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ShareNov. 18, 1997 — A prototype for future "computational grids," which will provide supercomputing power on demand, just as a power grid provides electricity, will be demonstrated in San Jose this coming week by researchers from the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute (ISI) and the Argonne National Laboratory.
The testbed grid at the SC97 conference in San Jose's McEnery Convention Center Nov. 15-21 will harness approximately 3,000 data processors in the U.S. and Europe. GUSTO (Globus Ubiquitous Supercomputing Testbed) is the latest development of the Globus system, an integrated set of software components for next-generation high-performance Internet computing.
"By providing pervasive access to supercomputing capabilities, computational grids will change the way we think about and use high-end computing," said Ian Foster of Argonne, who co-leads the Globus project with Carl Kesselman of ISI. "We're excited to take this step toward establishing a permanent computational grid facility."
"From previous experiments, we know that both the technical and organizational obstacles to creating such integrated grids are tremendous," Dr. Kesselman said. "However, the cooperation that we have received from all participants has been amazing. People are clearly ready for this next step towards widespread collaborative supercomputing."
Drs. Foster and Kesselman believe that future computational grids will place the most advanced supercomputers, data archives, virtual-reality displays, and scientific instruments at the fingertips of the nation's scientists and engineers -- regardless of where tools or people are located -- and hence enable new problem solving techniques, such as distributed supercomputing, remote visualization, and tele- immersion.
At SC97, 10 groups will use Globus software and GUSTO resources for a range of distributed supercomputing applications, including:
One novel resource incorporated in the GUSTO grid is a large pool of workstations managed by Condor, a system developed at the University of Wisconsin by Prof. Miron Livny and his colleagues to support high-throughput computing. "We're excited to be coupling Condor with Globus," said Livny. "We believe that future grids will need to support both high- performance and high-throughput computing, and this seems to be the way to do it." Among the events planned for the SC97 conference is an attempt at a world-record SF-Express run. The goal is to harness a sizable fraction of GUSTO resources to achieve a simulation involving 60,000 entities.
The GUSTO grid was developed in collaboration with the National Computational Science Alliance (Alliance) and the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (NPACI), both recipients of NSF Partnerships for Advanced Computational Infrastructure awards; as well as with staff at DOE and NASA laboratories and other research centers around the world.
The Alliance, anchored by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, helped develop essential software and incorporated its large SGI/Cray Origin2000 and Convex supercomputers into the grid. NPACI, anchored by the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California, San Diego, is also supporting the effort and providing access to computers.
Other sites participating in GUSTO include the California Institute of Technology, the Paralleldatorcentrum at Kungliga Tekniska Hogskolan in Sweden, Indiana University, the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, Los Alamos National Laboratory, NASA's Ames Research Center, the Rechenzentrum Garching der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft Garching in Germany, the Texas Center for Computational and Information Sciences at the University of Houston, the Maui High Performance Computing Center, and the Condor Project at the University of Wisconsin. GUSTO resources are connected by a variety of high- speed networks, including ESnet, vBNS, and international networks accessed via STAR TAP (www.startap.net).
Foster and Kesselman previously collaborated on I-SOFT, the middleware used for the I-WAY experiment at the Supercomputing '95 conference.
Globus research and development is supported by DARPA, DOE, and NSF, and by an equipment grant from Sun Microsystems.
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