NCSA NEWS

Alliance SC99 Exhibit Spotlights Access Grid, Scientific Applications and Heterogeneous Clustering

released November 10, 1999

 

Contact
Karen Green
Public Information Officer
kareng@ncsa.uiuc.edu
217.265.0748 phone
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PORTLAND, OR -- More than 30 researchers with the National Computational Science Alliance (Alliance) will exhibit their work in the Alliance research exhibit at next week's SC99.

A key feature of this year's exhibit will be the Access Grid, an ensemble of resources that links people in virtual spaces for collaborative science, workshops, and distance education sessions. An 8 x 8-foot display screen will serve as an entry point -- or node -- to the Access Grid, allowing persons at other Access Grid nodes across the country to look in on presentations and demonstrations in the booth. In addition, three Alliance partners -- Argonne National Laboratory, Boston University and the Maui High Performance Computing Center/Albuquerque High Performance Computing Center (MHPCC/AHPCC) -- will feature live Access Grid nodes in their booths on the SC99 show floor.

Along with the Access Grid node/large screen display, the Alliance booth will include an ImmersaDesk, a portable display system for VR applications, Unix and NT workstations, and an eight-processor heterogeneous Linux/NT cluster. SC99 will be held Nov. 13-19 at the Oregon Convention Center. The SC exhibit hall opens with a VIP show from 7-9 p.m. Monday, Nov. 15. Exhibit hours will be 10 a.m. - 6 p.m. on Nov. 16 and 17 and 10 a.m. - 4 p.m. Nov. 18.

The Alliance booth's Access Grid node will be used for real-time collaboration by several demonstrators. On Monday night, the Alliance Partners for Advanced Computational Services (PACS), will feature the Access Grid in action with a multi-site, nationwide collaborative session. Developers of the Access Grid will showcase the technology behind the Grid, including open source software, off-the-shelf computer and networking hardware, and IP multicast technology. Rick Stevens, of Argonne and a researcher with the Alliance Distributed Computing team, will give a brief overview of the Grid and talk about how it will change the future. Frank Gilfeather, head of MHPCC/AHPCC, will discuss how Grid technology was used to support the Chautauquas, a series of meetings held last summer to introduce new audiences to technologies being developed by the Alliance. A demonstration of the Chemistry Visualization program (Chem Viz), which uses an SGI Origin2000 supercomputer to generate and display chemistry images on the Web for use by high school science teachers, will also utilize the Access Grid. The CAVE Research Network Users Society (CAVERNUS) will hold its regular meeting over the Grid in the Alliance booth, at the Alliance Center for Collaboration, Education, Science and Software (ACCESS) and various other Grid nodes.

"This year, what we call Alliance booth activities will actually take place all across the country, thanks to the use of the Access Grid," said Larry Smarr, director of the Alliance and its leading-edge site, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). "From remote collaboration on scientific applications, to use of distributed computing systems and resources, we will be demonstrating the possibilities of grid computing and communications."

Of course, the Alliance booth will also feature scientific research made possible through the use of the Alliance's computing resources. An international team of researchers representing NCSA, the Max Planck Institut für Gravitationsphysik (Albert Einstein Institute) in Potsdam, Germany, and Washington University in St. Louis will run a simulation of the collision of two black holes on the ImmersaDesk. The computations will be done on two Cray T3Es in Germany and transmitted to the Alliance booth via the German DFN-Verein's 622 Mb/s ATM network. The demonstration will be similar to a trans-Atlantic demo featured at the Alliance's SC98 booth, but will incorporate new visualization techniques, faster networking between supercomputers for better metacomputing and a better simulation, and more interactive capabilities within the simulation. The demo will use Cactus 4.0, a major upgrade of an application used to solve partial differential equations.

A scientific demonstration presented by the Alliance Environmental Hydrology team will show how the Access Grid can be put to use to simulate complex ecosystems in the Chesapeake Bay. The team, led by Glen Wheless of Old Dominion University (ODU), will demonstrate the use of VR, collaboration, networking and distributed simulation to configure an ecosystem model using the Origin2000 supercomputer at NCSA. The results will then be visualized in near-realtime on the SC99 show floor. The demonstration will also include remote participants using the CAVE at ODU.

Among the technological breakthoughs to be shown in the Alliance booth will be a computational cluster featuring two dual-processor machines running Windows NT and two dual-processor machines running Linux. According to Rob Pennington, head of the Alliance's NT Supercluster development team, the demonstration could be the first public display of a cluster running two different operating systems, in which all the processors are able to communicate using MPI despite the OS differences. That cross-communication is made possible by a software package called VMI, developed by Avneesh Pant of NCSA. The heterogeneous cluster will solve astronomical partial differential equations using Cactus.

"The use of a heterogeneous cluster has very big implications for the user," said Pennington. "Basically, it could make the question of what operating system you are using obsolete."

Many of the demonstrations in the Alliance booth will use the Globus toolkit. Globus is a set of integrated software tools used in distributed computing environments, such as computing done over a grid. Globus was developed by a team led by Ian Foster, of Argonne and the University of Chicago, and Carl Kesselman, of the University of Southern California's Information Science Institute.

For specific times and dates of Alliance research booth demonstrations, stop by the Alliance booth (R300) on the SC99 show floor.

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications is the leading-edge site for the National Computational Science Alliance. NCSA is a leader in the development and deployment of cutting-edge high-performance computing, networking, and information technologies. The National Science Foundation, the state of Illinois, the University of Illinois, industrial partners, and other federal agencies fund NCSA.

The National Computational Science Alliance is a partnership to prototype an advanced computational infrastructure for the 21st century and includes more than 50 academic, government and industry research partners from across the United States. The Alliance is one of two partnerships funded by the National Science Foundation's Partnerships for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (PACI) program, and receives cost-sharing at partner institutions. NSF also supports the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (NPACI), led by the San Diego Supercomputer Center.

 

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