The UK eScience Grid and other real Grids

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The UK eScience Grid(and other real Grids)

• Mark Hayes

NIEeS Summer School 2003
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The Grid in the UK
Pilot projects in particle physics, astronomy,
medicine, bioinformatics, environmental
sciences...
Contributing to international Grid software
development efforts
10 regional eScience Centres
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Some UK Grid resources

• Daresbury - loki - 64 proc Alpha cluster
• Manchester - green - 512 proc SGI Origin 3800
• Imperial - saturn - large SMP Sun
• Southampton - iridis - 400 proc.Intel Linux
  cluster
• Rutherford Appleton Lab - hrothgar - 32 proc
  Intel Linux
• Cambridge - herschel - 32 proc Intel Linux
  cluster
• ...
• coming soon 4x gt64 CPU JISC clusters, HPC(X)

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Applications on the UK Grid
Ion diffusion through radiation damaged crystal
structures (Mark Calleja, Earth Sciences,
Cambridge)

• Monte Carlo simulation lots of independent runs
• small input output
• more CPU -gt higher temperatures, better stats
• access to 100 CPUs on the UK Grid
• Condor-G client tool for farming out jobs

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Applications on the UK Grid
GEODISE - Grid Enabled Optimisation Design
Search for Engineering (Simon Cox, Andy Keane,
Hakki Eres, Southampton)

• Genetic algorithm to find the best
• design for satellite truss beams
• Java plugins to MATLAB for remote
• job submission to the Grid
• Used CPU at Belfast, Cambridge, RAL,
• London, Oxford Southampton

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Applications on the UK Grid
Reality Grid (Stephen Pickles, Robin Pinning -
Manchester)

• Fluid dynamics of complex mixtures, e.g
• oil, water and solid particles (mud)
• Used CPU at London, Cambridge
• Remote visualisation using SGI
• Onyx in Manchester (from a laptop
• in Sheffield)
• Computational steering

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Applications on the UK Grid
GENIE - Grid Enabled Integrated Earth system
model (Steven Newhouse, Murtaza Gulamali -
Imperial)

• Ocean-atmosphere modelling
• How does moisture transport from the
• atmosphere effect ocean circulation?
• 1000 independent 4000year runs
• (3 days real time!) on 200 CPUs
• Flocked condor pools at London Southampton
• Coupled modelling

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Two years to get this far...
July 2001 - Regional eScience Centres
funded October 2001 - First meeting of the Grid
Engineering Taskforce (biweekly meetings using
Access Grid) August 2002 - Level 1 Grid
operational (simple job submission possible
between sites) April 2003 - Level 2 Grid
applications (security, monitoring,
accounting) July 2003 - Level 3 Grid
more users, more robust
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The European DataGrid

• Tiered structure Tier0CERN
• Lots of their own Grid software
• Applications particle physics,
• earth observation, bioinformatics
• http//www.eu-datagrid.org/

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NASA Information PowerGrid

• First production quality Grid
• Linking NASA academic
• supercomputing sites at 10 sites
• Applications computational fluid
• dynamics, meteorological data
• mining, Grid benchmarking
• http//www.ipg.nasa.gov/

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TeraGrid

• Linking supercomputers
• through a high-speed network
• 4x 10GBps between SDSC,
• Caltech, Argonne NCSA
• Call for proposals out for
• applications users
• http//www.teragrid.org/

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Asia-Pacific Grid

• No central source of funding
• Informal, bottom-up approach
• Lots of experiments on
• benchmarking bio apps.
• http//www.apgrid.org/

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What does it take to build a Grid?

• Resources - CPU, network, storage
• People - sysadmins, application developers, Grid
  experts
• Grid Middleware - Globus, Condor, Unicore
• Security - so you want to use my computer?
• Maintenance - ongoing monitoring, upgrades and
• co-ordination of this between multiple sites
• Applications and users!

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How you can get involved...

• NIEeS
• National eScience Centre (Edinburgh)
• http//www.nesc.ac.uk/
• NERC PhD studentships
• Your local eScience Centre
• Adopt an application!

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Questions?