1. 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 (2004-2005) VisualGrid Project (2005-2006) Bioinformatic Accelerator (2005-)

2. 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 http://www.cs.uncc.edu/~abw/ ITCS4010F05

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

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

5. 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.

6. 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

7. 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

8. 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

9. As with SURAGrid, using OGCE2/gridsphere Login page

10. Usual portlets:

11. Proxy Manager

12. Job Submission

13. 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.

14. 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!!!!!!!!!!