UABgrid : A campus-wide distributed computational infrastructure

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UABgrid A campus-wide distributed computational
infrastructure

• University of Alabama at Birmingham
• UABgrid Architecture Team
• Jill Gemmill
• Purushotham Bangalore
• John-Paul Robinson

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Acknowledgments

• This work has been supported by
• Office of the Vice President for Information
  Technology
• Department of Computer Information Sciences,
  School of Natural Sciences and Mathematics
• Enabling Technology Laboratory, School of
  Engineering
• National Science Foundation
• ANI-0330543 NMI Enabled Open Source
  Collaboration Tools for Virtual Organizations
• NSF ANI-0123937 via SURA-2002-103 Subcontract
  UAB Middleware Testbed Program Integrated
  Directory Services, PKI, Video, and Parallel
  Computing
• NSF CNR-0420614 Computer and Information
  Sciences Grid Node Research Facility
• Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or
  recommendations expressed in this material are
  those of the author(s) and do not necessarily
  reflect the views of the National Science
  Foundation

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UAB Background

• 36 yr. old urban medical research U.
• 82 city blocks
• 13 schools ( 13 deans)
• 17,000 students 16,000 employees
• Students are 26.3 percent African American and
  60.2 percent female
• 70 research centers
• 20th in NIH funding (4th in SE)
• 433 million in research funding doubling every
  10 years
• No history of centrally supported HPC or other
  research-oriented computing services (eg
  Statistics)
• The Alabama Supercomputer Authority

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Whats a Campus Grid?

• Strategic View
• Maximize use of universitys investment in
  computational resources
• Minimize administrative effort involved in
  campus-wide resource sharing
• By leveraging investments in Identity Management,
  WebISO, Directories, and Network infrastructures
• UABgrid is a federation of resource owners who
  happen to share a common identity provider

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UABgrid Partners

• Office of VPIT Sheila Sanders, VPIT IT Academic
  Computing David L. Shealy, Jill Gemmill,
  John-Paul Robinson,
• 128 node cluster 64 node P3 cluster desktop
  condor pool 6 terabytes IBP storage
• Department of Computer and Information Sciences
  Tony Skjellum, CIS Chair Puri Bangalore, Asst.
  Prof.
• 256 processor 64 processor clusters, Viz Wall,
  Parallel Storage System
• Engineering Enabling Technology Lab Bharat Soni,
  Chair Mechanical Engineering Alan Shih, ETLab
  Director
• 256 processor and 128 processor clusters Viz
  Wall, High Speed Storage Systems

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Current UABgrid Applications

• BioInformatics
• BLAST, Gene Sequence Analysis, Structural
  Biology, Micro-Array Data Analysis, Visualization
• PDE
• Automotive Industrial, Surface Simulations,
  Optimization
• Grid and Middleware Research
• Scheduling, Load Balancing, Granular Authorization

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UABgrid Architecture Today Phase I
GigaBit
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UABgrid Phase II
Additional Grid Nodes
10 GigE
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Factors Supporting Resource Sharing

• Provost and VP Research are being inundated with
  competing school requests to purchase clusters
• Deans whove gotten clusters find themselves
  losing classroom space to equipment racks and
  facing large power and AC bills
• Clusters, large databases, schedulers, etc.
  require expensive expertise

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Grid User Management

• Grid identity comes from enterprise
  authentication system ( BlazerID)
• WebISO leveraged to provide digital certificate,
  private key and proxy certs behind the scenes
• Grid Portal and Per-System User Accounts Are
  Provisioned Automatically, saving much
  administrative effort (Phase I grid-mapfiles
  Phase II LDAP stored posix accounts GridShib)

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Grids for Mere Mortals

• For jobs run repeatedly where only the database
  or query varies, it is worthwhile to build a
  user-friendly interface and also to optimize use
  of resources
• Example BLAST (National Library of Medicine
  gene sequence matching software)

http//www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Education/BLASTinfo/in
formation3.html
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Improving the Interface GridBLAST

• Access using BlazerID and password
• Queries and Results easily uploaded downloaded
• Web UI can be hosted on any server
• Web UI can be written in any development language

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Improving Performance G-BLAST

• A native Grid Service Interface for BLAST
• G-BLAST provides automatic BLAST algorithm
  selection based on of queries, length of
  queries, size of the database used, and machines
  available
• BLAST algorithms employed multi-threaded BLAST,
  database-splitting BLAST (e.g., mpiBLAST),
  query-splitting BLAST

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G-BLAST architecture
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G-BLAST Scheduler Architecture
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UABgrid Funding and Management Today

• All equipment has been purchased with various
  grant funds
• ETLab has been designated as a campus resource
• ETLab has contracted for 50 of one IT provided
  unix administrator to manage its clusters
• Academic Computing has 2.3 employees and provides
  other support in addition to HPC
• Computer science / NSM resources are available
  to other campus computational scienctists
• Computer Science has 1 administrator for all CIS
  systems
• Each research department hires its own
  programmer(s)
• Developing sustainable funding model(s) is
  challenging

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Federated Grids

• Exploring cross-domain resource sharing scenarios
• Federated Identity experiences in SURAgrid
• Federated Attributes myVocs and GridShib

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SURAgridwww.sura.org
University of Virginia
Grid Portal
Digital Certificate Login
Resources
SURAGrid Portal
UVACA
Grid Portal
BlazerID and password
Texas Advanced Computating Center
UABgridCA
LSUCA
Grid Portal
Kerberos Login
Resources
SURAGrid CA Bridge
Louisiana State University
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a Virtual Organization
Service Center

• Use of Shibboleth in Grids provides Attribute
  based Access Control (not just identity)
• Example Faculty may be assigned higher priority
  in job queues than students
• For VOs the most important attribute is member
  of VO ABC, and VO memberships typically cross
  domains.
• myVocs offers easy, self management for VOs and
  expects web browser as primary access to
  resources
• Combined with GridShib, myVocs enables VO
  membership-based access to grid resources

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Inside myVocs
Attribute Aggregation
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Q A

• Jill Gemmill
• jgemmill_at_uab.edu
• Further Information
• http//uabgrid.uab.edu