Grid Computing

Cyberinfrastructure permits a new kind of scholarly inquiry and education, empowering communities to innovate and to revolutionize what they do, how they do it, and who participates.

Providing an evolving foundation for 21st-century research and education, cyberinfrastructure is both a focus for invention and an accelerator of innovation, linked through a trajectory that begins with design and evolves to broad-based use.

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.

This presentation will describe the identity management infrastructure of the UAB grid computing project, known as UABgrid. Its development is based on accomplishments of two NSF middleware projects at UAB, which focused on building NMI-enabled, open source tools for support of collaboration within virtual organizations that span institutional boundaries, are autonomous, and are collections of attributes. The middleware solution is known as myVocs and uses Shibboleth for identity management and attribution distribution, Globus for distributed computations, and GridShib to bind Shibboleth and Globus. UABgrid is now expanding its grid computing components to include metascheduling of jobs across multiple HPC clusters across the Internet.

Do you already have a grid-computing deployment on campus? Or do you have researchers who need to access grid-computing resources from high-performance computing centers around the globe? In this session, you will find out how to configure your CA to issue International Grid Trust Federation (IGTF)-compliant certificates and join over a hundred CAs currently certified under approved IGTF profiles. Hear real-life experiences from SURAgrid, see bridge PKIs in action, and learn how to leverage your campus PKI infrastructure to facilitate access to worldwide grid-computing efforts.

Modern cyberinfrastructure (CI) creates a “distributed computer” with resources dispersed in diverse geographic and administrative domains and the network providing the “backplane” for this computer. This session will present major players in research and education CI and will offer an overview of the CI Days program under way to assist campuses in planning and implementing CI.

The CI Days program is being developed in coordination with EDUCAUSE, Internet2, National LambdaRail (NLR), the National Science Foundation (NSF), and the Department of Energy (DOE). The NSF’s TeraGrid and the DOE’s Open Science Grid build on advanced networking to provide leading-edge collaborative computing infrastructure, Internet2 and NLR provide the enhanced network backplane infrastructure, and the NSF’s International Research Network Connections program offers international extensions. Internet2 also develops middleware tools to enable end users to reliably access CI resources, and EDUCAUSE addresses policy and funding issues involved with implementing and operating CI.

Since January of 2007, the TeraGrid has been partnering with select campuses to pilot the use of Internet2's Shibboleth and with NCSA and the University of Chicago's GridShb to access grid-enabled resources. This session will offer insight into the lessons learned and next steps to be taken toward campus and cyberinfrastructure integration.

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 Great Plains Network (GPN) is a regional consortium of public universities in seven states: Arkansas, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, and South Dakota. This effective practice is a companion to "GPN: Building the Regional Middleware Infrastructure" (#294). It describes the creation of applications using middleware tools being developed as part of the NSF Middleware Initiative (NMI). These tools support collaborative research projects and the sharing of resources in a multi-institutional, virtual organization environment. This report is part of the NMI-EDIT Identity and Access Management Case Study Series.

Cyberinfrastructure is revolutionizing the scientific-research landscape and is positioned to similarly revolutionize learning. The challenge for educators is to find an innovative strategy that incorporates the best of traditional pedagogy with new paradigms that reflect our times. This presentation outlines how computation, visualization, storage, and high-speed networks can create novel learning environments.