TACC and Platform to develop web-based grid portals

Toronto 18 November 2002 Platform Computing and the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at The University of Texas at Austin announced that they will collaborate on research and development of next-generation software technologies for Grid computing

This partnership will focus deployment and use of scientific applications and experiments on Grids. The University of Texas at Austin is the largest university in the US, and TACC is building a university-wide UT Grid that will connect the myriad of clusters, workstations, visualization systems, and storage devices of researchers and departments to TACC's high-end facilities. Platform LSF and Platform MultiCluster are viewed as key technologies for enabling researchers to share HPC resources and to execute codes that span multiple HPC systems.

TACC and Platform will develop Web-based Grid portals to simplify the use of this large collection of HPC systems. According to Mary Thomas, Grid Computing Group manager at TACC: "The NPACI Grid Portal Toolkit is one of the leading toolkits for building Grid-based portals on Grids that use the Globus Toolkit. We look forward to extending GridPort to work with Platform LSF as well as Globus to provide portals and applications a more complete set of Grid services."

Together, Platform and TACC plan to work on various joint initiatives including:

  • Creating new software solutions that enhance the existing offering for production-quality Enterprise Grid environments;
  • Improving the interoperability between local, state, national and global Grids by developing components that directly promote interoperability between Platform MultiCluster, other metaschedulers, and the Globus Toolkit;
  • Simplifying Grid access by leveraging each organization's ongoing portal development work based on the Globus Toolkit and Platform Globus; and
  • Ongoing technical discussions regarding the transition to the emerging Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA).
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"Based on their work with Globus, TACC personnel are leaders at the forefront of Grid computing, enabling scientific computing on the Grid through their GridPort access portal," said Rene' Copeland, vice president, government and life sciences, Platform Computing. "By partnering with us, TACC helps us to further evolve our Enterprise Grid solutions based on Platform LSF and MultiCluster, and leverages our strategic investment in offering a commercially supported distribution of the Globus Toolkit. With TACC, we can add real value to the scientists and engineers that seek to use the Grid."

TACC also participates in a variety of larger-scale Grid projects. As a member of the High Performance Computing Across Texas (HiPCAT) Consortium -- which also includes Texas A and M University, Texas Tech University, Rice University, and the University of Houston-TACC is helping to develop the Texas Internet Grid for Research and Education (TIGRE). TACC is also a member of NPACI and develops software in support of the NPACI Grid and the TeraGrid. The research and development conducted by TACC and Platform to extend MultiCluster to interoperate with other Grid metaschedulers will be vital for establishing this Grid. This collaborative project will help address the challenges of inter-Grid collaboration, while impacting the development of new Grid solutions for computational science and engineering.

TACC was recently awarded a $2.1 million grant from the Department of Energy (DoE) Mathematics, Information, and Computational Sciences (MICS) program to support the DoE Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing (SciDAC) Collaboratory projects through the development of new web portal technologies. The goal of this project is to develop and deploy interoperable portal and web services that can be used by a large number of independent users across the entire DoE Science Grid.

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