NCSA/Alliance Booth to Show Cutting-Edge Technologies

released 10.28.03

Contact

Trish Barker NCSA Public Information Specialist tlbarker@ncsa.uiuc.edu 217.265.8013

PHOENIX — Visitors to booth 2333 at SC2003 can learn more about the power of the TeraGrid, observe the capabilities of the NEESgrid, and experience visualizations of tornadoes and simulations of the beginning of the universe.

The booth is the exhibit of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the National Computational Science Alliance (Alliance). SC2003, the world's largest high-performance computing and networking conference, will be held Nov. 15-21 at the Phoenix Civic Plaza Convention Center.

The SC2003 exhibit floor opens at 7 p.m. Monday, Nov. 17, with a gala reception and will be open from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 18, and Wednesday, Nov. 19, and from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 20.

"The cyberinfrastructure and grid computing resources being developed by NCSA, and through the Alliance and TeraGrid partnership, are enabling critical scientific research," said Dan Reed, director of NCSA and the Alliance. "At SC2003, we'll showcase both the enabling grid technologies and the groundbreaking work being produced by researchers in a wide range of disciplines, from cosmology to biology."

A highlight of the NCSA/Alliance will be high-resolution animated visualizations of an evolving tornado using a 7,000 lumen HDTV projector. The tornado was simulated using NCSA computers and is based upon the violent storm that caused F4 damage (consistent with winds exceeding 200mph) at Manchester, South Dakota, earlier this year. This NCSA animation, which also will be featured in an upcoming NOVA television special, is being used by scientists to better understand the thunderstorm processes that favor violent, long-lived tornadoes.

Several demonstrations in the NCSA/Alliance booth will focus on the TeraGrid, a multi-year, multi-site effort—funded by the National Science Foundation—to build the world's most powerful distributed computing infrastructure for open scientific research. When completed, the TeraGrid will offer at least 20 teraflops of computing power connected through a network operating at 40 gigabits per second. TeraGrid demonstrations include:

• Bioinformatics applications on the TeraGrid -- the Grid-BLAST portal will be used to upload and access databases and to launch sequence similarity searching jobs on the TeraGrid


• Atmospheric discovery on the TeraGrid -- the capability to place jobs on many grid resources will be demonstrated with the MEAD application, as will the descriptive workflow aspects of the application


• Running applications on the TeraGrid using MPICH-VMI2 -- MPICH-VMI2 provides a high performance implementation of MPI over Myrinet, Infiniband and Gigabit Ethernet networks and is slated to be included in the Common TeraGrid Software Stack. Its novel features will be described and preliminary scaling numbers will be presented


• Inca -- the Inca Test Harness and Reporting Framework is a flexible framework for automated testing, verification, and monitoring of the TeraGrid Hosting Environment, the packages and environment variables that are deployed and supported at every TeraGrid site.

Other grid computing activities at the NCSA/Alliance booth include an explanation of how the Grid Application Toolkit allows developers to create applications that smoothly migrate from one grid site to another; a demonstration of GrADS tools, which help users understand and improve the performance of their grid applications; and highlights of the National Virtual Observatory, a data grid for astronomy.

Additional presentations will spotlight simulations of the origins of the universe, large-scale visualizations of bioinformatics data, the use of computational biochemistry tools in nanodevice design, and the capabilities of the NEESgrid for multi-site earthquake experiments.

The NCSA/Alliance booth will also feature an interactive demonstration of the IntelliBadge tracking technology, including a playback of the attendance data gathered during SC2002 in Baltimore.

Demonstrations in the NCSA booth will run from 10:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. on Tuesday, Nov. 18 and Wednesday, Nov. 19, and from 10:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 20. For a demonstration schedule, stop by the Alliance booth.

NCSA (National Center for Supercomputing Applications) is a national high-performance computing center that develops and deploys cutting-edge computing, networking and information technologies. Located at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, NCSA is funded by the National Science Foundation. Additional support comes 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/.

The National Computational Science Alliance (Alliance) is a nationwide partnership of more than 50 academic, government and business organizations working together to prototype an advanced computational infrastructure for the new century. This infrastructure, called the Grid, is rapidly developing into a ubiquitous, pervasive, national-scale information infrastructure that links supercomputers, virtual environments, scientific instruments, large databases and research teams. Started in 1997, the Alliance is one of two national partnerships funded by the National Science Foundation's Partnerships for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (PACI) program and receives cost-sharing at partner institutions. The Alliance is led by NCSA.