“grids and escience” mark hayes technical director - cambridge escience centre gefd summer...
TRANSCRIPT
“Grids and eScience”
Mark Hayes Technical Director - Cambridge eScience Centre
GEFD Summer School 2003
eScience - a definition
“eScience is about global collaboration in key areas of science and the next generation of infrastructure that will enable it.”
Dr.John Taylor, Director General of the Research Councils
In the beginning…
"The collection of people, hardware, and software... will become a node in a geographically distributed computer network…. Through the network... all the large computers can communicate with one another. And through them, all the members of the community can communicate with other people, with programs, with data, or with a selected combination of those resources.”
J.C.R.Licklider, “The Computer as a Communication Device”Science and Technology, April 1968
The ARPAnet in 1970
International connectivity - 1991
International connectivity - 1997
International bandwidth
From “3D geographic network displays” - Cox et al, ACM Sigmod Record - December 1996
What does the Internet look like?
http://www.cybergeography.org/
The World Wide Web
Invented at CERN by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989 as a tool for collaboration and information sharing in the particle physicscommunity.
Early distributed computing
1.2 million CPU years so far...
Brute force attempt to crack strong encryption
Protein folding
The Grid - 1998
Editors: Foster & Kesselman
700 pages22 chapters40 authors
Analogy with the electricalpower grid - just plug in.
The Grid - 2003
Editors: Berman, Hey, Fox
1000 pages43 chapters116 authors
Applications, data sharing andvirtual communities.
It’s not just compute cycles...
An exponential growth in data from many areas of science.
The Grid in the UK
Pilot projects in particle physics,astronomy, medicine, bioinformatics,environmental sciences...
Contributing to internationalGrid software development efforts
10 regional “eScience Centres”
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 >64 CPU JISC clusters, HPC(X)
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 -> higher temperatures, better stats• access to ~100 CPUs on the UK Grid• Condor-G client tool for farming out jobs
Applications on the UK Grid
Reality Grid (Stephen Pickles, Robin Pinning - Manchester)
• Fluid dynamics of complex mixtures, e.goil, water and solid particles (mud)
• Used CPU at London, Cambridge
• Remote visualisation using SGIOnyx in Manchester (from a laptop in Sheffield)
• Computational steering
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
Questions?