"Sometimes you get engaged in a project and can't predict what's going to have the highest impact down the road," says TACC Director Jay Boisseau. "While the initial funded phase of UT Grid ended without achieving some of the original goals, the project resulted in the evolution of the GridPort toolkit, the creation of the GridShell software, the deployment of a production PC grid environment using United Devices software and the expansion of a campus PC grid based on Condor software."

The GridPort toolkit was built by TACC researchers to create grid computing user portals. GridShell, now known as MyCluster within the TeraGrid, enables grid users with applications that include a large number of serial computations to easily access many computing nodes across a grid.

"Both of these projects are good UT Grid success stories," says Boisseau. "The GridPort toolkit was used to create the TeraGrid User Portal. MyCluster makes it easier for people to grab nodes to execute serial computations within the TeraGrid environment, and it's being extended to do the same thing for parallel jobs and to give the appearance of a global distributed file system across TeraGrid."

While the UT Grid's user portal work and the GridShell project may have had the greatest impact nationwide, UT Grid also established several campus grid infrastructures that aid the research of UT scientists.

"We looked at using older clusters for serial jobs, and tried to link up clusters across campus for parallel computing," explains TACC's Warren Smith.

For serial computing, two different grids were set up across campus. Roundup, which uses commercial software from United Devices, brought together Windows machines scattered across campus. Today Roundup includes about 2,000 desktops, and is used by several scientists to harness additional computing power. The second serial grid, named Rodeo, is based on Condor technology. Rodeo's Condor pool of about 500 machines includes desktops and older clusters, and is also used by several UT scientists.

"For parallel computing, the idea was that TACC would be the hub, and other clusters on campus would link up to us," says Smith. "Jobs would migrate to or from TACC when they exceed the capabilities of the local cluster. But technology was a major problem, as there was no good solution for metascheduling at the time. Since then some new technologies are being developed by other projects, and we hope to leverage those for UT."

While the project has been officially on hiatus since the end of 2005, Rodeo and Roundup continue to be supported and available for UT users. Development activities also continue, through other projects, on GridShell/MyCluster and on the TeraGrid and other GridPort-based user portals. And with the increasing emphasis on campus grids throughout the country, Boisseau and Smith hope to re-invigorate UT Grid in the coming year.

"As a formal project it's on hiatus, there's no less importance on UT Grid than there was four years ago and we're as passionate as ever about achieving all our goals," says Boisseau. "We're currently focusing on state and national efforts that are going into operation very soon, and will start to leverage those technologies for the UT campus."

For more information visit the TACC Web site.