Visualization of black holes colliding as viewed during the demonstration. The simulation was developed by Ed Seidel from Louisiana State University's Center for Computation and Technology.

At the Global Lambda Integrated Facility's Global LambdaGrid workshop in Tokyo, Japan, researchers from the Enlightened Computing and G-lambda projects demonstrated that scientific applications running in the United States and Japan could reserve, manage and monitor computing and network resources in both countries.

"The scale we're talking about is the largest yet for this type of demonstration," says Gigi Karmous-Edwards from MCNC and the Enlightened Computing project. "Each country had seven large clusters connected by a national 10-gigabit-per-second test bed. The applications submitted requests for compute and network resources to grid middleware, which reserved the resources across both countries using control plane signaling to automatically set up the network connections."

While similar demonstrations have been completed in the past using grid computing resources, the network connections had to be reserved months in advance. In the recent demonstration, large-capacity network connections between the computing resources were created in a matter of seconds using control plane technology.

In the United States, the Enlightened Computing team used a visualization of a simulated collision of two black holes to demonstrate the grid and network interoperability. The data for the visualization had already been simulated and was distributed across computer clusters in both countries. During the demonstration, control plane signaling was used to create 10 gigabit-per-second connections between the clusters and a visualization client running on the workshop floor.

Illustration of the process of Si-O bonding. The red and blue balls indicate oxygen and silicon, respectively. The reaction proceeds from the top left to the bottom right. The simulation was developed by Shuji Ogata from the Nagoya Institute of Technology and customized for the demonstration.

"We calculated the transition of Silicon-Oxygen bonding using molecular dynamic and quantum mechanics simulations," explains Hiroshi Takemiya from Japan's National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology. "This was done using a grid-enabled MPI implementation developed at our institute that allows us to get high-precision results within acceptable simulation times."

An enhanced version of the demonstration will be showcased by the collaboration at the Supercomputing 2006 conference in November. MCNC is also pursuing a similar collaboration with a European project called Phosphorous, to demonstrate trans-Atlantic scheduling of computing and network resources.

Learn more at the Enlightened Computing, G-lambda and GLIF Web sites.