June Feature Stories
First SAP Collaboration a Quantum Success
As the first Strategic Application Program (SAP) project draws to a close, the collaborators are pleased with their results. The SAP project "High Performance Algorithms for Scalable Spin-Qubit Circuits with Quantum Dots" materialized almost six months ago when Jean-Pierre Leburton, the project's principal investigator, met with Nahil Sobh, the SAP coordinator.
NMI-R5 Released
NMI-R5 was released May 24. New components include APST, a tool that schedules and deploys parameter sweep applications on the Computational Grid; DataCutter, a framework designed to provide support for processing of large scientific datasets in heterogeneous environments; Data Cutter STORM, services-based middleware that is designed to support data select and transfer operations on large and distributed scientific datasets; GridPort, which enables the development of portals and applications on top of underlying distributed and grid computing infrastructure to facilitate computational science; the Inca Test Harness and Reporting Framework (Inca), a generic framework for the automated testing, verification, and monitoring of functionality common to a set of Grid systems; and a new Storage Resource Broker (SRB) client. NMI Release 5 (NMI-R5) consists of contributions from a wide range of middleware developers that partner through multi-institutional NMI-funded teams at the GRIDS Center, the EDIT consortium and the Open Grid Computing Environments consortium.
News Stories for June
Next Alliance Allocation Application Deadline July 6
The next review board meeting for Alliance allocations will be held on September 8-9, 2004. The deadline for the next round of proposals is July 6. Principal investigators will be notified of their awards by September 30, 2004.
Argonne to Play Major Role in New Computing Facility
Argonne and Oak Ridge National Laboratories will collaborate in developing a new national computational science facility aimed at deploying a supercomputer capable of sustained performance of 100 trillion floating-point operations per second (teraflops) by 2007. Argonne will help develop software for two computers to be deployed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory: Red Storm, a massively parallel machine, and a Cray X-1 vector architecture parallel computer. The Cray will be upgraded to a more powerful version, the X-2, which is expected to achieve the 100-teraflops mark. In addition, Argonne will deploy and evaluate, in partnership with IBM, a five-teraflops BlueGene/L supercomputer at the laboratory's Illinois site. Researchers at Argonne 's Mathematics and Computer Science Division will evaluate the system and the software needed to support scientific applications.
Using the Globus Toolkit with Firewalls
Olle Mulmo and Von Welch discuss how to address issues arising from the use of Globus Toolkit in the presence of firewalls, including accessibility, coordination of user processes, and network address translation. Reprinted from Clusterworld on the Globus website.
Distributed Hybrid Earthquake Engineering Experiments: Experiences with a Ground-Shaking Grid Application
Published in the Proceedings of the 13th IEEE Symposium on High Performance Distributed Computing (HPDC-13), 2004, this article describes NEESgrid, a Grid-based architecture for performing novel distributed hybrid computational/physical earthquake engineering experiments. The paper discusses the requirements that underlie this extremely challenging application of Grid technologies, describes architecture and implementation, and discusses experiences with the application of this architecture within an unprecedented earthquake engineering test that coupled large-scale physical experiments in Illinois and Colorado with a computational simulation. The results point to the remarkable impacts that Grid technologies can have on the practice of engineering, and also contribute to a general understanding of how to build and deploy effective Grid applications.
CGEMS Issues Call for Curricular Materials
The Computer Graphics Educational Materials Source (CGEMS), an emerging online refereed repository for curricular materials related to computer graphics, is currently considering submissions of materials in two major categories: complete modules or self-contained teaching units, and individual lesson plans/"teaching gems." More information is available at the website.
Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center Orders Cray "Red Storm" Supercomputer
PSC has placed an order for a Cray "Red Storm" system, modeled on the 40-TeraOps (40 trillion calculations per second) machine scheduled to be put in place at Sandia National Laboratory this year. The Pittsburgh machine is expected to be delivered in third-quarter 2004.
Software Releases
Cactus 4.0 Beta 14 Released
Cactus 4.0 Beta 14 was released May 13. Changes include a more robust configuration.ccl and enhancement of the function aliasing syntax and to HTTPD security. Example thorns have also been updated. The release of Cactus 4.0 Beta 15 is expected in mid-June.
VMI 2.0 Released
VMI 2.0, a middleware communication layer that addresses the issues of availability, usability, and management in the context of large-scale SANs interconnected over wide-area grids, was released May 11. New capabilities of the 2.0 release include the ability to stripe data across heterogeneous networks, the ability to fail over from one network onto a heterogeneous network, and the ability to add data filters and other features dynamically, remotely, and even on per-connection basis.
Call for Testing: Globus Java WSRF Core 3.9.0 Development Release Available
This is a snapshot of code currently under development, not covered by same level of support and documentation as stable releases, and is not recommended for production settings. See download page and call for testing document for more details.
Conferences, Workshops, and Training Events
Grant Proposal Workshop June 21-25
Register online for the Grant Institute's Grants 101 course, to be held June 21-25 at Ohio State University. The course is designed for both the beginner looking for a thorough introduction and the intermediate looking for a refresher course that will strengthen their grant acquisition skills.
Call for Proposals (June 25) for NERSC ACTS Workshop
The Fifth Workshop on the DoE Advanced Computational Software Collection, "Enabling Technologies for High-End Computer Simulations," will be held August 24-27 at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Proposals must be submitted by June 25; notifications of acceptance will be sent July 2. See the website for workshop topics.
GRIDS Targeted Community Workshop, June 30-July 1
PIs, project leaders and technical staff of TeraGrid, NEESgrid, BIRN, VDT, LEAD, SEEK, GEON, NPACKAGE, OGCE and other e-Science projects, should plan to attend this meeting, which will be held in Madison, WI and is intended to facilitate cross-discipline interactions involving Grid middleware, define requirements that meet needs of communities involved in e-Science projects, and define various areas of interest to targeted projects.
Register for Commodity Cluster Symposium by June 30
A symposium entitled "On the Use of Commodity Clusters for Large-Scale Scientific Applications 2004," and sponsored by the the Army Research Laboratory Major Shared Resource Center (ARL MSRC), Raytheon, and the Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC), will be held July 27-29, 2004 in Tysons Corner, VA. Early registration ends June 30.
Register for SIGGRAPH by July 2
ACM's SIGGRAPH 2004 will take place August 8-12 in Los Angeles, CA. To receive a substantial early registration discount, members must register by July 2.
Register for the Next Linux Cluster Institute by August 13
The next Linux Cluster Institute will be held September 27-October 1, 2004, at the Center for High Performance Computing at the University of New Mexico. Linux Cluster Institute workshops are intensive, hands-on sessions for computational scientists, engineers, and cluster system administrators. Those interested are advised to register early for workshops due to the limited number of available seats. Participants are encouraged to bring their own applications/problems with them for the workshop.
