Map of SURAgrid participants. |
SURAgrid, the cyberinfrastructure initiative of the Southern Universities Research Association, has received authorization for $1 million over the next three years from the SURA Board of Trustees to expand its resources and staff and to develop new grid communities across the Southeastern United States.
“We’re continuing the growth of SURAgrid as a heterogeneous set of resources for SURA researchers,” says Gary Crane, SURA’s director of IT initiatives. SURAgrid was launched in 2004 to provide high performance computing resources in support of research, education and economic development within the American Southeast region.
Several scientific applications are already under development within SURAgrid, and project leaders hope that educational applications won’t be far behind.
One of the first applications is a grid-enabled version of ADCIRC, the Advanced Circulation Model, used on the SURAgrid to compute ocean water levels and depths. ADCIRC is used within SCOOP, the SURA Coastal Ocean Observing and Prediction program, to compute tidal and storm surge water levels and depths resulting from North Atlantic tropical storms and hurricanes.
“ADCIRC is the first SCOOP application to benefit from access to SURAgrid,” says Mary Fran Yafchak, SURA’s IT program coordinator. “SURAgrid is happy to provide the additional resources needed for ADCIRC to contribute to forecasting for the 2006 hurricane season.”
Predicting ocean depths and water levels isn’t the only scientific task the SURAgrid supports. One group of computer scientists has used the SURAgrid to investigate the performance of genome alignment applications across several computing platforms, and another has tested a computational method called task farming using astronomy and oil-drilling applications.
“There are also a couple of projects funded by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Army’s Telemedicine and Advanced Technology Research Center that are focused on discovering and developing more new applications,” adds Crane. “We’re looking within the SURA region for existing applications that could benefit from grid computing.” Applications already under development include movement and storage of nuclear physics data, computational support for a grid implementation of electron nuclear dynamics theory, and simulations of contaminants in urban water systems.
The SURAgrid collaboration currently includes 26 institutions contributing resources, applications or experience to the grid. Scientists wishing to use the SURAgrid have access to a resource pool of 900 processors with a combined peak computing capacity of nearly 3 teraflops. Access to high-performance computing resources and sharing resources with other grid projects is also a goal of SURAgrid, notes Yafchak. SURAgrid is exploring the possibility of becoming a science gateway to the TeraGrid and its HPC resources, partnering with corporations such as IBM to make commercial resources available through the SURAgrid portal, and talking with other grid projects, such as the Computational Chemistry Grid and Open Science Grid, about future cooperation.
The grid-enabled ADCIRC application was developed by a team at the University of North Carolina-Renaissance Computing Institute. For more information, visit the SURAgrid, SCOOP and ADCIRC/UNC-RENCI Web sites.
—Katie Yurkewicz
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