Acquisition of TeraPort: A Grid Enabled Analysis Platform with Optical Connectivity

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This project, building and deploying "TeraPort," a university-based, multi-disciplinary, and internationally integrated data-intensive, Grid enabled analysis platform with superior connectivity to both domestic and international networks, aims at acquiring the necessary computing and network infrastructure. While serving as an excellent testbed for computer science research (workload management, policy specification and enforcement, middleware testing and support), the facility will provide application production services and be operated as a shared resource not only among the University of Chicago researchers, but faculty, scientists, and students participating in U of C affiliated virtual organizations, with specific focus on integration and interoperability with the TeraGrid, iVDGL (international Virtual Data Grid Laboratory), and the LCG (Computing Grid Project) grid fabrics. The project exploits the State of Illinois optical networking project, I-WIRE, to provide high performance connectivity between the TeraPort facility on the U of Chicago campus and off site Grid resources. (This is made possible by the I-WIRE's connection to optical Starlight facility in downtown Chicago which provides a peering point of access to the TeraGrid backbone, U.S. universities and national laboratories connected to the Abilene and ESnet networks, European networks, such as SURFnet and NORDUnet, and the multi-Gigabit DataTAG network to CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland.) Many scientific disciplines requiring data-intensive computations at scales orders of magnitude larger than previously attempted, such as high energy physics, computational biology, genome science, and emerging problems in computational psychology and the social sciences, will benefit from this infrastructure. Persistent, distributed infrastructures, known as "data grids," that allow sharing of data, knowledge and compute resources in a secure manner across organizational and institutional boundaries, address these problems involving large, geographically distributed communities of researchers that require controlled access to Petascale data collections and computational resources. Advances in development of high performance optical networks connecting distributed resources at speeds up to 40 gigabits per second are central to these new infrastructures. Computational biology, particle physics, and astrophysics constitute examples of many "e-Science" disciplines that have been recognized as prime candidates for application and development of these new Grid technologies and networks. The facility supports the following projects: TeraPort as an Enabler of Grid Research, TeraPort, TeraGrid, Tier2 Centers and High Energy Physics Data Grids, Computational Systems Biology and Using TeraPort to Prototype the Proteomics Data Grid, Enabling Computational Genomics with TeraPort, TeraPort and Multimodal Communication in Humans and Machines, Computational Social Science, Constraint-Based Social Simulation. The TeraPort facility presents a unique resource for researchers accelerating progress by providing on-ramp services to a very large scale national and international platforms. Furthermore, the facility allows exploration of hybrid combinations of local, shared resources in concert with very large scale Grid resource.