NCSA NEWS

NPACI Exhibit at SC2001 to Feature Demonstrations of the TeraGrid, Telescience, Grid Portals, and Visualization Tools

released November 8, 2001

Contact
David Hart
SDSC
dhart@sdsc.edu
858.534.8314

DENVER — The research exhibit for the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (NPACI), booth R206, at the SC2001 exhibition in Denver, November 12-15, will feature applications and technologies that will fuel future accomplishments in fields, from ranging from astrophysics to proteomics. Partners will demonstrate the latest NPACI innovations: personalized grid portals, extreme data storage software, large-scale interactive visualization tools, global network monitoring, and educational programs. Along with an extensive lineup of demos, presentations, and posters, the NPACI exhibit will house a glimpse into the future of grid computing—a prototype data-intensive TeraGrid node.

"The NPACI exhibit will allow attendees to see and hear about the amazing things that NPACI is doing," said Fran Berman, director of the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) and NPACI. "We're taking full advantage of SC2001 to inform and excite the HPC community about the successes, accomplishments, and creativity that stem from NPACI and its collaborations." Berman will also deliver an SC2001 plenary lecture on Grid Computing in the Terascale Age, Wednesday, November 14, at 9:15 a.m.

The NPACI exhibit will give attendees their first chance to see the TeraGrid in action. The configuration on the exhibit floor will include an IBM Linux cluster with 32 Intel IA64 processors and a 7-terabyte storage-area network anchored by a Sun Fire 6800 server from Sun Microsystems. NPACI demonstrations on the prototype TeraGrid will include:

• Biodiversity Prediction: The WhyWhere application by SDSC's David Stockwell, combines a massive database of environmental and satellite data, efficient image processing algorithms, and grid-based cluster computing into a search and mapping system that allows biodiversity researchers to answer the question, "Where is it and why?" for any species, anywhere on the globe.



• Oil Reservoir Simulation: Joel Saltz of Ohio State University and Alan Sussman from the University of Maryland will conduct exploration and visualization of ensembles of oil reservoir simulations. This activity, a collaboration with the University of Texas Center for Subsurface Modeling, provides an efficient and cost-effective means for accurate characterization of oil reservoirs, which has strategic, economic, and environmental benefits.



• Protein Fragment Matching: In a matter of hours, the parallel version of the Sequest code running on Linux clusters and demonstrated by SDSC's Amit Majumdar, matches peptide fragments to an existing protein database by comparing tandem mass spectrometry output to the appropriate protein or DNA database.

SC2001, the annual high-performance computing and networking conference, will be held in Denver November 10-16, with the SC2001 Exhibition open from Monday evening, November 12, to Thursday, November 15. In addition to the NPACI research exhibit, NPACI researchers will be presenting their work as part of the SC2001 technical program, tutorials, and the SCinet High-Performance Bandwidth Challenge.

A complete schedule of the more than 20 demonstrations to be held in the NPACI research exhibit will be available at http://www.npaci.edu/sc2001/ and in Booth R206. Other highlights from the NPACI research exhibit include:

• Remote-Control Science: Mark Ellisman of UC San Diego and colleagues will demonstrate their system for "telescience"—remote operation of, in this case, an electron microscope in San Diego and advanced tomography applications on the grid. This activity will also be presented in the National Coordination Office for Information Technology exhibit (R551).



• Grid Computing Portals: The NPACI HotPage portal, developed by SDSC's Grid Portals Architecture group, now lets researchers create a personalized gateway to the grid and advanced storage resource management features on NPACI high-end resources.



• Grid-Aware Data Management: IBPster, a demonstration by partners from UC Santa Barbara, the University of Tennessee, and other partners, shows how the Internet Backplane Protocol and the Network Weather Service may be used to store and deliver MP3 music and MPEG-2 video files on the grid. Once collected by users, the files move on the grid in response to changes in user location or access to available bandwidth.



• High Performance Network Monitoring: The CoralReef software suite from the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA) at SDSC is a comprehensive toolkit for network measurement and analysis. CAIDA researchers will also discuss current network security work, including analysis and quantification of denial-of-service attacks and the CodeRed and Nimda worms.



• Scalable Visualization: NPACI's Scalable Visualization Toolkits effort is developing a general-purpose, portable, and efficient software suite that addresses the visualization of larger-than-core data sets such as renderings of detailed biomedical, geophysical, and astronomical information. Several tools built on the Scalable Visualization toolkit will be presented by researchers from SDSC and The Scripps Research Institute.

The $53 million TeraGrid project is funded by the National Science Foundation and includes four partners: the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California, San Diego, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, and Argonne National Laboratory in Argonne, IL. When completed, the TeraGrid will include 13.6 teraflops of Linux Cluster 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.

The National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (NPACI) unites 48 universities and research institutions to build the computational environment for tomorrow's scientific discovery. Led by UC San Diego and the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), NPACI is funded by the National Science Foundation's Partnerships for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (PACI) program and receives additional support from the State and University of California, other government agencies, and partner institutions. The NSF PACI program also supports the National Computational Science Alliance. For additional information about NPACI, see http://www.npaci.edu/, or contact David Hart at SDSC, 858-534-8314, dhart@sdsc.edu.

 

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