SCI: ETF Early Operations: CACR/CIT

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The Extensible Terascale Facility (ETF), or TeraGrid, involves nine resource providers operating high-performance computing, information, and visualization facilities, interconnected with a dedicated optical network and integrated with a set of common software that presents the user community with a cohesive set of resources and services. On October 1, 2004, the TeraGrid will conclude a three-year construction effort to create this distributed environment and will transition into an operational state. This proposal outlines a set of services to be provided at the Center for Advanced Computing Research (CACR) of the California Institute of Technology (CIT) as part of the TeraGrid. CACR will support the TeraGrid through a science-based approach focused on data-intensive applications, initially from a small set of national research communities sharing the following features: o there is a strong related scientific research group at CIT; o there is participation by leaders of related scientific research groups at other institutions; and o each reflects a priority direction for NSF or other federal research agencies, primarily multi-agency areas of interest. These areas will also share the following technical attributes: o large quantities of experimental and/or computational data are maintained in several local and remote heterogeneous collections; o there are requirements for new analysis approaches to extract information from the experimental data and/or interact with computational modeling; o there is an ongoing effort to create unified, interoperable services; and o the communities are building persistent virtual organizations that exploit and federate information resources. The proposed initial primary research communities are astronomy and high energy physics. Both areas offer opportunities for collaboration with other TeraGrid sites and each community has significant funding to develop domain specific cyberinfrastructure. CACR will assist these groups in deploying and tuning their software on the TeraGrid and provide support to facilitate their TeraGrid usage. In addition, we will initiate efforts with the geodynamics modeling and neutron physics communities. Since the problems faced by these user communities have common features, we anticipate identifying requirements for shared cyberinfrastructure. CACR will operate an Itanium2 cluster consisting of 72 dual processor nodes (.8 TF). This cluster is tightly coupled via Myrinet and Gigabit Ethernet to DataWulf clusters, which will provide approximately 170 TB of online disk storage. These resources will be utilized primarily for application development and for on-demand and interactive computation and data analysis. Because CACR has a focused role, it can be responsive to the initial research communities requirements for on-demand and interactive computation and data analysis. Inherent flexibility will allow experimentation with novel approaches to scheduling and, in general, resource management. For the past two decades, CACR and its predecessors have demonstrated an ability to work closely with relatively sophisticated user groups to explore innovative approaches to supporting scientists on the frontier of computational science. We propose to continue this mode of collaboration.