Experimental technology grid at the University of TennesseeKnoxville 20 Oct 99The project, called the Scalable Intracampus Research Grid (SInRG), will deploy an infrastructure that mirrors, within the boundaries of the Knoxville campus, both the underlying technologies and the interdisciplinary research collaborations that are characteristic of the national technology grid that the U.S. research community is now developing. Such computational power grids use special system software, sometimes known as middleware, to integrate high performance networks, computers and storage systems into unified systems that can provide advanced computing and information services--such as data staging, remote instrument control, and resource aggregation--in a pervasive and dependable way for an entire community. The national technology grid is now growing out of the convergent efforts of NSF's Partnerships for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (PACI) and several other government agencies, including NASA, DoD, and DoE. While the SInRG infrastructure will become a node on this national grid at some point, it's primary purpose is to provide a technological and organizational microcosm in which key research challenges underlying grid-based computing can be attacked with better communication and control than wide-area environments usually permit. Jack Dongarra, professor and distinguished scientist at UTK and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, leads the large team of computer scientists and research partners from other disciplines that will build and use SInRG. The project team is made up of two basic groups. One is focused on research for SInRG's middleware, and the other is engaged in interdisciplinary research leading to applications that will leverage SInRG's power. The members of the middleware group--Dongarra, Jim Plank, Rich Wolski, and Micah Beck--bring complementary research interests and component software to the task at hand, including software for remote scientific computing, scheduling distributed computation, resource monitoring and performance prediction, and flexible management of distributed storage. "Of course we're excited by the opportunity to build on and experiment with the integration of our different projects to create SInRG's system software, but we also plan to leverage the work that's being done by the PACIs and the other parts of the national grid community," said Dongarra, who participates in both PACI organizations and is on the Internet2 Application Strategy Council. "Our work with SInRG will be one part, an important one we hope, of a much larger story about the transformation of computing and information systems that high performance networks like Abilene make possible and computational grids will bring about." The SInRG applications research group mirrors another aspect of the national effort--it's based on interdisciplinary collaboration between computer scientists and researchers from other domains with extremely challenging computational problems they need to solve. The initial set of SInRG applications will build on long-running partnerships between a group of computer science co-PIs--including Bob Ward, Jens Gregor, Mike Thomason, Mike Langston, Padma Raghavan, and Michael Berry--and leading researchers from other departments, including Chemical Engineering (Peter Cummings), Radiology (Gary Smith), Electrical Engineering (Don Bouldin) and Computational Ecology (Lou Gross).
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