Grid Computing and the Role of NeSC

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Grid Computing and the Role of NeSC Prof
Richard Sinnott Technical Director National
e-Science Centre r.sinnott_at_nesc.gla.ac.uk
26th October 2006
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Purpose of Today

• To provide Stirling folk with
• Broad overview of Grids
• Flavour of different kinds of e-Research possible
• Explain the role of NeSC
• What we have done, what we are doing, and plans
  for the future
• What resources we have at our disposal
• Why?
• NeSC-III continuation grant
• Grids are successful when widely adopted
• User communities essential need to be more
  altruistic
• Avoid the me-science culture
• Im not that nice a guy, I see this as the
  possibility to tap into whole new areas of
  collaboration with Stirling University
• Aquaculture, environmental sciences,

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e-Science and the Grid
e
-
Science is about global collaboration in key
areas of science, and the next generation of
infrastructure that will enable it.
e
-
Science will change the dynamic of the
way science is undertaken.
John Taylor
Director General of Research Councils
Office of Science and Technology

• Grid is infrastructure used for e-Science
• Metaphor of Power Grid compute and data
  resources
• on demand

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Foundation for e-Science

• e-Science methodologies transforming science,
  engineering, medicine and business
• driven by exponential growth in data, compute
  demands
• enabling a whole-system approach

computers
software
Grid
sensor nets
instruments
Shared data archives
colleagues
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Data Grids for High Energy Physics
PBytes/sec
100 MBytes/sec
Offline Processor Farm 20 TIPS
There is a bunch crossing every 25 nsecs. There
are 100 triggers per second Each triggered
event is 1 MByte in size
100 MBytes/sec
Tier 0
CERN Computer Centre
622 Mbits/sec
Tier 1
FermiLab 4 TIPS
France Regional Centre
Italy Regional Centre
Germany Regional Centre
622 Mbits/sec
Tier 2
622 Mbits/sec
Institute 0.25TIPS
Institute
Institute
Institute
Physics data cache
1 MBytes/sec
Tier 4
Physicist workstations
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The e-Health Future
Tissues
Cell
Protein functions
Organs
Protein Structures
Organisms
Gene expressions
Physiology
Populations
Nucleotide structures
Cell signalling
Nucleotide sequences
Protein-protein interaction (pathways)
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Next Generation Transistor Design
3D Statistical
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UK e-Science Budget (2001-2006)
Total 213M
100M via JISC
Staff costs - Grid Resources Computers
Network funded separately
Source Science Budget 2003/4 2005/6, DTI(OST)
Slide from Steve Newhouse
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e-Science in the UK
e-Science Institute
NationalCentre fore-SocialScience
Core NGS Nodes HPCx CSAR
Grid Operations Support Centre
NERCe-ScienceCentre
National Institute for Environmentale-Science
CeSC (Cambridge)
OMII-UK
OMII-UK
OMII-UK
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NeSC Mission Statement

• To stimulate and sustain the development of
  e-Science in the UK, to contribute significantly
  to its international development and to ensure
  that its techniques are rapidly propagated to
  commerce and industry.
• To identify and support e-Science projects within
  and between institutions in Scotland, and to
  provide the appropriate technical infrastructure
  and support in order to ensure rapid uptake of
  e-Science techniques by Scottish scientists.
• To encourage the interaction and bi-directional
  flow of ideas between computing science research
  and e-Science applications
• To develop advances in scientific data curation
  and analysis and to be a primary source of top
  quality systems and repositories that enable
  management, sharing and best use of research data.

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NeSC Continuation Grant

• One of the few to be offered continued funding
• Runs from August 2006 end July 2008
• PI is Prof. Peter Clarke
• However - limited resources
• 0.25 FTE Prof. R. Sinnott - Technical Director
• 0.25 FTE Dr D. Berry - Project Manager
• 0.5 FTE Susan Andrews - Web Database Developer
• 0.33 FTE Iain Coleman - technical writer/ content
  editor
• 0.5 FTE Chris Bayliss - Software Engineer
• 1 FTE event team staff
• 0.5 FTE computing staff
• 0.25 FTE administrative support staff
• Total 3.5FTE (over 2 sites)

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NeSC-3 Plans

• 1. National leadership and coordination, and
  International Representation
• National and International Activities including
  OGF and JISC e-Infrastructure
• Knowledge base for UK e-Science web site
• Plan for 6 key community events per annum
• Outreach through other events
• AHM Support
• e-Science centre directors meetings
• Host international delegations.
• home for GridNet

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NeSC-3 Plans ctd

• 2. Promote research excellence based upon
  existing and newly developing areas of strength
• Scientific Data Exploitation
• High-performance networking
• Bioinformatics
• Clinical Sciences
• Electronic Engineering
• Security
• Emergency Response Computation Dynamics
• BioMedical Image Analysis

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NeSC-3 Plans ctd

• 3. Inform/contribute to development of national
  e-Infrastructure and international standards
• Technical Development
• ETF, STF, ATF and GOSC
• Middleware OGSA-DAI/DAIT, eDIKT2
• Security expertise
• Standards such as GGF/OGF
• Infrastructure
• Scottish e-Infrastructure (more soon)
• AccessGrid
• Working closely with EUCS and GUCS

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NeSC-3 Plans ctd

• 4. E-Science outreach and uptake in the Regional
  community
• plan for 3 events per year to foster uptake of
  e-Science in the Scottish Region
• You are the first!!!!
• Next one in Aberdeen 13th December
• organise workshops and seminars at various
  Scottish institutions on a variety of application
  domains of regional interest
• fostering inter-institute projects
• SBRN, GS SFHS, GEODE, nanoCMOS,

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NeSC-3 Plans ctd

• 5. Stimulate e-Science Education
• Grid Computing module in advanced MSc at
  Department Computing Science in Glasgow
• E-Science MSc in Edinburgh
• EGEE Training Team in Edinburgh
• Involved in National Grid Service training
  courses
• Various summer schools

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Glasgow e-Science Hub

• E-Science Hub
• Externally
• Glasgow end of NeSC
• Involved in UK wide activities
• Involved in numerous projects (more later!)
• Public visibility of NeSC
• responsible for NeSC web site (www.nesc.ac.uk)
• Internally
• Focal point for e-Science research/activities at
  Glasgow
• Work closely with foundation departments
• Department of Computing Science
• Department of Physics Astronomy
• Also working with other groups including
• Bioinformatics Research Centre, Biostatistics
• Electronics and Electrical Engineering
• Clinicians, Hospitals, across Scotland,
• Arts Humanities, University Services
• NeSC GU now part of University Services!

J. Jiang
Chris Bayliss
A. Ajayi
Campbell Millar Nano CMOS PC
Mohd Noor (PhD)
Gordon Stewart
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In the beginning at Glasgow

• Consolidation of resources
• Story started with building around ScotGrid
• Providing shared Grid resource for wide
• variety of scientists inside/outside Glasgow
• HEP, CS, BRC, EEE,
• Target shares established
• Non-contributing groups encouraged

• ScotGrid Disk 15TB
• CPU 255 1GHz

• Hardware
• 59 IBM X Series 330 dual 1 GHz Pentium III with
  2GB memory
• 2 IBM X Series 340 dual 1 GHz Pentium III with
  2GB memory
• 3 IBM X Series 340 dual 1 GHz Pentium III with
  2GB memory
• and 100 1000 Mbit/s ethernet
• 1TB disk
• LTO/Ultrium Tape Library
• Cisco ethernet switches
• And then came
• IBM X Series 370 PIII Xeon with 32 x 512 MB RAM
• 5TB FastT500 disk 70 x 73.4 GB IBM FC Hot-Swap
  HDD
• eDIKT 28 IBM blades dual 2.4 GHz Xeon with 1.5GB
  memory
• eDIKT 6 IBM X Series 335 dual 2.4 GHz Xeon with
  1.5GB memory
• CDF 10 Dell PowerEdge 2650 2.4 GHz Xeon with
  1.5GB memory
• CDF 7.5TB Raid disk

• 2.81 million CPU hours completed
• Compare Sun 1 CPU/hr
• 313,500 jobs completed
• Stats on usage available to user groups

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Glasgow e-Science Infrastructure ctd

• Now includes
• Computer Services second HPC facility (128
  Opteron based)
• University SAN (50TB 25TB mirrored across
  campus)
• 850k investment
• SMP donations to NeSC Glasgow
• Access to campus wide resources
• Campus wide Condor provisionally oked
• EEE compute clusters and larger SMP machines
• others
• Scottish Bioinformatics Research Network
  equipment funds (80k)
• BBSRC REI equipment grant success (120k)
• Connection to UKLight network (up to 10Gbit/s)
• (ask Pete for more details on UK Light)
• Use of National Grid Service

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ScotGrid Infrastructure Now

• 800k of SRIF-3 funding
• Glasgow investment builds on SRIF-1/SRIF-2
  funding, ScotGrid and eDIKT projects
• Clustervision cluster now procured
• installation well advanced
• consists of 140 dual core, dual CPU Opteron
  worker nodes
• provides more than 1 million SI2K
• 100TB raw disk
• In process of becoming affiliate of the NGS
• 10 made available for NGS

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Similar Story in Edinburgh

• Created the Advanced Computing Facility
• secure site outside Edinburgh
• contains 155TB SAN and HPC servers
• initial investment 3.8M
• Further 2M SRIF-3 investment on-going for new
  compute cluster
• These investments and Glasgows laying
  foundations for Scottish Grid Service

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Scottish Grid Service

• Case is currently being formulated
• Initial proposal outline agreed by SE as
  strategically important for Scotland
• Aberdeen, Dundee, Edinburgh, Glasgow (lead),
  Heriot-Watt, Strathclyde, Stirling (Ken), St
  Andrews,
• Abertay, Highlands Islands,
• Be inclusive!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
• Offer more than Grid computing resources
• Move towards service based infrastructure
• Key application areas
• High energy physics, life sciences and
  bioinformatics, electronics, computing science,
• Arts humanities, social sciences, other things
  of relevance/importance for Scotland
• Cant support everyone, so will likely need to
  cherry-pick

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Finally

• Lots of opportunities in this space
• In the last 2 years I have personally been
  involved in 48 funding proposals (more in a
  bit!!!)
• (18 funded, 6 being reviewed, 8 in progress,
  dont mention the rest!)
• We are happy to provide training
• Offer lectures/seminars on Grids/e-Science here
  at Stirling?
• Follow up workshop here?
• Organise events through e-Science Institute
• Themes, workshops,
• What are Stirling interested in?
• Best place to learn more is NeSC web site
• Primary source of information on UK e-Science
• What projects, what is happening in what areas,