NCSA NEWS

TeraGrid Demos, In-A-Box Software, Cambridge Collaboration Featured at Alliance Booth at SC

released November 8, 2001

Contact
Karen Green
NCSA Public Information Officer
kareng@ncsa.uiuc.edu
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217.244.7396 fax

DENVER — Visitors to the National Computational Science Alliance (Alliance) research exhibit at SC2001 will witness demonstrations of science on a prototype of the TeraGrid, which will be the world's largest, fastest, most comprehensive, distributed infrastructure for open scientific research when deployed next year.

The Alliance booth (R216) will also feature a virtual collaboration among the Alliance and SGI booths and researchers with the UK Computational Cosmology Consortium (UK-CCC), headed by Prof. Stephen Hawking and located at Cambridge University, Cambridge, England. In addition, CD-ROMs of the Alliance's In-a-Box software packages will debut and will be available free in the booth.

"We have many new tools, technologies, and applications to showcase for the high-performance computing and networking community this year," said Dan Reed, director of the Alliance and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "On the show floor, we will set up a prototype of the fastest production network ever deployed to demonstrate the potential of the TeraGrid, we will launch a major software deployment effort, and we will feature the world's most respected physicist talking about how our technologies have enabled his research."

The TeraGrid is a $53 million effort funded by the National Science Foundation that involves four partners: NCSA, the lead organization in the Alliance; the San Diego Supercomputer Center, the lead organization in the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (NPACI); Argonne National Laboratory, a key Alliance partner; and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), a key NPACI partner. When completed, the TeraGrid will include 13.6 teraflops of Linux Cluster computing power distributed at the four TeraGrid sites, facilities capable of managing and storing more than 450 terabytes of data, high-resolution visualization environments, and toolkits for grid computing.

Several TeraGrid demonstrations will originate in the Alliance booth and run on Linux clusters in the booths of all four TeraGrid partners. A 20-gigabit/second network will connect the Alliance and NPACI booths, creating a prototype TeraGrid network faster than any network ever before deployed at SC. The network will be made possible by eXtreme Net (Xnet), the network technology development showcase at SC2001, which provides a venue for bleeding-edge, developmental networking technologies and experimental networking applications.

Alliance and TeraGrid demonstrations will include:

• A simulation running the NAMD molecular dynamics code, developed by the Theoretical Biophysics Group at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. The demonstration involves atomic-level simulations of the protein that plays a large role in our sense of touch. NAMD runs are currently being done on NCSA's first Itanium cluster and the code also runs on McKinley, Intel's second-generation Itanium processor.



• A demonstration using the Cactus computational framework to model the collision of two black holes. These types of simulations require massive amounts of computing power. The simulation will also use grid-based resources, such as the Globus Toolkit (for message passing among clusters) and HDF5 (for live, streaming visualizations).



• Simulations of cumulus cloud development using ARPI3D, a simpler version of the Advanced Regional Prediction System (ARPS) weather research model developed at the University of Oklahoma. These simulations were performed on NCSA's new Itanium Linux cluster and show a time lapse of the clouds generated over a surface-based stationary heat source.

Another premier demonstration will involve collaborators at the Alliance booth, the SGI booth, and the UK-CCC, of which Hawking is the principal investigator. Members of the consortium will participate in the demonstration from the Centre for Mathematical Sciences at Cambridge, where their SGI supercomputer, named "Cosmos," is located. The demonstration will use Virtual Director, software developed at NCSA that allows researchers to use a virtual camera to navigate complex scientific visualizations, and record and edit their movements. The group will look at cosmological data from the Cambridge lab, and researchers at each site will be able to navigate and see their colleagues at the other sites as avatars in the simulation. Hawking, who is on a book tour in Japan, will not be able to take part in the live demonstration, but did tape a statement that will introduce it, saying:

"We are pleased to be working with SGI and NCSA to realize the full potential of the Onyx visualization on Cosmos and to be able to use it across the grid."

In addition to the demonstrations, the Alliance booth will offer its In-a-Box software on CD to the research community. These CDs promise to make it easier and faster for researchers to take advantage of new technologies developed by the Alliance and NCSA. They consist of four interrelated packages: Cluster-in-a-Box, Grid-in-a-Box, Access Grid-in-a-Box, and Display Wall-in-a-Box. Together, these software packages will lower the cost and expertise needed to utilize new technologies and will create a new level of interoperability to support the needs of the national research community.

For a demonstration schedule, visit the Alliance booth at SC2001 in Denver beginning at 10 a.m. Tuesday, Nov. 13.

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is a leader in developing and deploying cutting-edge high-performance computing, networking, and information technologies. NCSA is a partner in the TeraGrid project, a National Science Foundation initiative to build and deploy the world's largest, fastest, most comprehensive, distributed infrastructure for open scientific research. NCSA also leads the National Computational Science Alliance (Alliance), a partnership to prototype an advanced computational infrastructure for the 21st century that includes more than 50 academic, government, and industry research partners. The NSF Partnerships for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (PACI) program funds the Alliance. In addition to the NSF, NCSA receives support from the state of Illinois, the University of Illinois, private sector partners, and other federal agencies. For more information, see http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/.

 

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