Grids and eScience

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Grids and eScience

• Mark Hayes
• Technical Director - Cambridge eScience Centre

GEFD Summer School 2003
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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
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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
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International connectivity - 1991
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International connectivity - 1997
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International bandwidth
From 3D geographic network displays - Cox et
al, ACM Sigmod Record - December 1996
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What does the Internet look like?
http//www.cybergeography.org/
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The World Wide Web
Invented at CERN by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989 as a
tool for collaboration and information sharing in
the particle physics community.
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Early distributed computing
1.2 million CPU years so far...
Brute force attempt to crack strong encryption
Protein folding
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The Grid - 1998
Editors Foster Kesselman 700 pages 22
chapters 40 authors Analogy with the
electrical power grid - just plug in.
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The Grid - 2003
Editors Berman, Hey, Fox 1000 pages 43
chapters 116 authors
Applications, data sharing and virtual
communities.
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Its not just compute cycles...
An exponential growth in data from many areas of
science.
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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
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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Questions?