Envision Q3 -2002
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ENNPACI & SDSC ISION+UARTERLY SCIENCE MAGAZINE V OL. 18 NO. 3 V JULY – SEPTEMBER 2002 SOFTWARE THE GODDESS OF WISDOM WOULD HAVE APPRECIATED ENHANCING RESEARCH WITH PORTALS RETOOLING FIELD RESEARCH — WIRELESSLY NPACI Building the Computational Infrastructure for Tomorrow’s Scientific Discovery The National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (NPACI) joins Contents 41 partner institutions in 17 states, Australia, Italy, Spain, and Sweden, in creating the FROM THE DIRECTOR NEWS foundation for a ubiquitous, continuous, and pervasive computational environment to 20 Blue Titan and SDSC Developing 1 Building a Community Grid support research by the world’s scientists. Web Software NPACI is led by UC San Diego, funded 20 primarily through the NSF’s Partnerships for PORTALS Plant Genomics Website at SDSC Attracts Attention Advanced Computational Infrastructure 2 program, and has its focus of activities at the Powerful Data Management Tool 20 SDSC and Entropia Harnessing San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC). Comes of Age Desktop PCs NPACI INFORMATION 6 Neuroscience Portal 20 Lifemapper Produces Fran Berman, Director Marshals Rich Network Species Distribution Maps David Hart, Communications Director of Technologies [email protected] and Models 8 GridPort Provides Simple 858-534-8314 21 NSF Awards $3.28 Entrance to Scientific Million to NLANR SDSC p. 2 Computing 21 SDSC is a campus research unit of UC San SDSC’s Rozeanne Steckler Diego and the focus of activities for NPACI. SCIENTIFIC INNOVATION Receives ‘Spirit of Preuss’ Since 1985, SDSC has served the U.S. p. 11 Award scientific community as a national laboratory 11 Computational Anatomy: An Emerging for computational science and engineering. 21 Discipline Calendar GENERAL INFORMATION BACK COVER Phone: 858-534-5000 EDUCATION [email protected] Understanding Protein-Ligand Interactions 14 Kids Thrive on Science: www.npaci.edu SDSC and Houston www.sdsc.edu Girl Scouts Extend Subscribe to ENVISION and Online at: Successful In-School www.npaci.edu/Press/subscriptions.html Program ONLINE 16 Wireless Networking www.npaci.edu/Online Extends High-Speed p.14 Online is a biweekly, Web newsletter of the Internet to Remote latest research and developments from Academic Sites in Southern California NPACI and SDSC. ENVISION www.npaci.edu/enVision enVision, ISSN 1521-5334, is published quarterly by NPACI and SDSC Communications. For a free subscription or to make address changes, visit the website or contact the editor. EDITOR: Rex Graham, [email protected], 858-822-5408 DESIGNER: Gail Bamber, [email protected], 858-534-5150 WRITERS: Kimberly Mann Bruch (KMB), Cassie Ferguson (CF), Mike Gannis (MG), Rex Graham (RG), David Hart (DH), Linda McIntosh (LM), Merry FRONT COVER: ORGANIZING DATA FOR KNOWLEDGE DISCOVERY Maisel (MM), Paul Tooby (PT) The Storage Resource Broker is a client-server based middleware Any opinions, conclusions, or recommenda- implemented at the San Diego Supercomputer Center to provide a uniform tions in this publication are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the access interface to different types of storage devices. The SRB provides an views of NSF, other funding organizations, uniform API that can be used to connect to heterogeneous resources that SDSC, UC San Diego, or the NPACI may be distributed, and access data sets that may be replicated. The SRB, partner institutions. All brand names and in conjunction with the Metadata Catalog, provides a means for accessing product names are trademarks or registered data sets and resources through querying their attributes instead of trademarks of their respective holders. knowing their physical names and/or locations. PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY GAIL W. BAMBER Building a Community Grid FROM THE DIRECTOR or many of us who have been working in grid computing for the last decade, the current environment is F exhilarating. At present, there is strong interest in the Grid from researchers, developers, funding agencies, the commercial sector, and a growing segment of resource-limited applications communities. If any time is the time for grid computing, this is it. At the same time, there is a growing concern that both added capabilities and capacities to users while at the Grid has been oversold. In particular, the concern the same time making the process of developing the is that the Grid will not be able to deliver its promise software infrastructure considerably more complex. of immense resources, high performance, and ubiquity Facing the heterogeneity problem early on will be to applications developers and users. This concern is required to help us gain the critical experience needed legitimate, as the Grid will ultimately only be as suc- to develop the Grid we have promised. cessful as its user base. The next layer, common infrastructure, is especially The issue is not that the promise of the Grid has important. No matter what hardware underlies the BY FRAN BERMAN NPACI and SDSC Director been oversold as much as that the difficulty of devel- Grid and no matter which applications are deployed oping the requisite Grid infrastructure has been under- on it, we must have a layer of software that the com- estimated. Grid infrastructure is far from solely an munity agrees on. Global Grid Forum standards, the integration project. Serious, long-term research must Open Grid Services Architecture, Globus, and NSF’s be conducted to support the use of the Grid as a virtu- Middleware Initiative (NMI) are all part of the current al computing platform where an application can “plug picture, and the community must agree on what serv- in” anywhere and achieve reasonable performance. An ices will be available and how they will be interfaced. impressive list of problems must be solved for the The next layer is comprised of user-focused and Grid to achieve its promise, including scheduling of community-focused middleware, pre-NMI software, Grid applications for performance as well as through- and other packages. While the common infrastructure put, the development of policies that can promote sta- layer is evolving largely as open source, the middle- bility of the Grid while crossing political, social, and ware layer will likely have proprietary software and technological boundaries, the development of pro- vendor products, too. The National Partnership for gramming environments which promote the develop- Advanced Computational Infrastructure (NPACI) is ment and deployment of adaptive, performance-effi- developing an interoperable collection of software cient programs for the Grid (such as those being called the “NPACkage” that will be deployed at all developed on the GrADS project), security, fault-toler- NPACI resource sites on top of NMI and NPACI ance, performance monitors, debuggers, and other resources (constituting an NPACI grid) as well as at Grid tools. other sites in the emerging global Grid. If we are thoughtful, serious, and organized about Finally, the applications layer provides the raison our approach to building the infrastructure, we should d’être for the Grid. Without applications that truly find have a usable, useful, and performance-efficient Grid the Grid a useful platform, the Grid can’t be success- by the end of the decade that evolves with new hard- ful. Note that if the Grid is developed properly, it will ware, new software, and new applications. This is a lot provide access for applications to any Grid resources, of work and much must be done in the meantime whether or not the application is distributed. It is criti- from infrastructure integration and application devel- cal for our community to work closely with the appli- opment to basic research. cations communities to develop useful application How will we build this vision of the Grid? models for the Grid. The Grid user community of the Building the Grid and developing a robust and usable next decade must be a broad community encompass- software infrastructure requires unprecedented coordi- ing existing Grid application paradigms (embarrass- nation and cooperation. Given that grid research start- ingly parallel applications, parameter sweeps, staged ed with a relatively small community that remains applications, etc.) as well as applications with depen- closely knit (some say too much so), there has been an dences (such as those found in computational biolo- opportunity for agreement on a basic service architec- gy), data-oriented “killer apps” over the next decade, ture approach and basic interfaces that have allowed and applications with polyalgorithms. the community to work together effectively. In partic- The development of this Community Grid Model, ular, a community model has evolved for the Grid as well as serious research into the problems of devel- with a four-layer design. oping the Grid that are not “low hanging fruit” is crit- The resource layer will always be the available ical to fulfill the promise of the Grid. The rapid devel- resources. On the TeraGrid project, we have the opment of today’s Grids demonstrates that an enor- opportunity to focus on the middle two layers with a mous amount can be done in a relatively short period larger group because each site will deploy the same of time. With serious focus, serious resources, and processor architecture. With the Extensible Terascale serious cooperation, we should be able to achieve the Facility just proposed, the Grid will be heterogeneous. full vision of the Grid and help usher in a new era of Heterogeneity is a fact of life on the Grid and provides science, software, and technology.