The South African National Grid : Perspectives for Physics

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The South African National Grid Perspectives
for Physics
Bruce Becker, Meraka Institute Coordinator,
SAGrid
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SAGrid A dream...
to enable anyone to access the
cyberinfrastructure and software and to
provide a tool for collaboration and research.
with the right credentials, anywhere in South
Africa, entire national and, if it is the case,
international in a way that is uniform,
coherent and easy-to-use federated, flexible
and dynamic
What do we need to realise this dream ?
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In the beginning, there was an idea... research
excellence through access to HPC

• Access to HPC resources becoming an important
  factor in SA research fields, a differentiating
  factor in many areas of research, a necessity for
  scientists
• Many universities had been running and using or
  planning institutional HPC centres in order to
  enhance their research capabilities
• Questions around cooperation and coherence
  started to arise
• Some researchers asked
• How can I use these machines to collaborate with
  my colleagues at other universities or
  laboratories ?
• How can I share my data and work with my
  collaborators in a coherent way ?
• Some IT departments asked
• How can we share our resources securely and
  fairly to the benefit of the researchers we
  support ?
• How can we learn from the best-practices in
  high-performance and distributed computing ?
• A major potential was available, if only we had a
  plan to exploit it in a coherent way...

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So, What do we mean by The South African
National Grid

• Word-by-word
• The
• there is one major effort to deploy computing
  resources, in a coherent and well-managed way.
• This does not exclude smaller or less-significant
  research projects, which may be integrated
  later or inter-operate with the national
  infrastructure
• South African National
• The infrastructure is hosted and maintained
  within the borders of South Africa and the
  operations team is South African
• Expertise is locally built, exploiting
  international contacts in operations and
  middleware
• A single operations team (a Virtual Organisation)
  is responsible for the operational state of the
  entire grid.
• Grid
• This is a federation of computational resources,
  respecting the definition of a compute grid and a
  data grid
• The computing resources are and remain the
  property of the site which paid for them,
  although they are shared amongst all users
• The kind and level of resource sharing is agreed
  to on a virtual organisation basis

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Why is this happening now ?
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Evolution of Computing and Communication
Technologies 1960-2010
Figure R. Barbera, INFN (CT)
COMPUTING

HTC

P2P

PDAs
Minicomputers


PCs

Workstations

Mainframes

Grids

PC Clusters
Computing as Utility

Crays

MPPs
WS Clusters


XEROX PARC worm
e-Science
Communication
e-Business
IETF
W3C
TCP/IP
Ethernet
Mosaic
HTML
Web Services
Email
Sputnik
SocialNets
Internet Era
WWW Era
XML
ARPANET
1960
1970
1975
1980
1985
1990
1995
2000
2010
Control
Decentralised
Centralised
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Distributed memory becoming the norm