploitation of Grid middleware – realise the capabilities of the Grid in leading edge academic, industrial and business computing applications – Leverage 100 posts plus £15M of additional investment ● Project Partners: – Daresbury Laboratory: CSED and e-Science Centre – Lancaster University: Management School, Physics, e- science and Computer Science – University of Liverpool: Physics and Computer Services – University of Manchester: Research Computing, Computer Science, Chemistry, Bio-informatics

4. Cliff Addison University of Liverpool Campus Grid Workshop October 2007 The NW-GRID Project Funding Project Funding: – North West Development Agency – £5M over 4 years commencing April 2004 – £2M capital for systems at four participating sites with initial systems in year 1 (Jan 2006) and upgrades in year 3 (Jan 2008) – £3M for staff – about 15 staff for 3 years Complemented by “Teragrid competitive” private Gbit/s link among sites.

5. Cliff Addison University of Liverpool Campus Grid Workshop October 2007 Condor Pools ● Often an excellent starting point for a Campus Grid. ● General issues for pooled systems: – Which PC’s to allocate to a pool? ● How decide when a Condor job can run? – Who can run jobs? – What executables can they run? – How is the input / output handled? – Energy issues?

6. Cliff Addison University of Liverpool Campus Grid Workshop October 2007 Other interesting topics ● Mark Calleja’s (Cambridge) ideas: – Virtualisation ● Can applications be sand-boxed in a “safe” OS? ● Do we run node images (i.e. application+OS) rather than simple applications? – Where do we go from here? ● How avoid “painting Campus Grids into a corner”? ● Where obtain future funding? ● How integrate with external grids?

7. Cliff Addison University of Liverpool Campus Grid Workshop October 2007 Ideas for today ● Most talks have a 45 minute slot – I hope there is lots of time for questions, but try to leave these to the end. ● Lunch is at 12:30 ● Tea / coffee at 15:00 to go along with the discussion. ● I’ll attempt to record questions that have been asked and bring these back into discussion at the end of the day. ● Ideas have also been raised about a follow-up “work- in” meeting to discuss practical issues – likely at Manchester in the December-January timescale, but nothing confirmed yet.