EDUCAUSE | Contributed by Organizations or Campuses; Articles, Papers, and Reports; and Grid Computing

Beyond Being There: A Blueprint for Advancing the Design, Development, and Evaluation of Virtual Organizations

ckeller — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 17:01:37 -0500

This report is based primarily on a workshop involving 42 people from academia and industry.
The goal of the workshop was to share systematic knowledge about the components, characteristics,
practices, and transformative impact of effective VOs; identify topics for future research that will
inform the ongoing design, development, and analysis of VOs for science and engineering research
and education; and create a new cross-disciplinary VO research community to conduct research across
a range of important topics. A subsequent workshop brought together more than 200 practitioners and
VO researchers to discuss how to build effective virtual organizations, and some of the material from
that workshop is represented here.

Open Science Grid: Building and Sustaining General Cyberinfrastructure Using a Collaborative Approach

ckeller — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 11:09:19 -0500

The author describes in this paper the creation and operation of the Open Science Grid (OSG [1]), a distributed shared cyberinfrastructure driven by the milestones of a diverse group of research communities. The effort is fundamentally collaborative, with domain scientists, computer scientists and technology specialists and providers from more than 70 U.S. universities, national laboratories and organizations providing resources, tools and expertise. The evolving OSG facility provides computing and storage resources for particle and nuclear physics, gravitational wave experiments, digital astronomy, molecular genomics, nanoscience and applied mathematics. The OSG consortium also partners with campus and regional grids, large projects such as TeraGrid [2], Earth System Grid [3], Enabling Grids for E–sciencE (EGEE [4]) in Europe and related efforts in South America and Asia to facilitate interoperability across national and international boundaries.

OSG’s experience broadly illustrates the breadth and scale of effort that a diverse, evolving collaboration must undertake in building and sustaining large–scale cyberinfrastructure serving multiple communities. Scalability — in resource size, number of member organizations and application diversity — remains a central concern. As a result, many interesting [5] challenges continue to emerge and their resolution requires engaged partners and creative adjustments.

Experiments with a Small Supercomputer

drupal — Wed, 18 May 2005 11:17:36 -0500

The authors find that with fail-over and load balancing software, these search clusters could become reliable enough for many services in the future.

Plugging into the Grid

drupal — Mon, 07 Mar 2005 17:12:07 -0600

"Purdue researchers are redefining how information is shared between scientists, professors, and students."

Top Researchers Ask Web Users to Join Science Grid

drupal — Thu, 18 Nov 2004 10:12:21 -0600

A team of researchers is set to unveil the latest distributed computing project, called the World Community Grid, which will use idle computer power from millions of volunteers to study such topics as genetic codes and complex weather forecasting. Like other distributed computing projects, the World Grid asks individuals to download a program to their computers. The program uses available processing power to work on small parts of very large projects. Up to 10 million users will initially be able to participate in the project; if the number of volunteers exceeds that, organizers will expand the program. Network security is a consideration that could deter some users or push some network administrators to forbid participation. Linda Sanford of IBM, one of the organizations involved in the project, said, "We are looking for the individual, not the institution, per se, to contribute. [Companies] will let their employees know when they can participate."In addition to IBM, the project is supported by the United Nations, the Mayo Clinic, Oxford University, and others.

The next big thing?

drupal — Fri, 30 Jan 2004 16:34:38 -0600

The author discusses "web services" and "grid computing" as the next big thing in computing.

China Grid Project Goes Live

drupal — Tue, 14 Oct 2003 15:50:16 -0500

Chinese education officials this week will launch a grid-computing project they say might one day cover 200,000 students at 100 universities around the country. The China Education and Research Grid, managed by the Chinese Ministry of Education, will initially include 12 universities and will be capable of 6 trillion FLOPS (floating point operations per second) by 2005. The power of the grid is expected to increase to 15 trillion FLOPS. Al Bunshaft, vice president of sales and development for grid computing for IBM, which is building the new Chinese grid computer, said it will be used for a University of Hong Kong Web-based language instruction application, video software developed by Peking University, and a suite of bioinformatics applications. The Chinese grid will not be as large as some, such as the U.S. National Science Foundation's TeraGrid, but Bunshaft said it could become the largest grid for remote learning.

Grid Computing

drupal — Thu, 20 Mar 2003 16:52:20 -0600

An Internet Society Advisory Council member briefing on grid computing.

The 2nd International Workshop on Peer-to-Peer Systems (IPTPS '03)Proceedings

drupal — Fri, 07 Mar 2003 10:18:21 -0600

The goal of this workshop is to examine peer-to-peer technologies, applications and systems, and also to identify key research issues and challenges that lie ahead. In the context of this workshop, peer-to-peer systems are characterized as being decentralized, self-organizing distributed systems, in which all or most communication is symmetric. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

-peer-to-peer applications and services
-peer-to-peer systems and infrastructures
-peer-to-peer algorithms
-security in peer-to-peer systems
-robustness in peer-to-peer systems
-anonymity and anti-censorship
-performance of peer-to-peer systems
-workload characterization for peer-to-peer systems

'Grid Computing' Is the Next Wave in High-Performance Computing

drupal — Tue, 03 Dec 2002 09:02:53 -0600

Many experts say that the next wave in computing, particularly for university and research purposes, will be grid computing. Grids are networks of computers, databases, and applications that combine to offer users huge gains in computational speed and the amount of resources available. Some experts suggest that grid computing will fundamentally alter the way we use computers.