US-Egypt Cooperative Research: RAMSys: Collaborative Metacomputing System

描述：该奖项旨在支持由康涅狄格州斯托尔斯市康涅狄格大学计算机科学与工程系Ian Greenshields博士和Reda Ammar博士以及埃及开罗电子研究所（ERI）院长Ayman El-Dessouki博士合作的项目。他们提议进行研究，寻求在开罗建立ERI作为埃及网格计算的卓越中心，将埃及和美国的计算资源连接起来。该项目将包括三个阶段：建立阶段，在ERI建立一个小型美国-埃及集群，以及现有的网格中间件；教育阶段，双方将共同为埃及（以及美国）科学家创建一个关于网格计算的在线教育资源；在一个研究阶段，他们将在计算医学的一个合作项目中练习小集群，以评估相对于时差的负载特性，以及相对于问题粒度的低带宽网络连接的影响，以及计算时间与数据传输时间的比率。范围：将广泛分布的计算资源聚合到一个无缝的大规模并行虚拟机（网格计算机）中，有可能提供具有成本效益的超级计算，并通过在大规模虚拟数据空间中共享数据来鼓励国际科学合作。然而，发展中国家的科学家往往既无法使用大型网格计算机，也无法获得允许他们利用廉价的商品工作站集群作为协作网格中的本地节点的IT支持。拟议的发展可以为埃及科学界提供一个中等规模的网格计算机，并且由于埃及和美国之间的时差，美国站点与埃及科学家合作的机器可以在美国一端的非工作时间由埃及利用，美国在埃及一端的非工作时间使用埃及机器也是如此。美国PI和埃及合作者在这一研究领域拥有丰富的经验。康涅狄格大学的一名研究生将在埃及从事这个项目。该提案符合INT在共同科学兴趣领域支持合作研究的目标。

0138760GreenshieldsDescription: This award is to support a collaborative project by Dr. Ian Greenshields and Dr. Reda Ammar, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Connecticut, Storrs, Connecticut, and Dr. Ayman El-Dessouki, President of the Electronics Research Institute (ERI), Cairo, Egypt. They propose to do research, which seeks to establish the ERI in Cairo as a Center of Excellence in Egypt in grid computing, linking Egyptian and US computation resources. The project will include three phases: an establishment phase, in which a small US-Egyptian cluster is established at ERI, together with extant grid middleware; an educational phase, in which they will jointly create an on-line educational resource for Egyptian (and also for U.S.) scientists regarding grid computing; and a research phase, in which they will exercise the small clusters with a collaborative project in computational medicine to assess loading characteristics relative to time differences and the effect of low bandwidth network connections relative to problem granularity and the ratio of compute time to data transfer time.Scope: The aggregation of widely distributed computing resources into a seamless massively parallel virtual machine (grid computer) has the potential for providing cost-effective supercomputing and for encouraging international scientific collaboration by the sharing of data in a massive virtual data space. However, scientists in developing countries tend not to have access either to massive grid computers or to the kind of IT support which allows them to exploit inexpensive clusters of commodity workstations as local nodes within a collaborative grid. The proposed development can provide the Egyptian scientific community with a medium-scale Grid computer, and because of the time differences between Egypt and the U.S., machines at U.S. sites which collaborate with Egyptian scientists can be harnessed by Egypt during the off-hours at the U.S. end, and the same holds for U.S. use of Egyptian machines during off-hours at the Egyptian end. The US PI and the Egyptian collaborator have extensive experience in this area of research. One graduate student from the University of Connecticut will work on the project in Egypt. This proposal meets the INT objective of supporting collaborative research in areas of mutual scientific interest.