[cdn-nucl-l] US DOE-IBM Science Grid Partnership

["Adam McLean" <adam.mclean@utoronto.ca>]

Posted on the Berkeley Lab email news service on March 22, 2002.
Wow - truly impressive computing power.  Take a look at
http://www.nersc.gov/ for more info.
Note that NERSC (the National Energy Research Scientific Computing
Center) was originally founded in 1974 at Lawrence Livermore as the
Controlled Thermonuclear Research Computing Center to serve the magnetic
fusion program there.

Adam

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Berkeley Lab News Release: DOE-IBM Science Grid Partnership

IBM and DOE Supercomputing Center to Transform Far-Flung Supercomputers
into a Utility-like Service Called DOE Science Grid

ARMONK, NY and BERKELEY, CA, March 22, 2002 -- IBM and the U.S.
Department of Energy's (DOE) National Energy Research Scientific
Computing Center (NERSC) today announced a collaboration to begin
deploying the first systems on a nationwide computing grid which will
empower researchers to tackle scientific challenges beyond the
capability of existing computers.

Beginning with two IBM supercomputers and a massive IBM storage
repository, the DOE Science Grid will ultimately grow into a system
capable of processing more than five trillion calculations per second
and storing information equivalent to 200 times the number of books in
the Library of Congress. The collaboration will make the largest
unclassified supercomputer and largest data storage system within DOE
available via the Science Grid by December 2002 - two years sooner than
expected.

The DOE Science Grid will also give scientists around the country access
to far-flung supercomputers and data storage in the same way that an
electrical grid provides consumers with access to widely dispersed
power-generating resources.

"Computing and data grids will establish a uniform computing and data
handling environment -- independent of location - that can be integrated
with scientists' work environment in much the same way that the Web
provided a way to integrate on-line documents into the scientific work
environment," said Horst Simon, director of the NERSC Division at
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). "Undertaking such
a large and long-term project, we are especially pleased to be working
with IBM, which has made grid computing central to its e-business
strategy."

Simon added, "Connecting supercomputer centers to grids will provide the
scientific community with a much more capable set of computing and data
management tools than those available today, and tools that can be used
more easily and effectively than today's tools. This should have a
substantial productivity benefit for scientific R&D, and will open up
entirely new avenues of exploration."

"The DOE Science Grid is a template for the kind of system that can
enable partnerships between public institutions and private companies
aimed at creating new products and technologies for business," said
Peter Ungaro, vice president, high-performance computing, IBM Server
Group.  "This collaboration between IBM and NERSC is a big step forward
in realizing Grid's promise of delivering computing resources as a
utility-like service."

Grids allow geographically distributed organizations to share
applications, data and computing resources.  An emerging model of
computing, Grids are built with clusters of servers joined together over
the Internet, using protocols provided by the Globus open source
community (Globus.org) and other open technologies, including Linux (R).

The DOE Science Grid's goal is to enhance the ability of DOE scientists
to explore the physical world through computational simulation and
scientific experiments and analysis of the resulting data. The Science
Grid will enable scientists at national laboratories and universities
around the country to perform ever-greater calculations, manage and
analyze ever-larger datasets, and perform ever-more complex computer
modeling necessary for DOE to accomplish its scientific missions. In the
future, supercomputers, data storage and experimental facilities at
Berkeley Lab, Argonne, Oak Ridge and Pacific Northwest national
laboratories are all expected to be connected to the DOE Science Grid.

The DOE Science Grid will give scientists real-time access to the
trillions of bytes of data that are stored at national labs around the
country. This kind of seamless access to information is required for
large-scale projects such as genomic and astrophysics research, which
generate much more data than can be stored in a single location.

As it evolves into a reliable infrastructure supporting scientific R&D,
the DOE Science Grid will also facilitate development and use of
collaboration tools that speed up research and allow scientists to
tackle more complex problems. NERSC is located at Berkeley Lab which has
been developing distributed collaboration and distributed data handling
technology for the past 10 years. This decade-long effort provided some
of the precursor grid tools and technologies.

"The combination of NERSC and the DOE Science Grid should provide an
unprecedented capability for incorporating high-end simulation and data
handling into the scientists' working environment where it can be
combined with local compute and data systems, and eventually with the
experiments themselves," said Bill Johnston, head of Berkeley Lab's
Distributed Systems Department and one of the architects of the DOE
Science Grid. "NERSC provides DOE's Office of Science with its major
tools for computational simulation and data analysis and storage, so
this integration of the most capable computing facilities directly with
the scientists' working environment is what will create new levels of
scientific capability and productivity."

NERSC, which operates a 3,328-processor  IBM  supercomputer (currently
the third most powerful computer on earth, according to the TOP500 List
of Supercomputers), had originally planned to make its high-performance
computing systems accessible via the DOE Science Grid by 2004. The
collaboration announced today will allow a core group of NERSC's 2,100
users to begin accessing resources via the DOE Science Grid two years
earlier than originally planned.

"We have been working closely with IBM since the installation of our IBM
supercomputer in 2000. Because we have a common interest in advancing
Grid technology, it made sense to work together," said Bill Kramer, who
is in charge of NERSC's computer operations. "As DOE's flagship center
for unclassified computing, making our resources more easily and more
widely accessible via the Grid will enhance research across a broad
spectrum of scientific disciplines."

In addition to the large IBM supercomputer system, DOE Science Grid
software will be integrated into NERSC's HPSS (High Performance Storage
System) archival data storage system, which has a capacity of 1.3
petabytes and is managed using IBM servers. NERSC and IBM have a strong
history of working together to bring new technology to bear on the most
challenging scientific problem. For example, NERSC and IBM are two of
the six development partners that created and improved the HPSS. NERSC
also operates a 160-processor IBM Netfinity cluster computer system.

By the end of the year, all three of NERSC's IBM systems are expected to
be on the Grid. To do this, IBM will develop its software to be
compatible with Globus and other Grid software, and NERSC will then move
the software into service. NERSC and IBM will also use the collaboration
to identify areas where the Grid software can be improved.

Additional information about NERSC is available at www.nersc.gov.
Berkeley Lab is a U.S. Department of Energy national laboratory located
in Berkeley, California.  It conducts unclassified scientific research
and is managed by the University of California. Visit our Website at
www.lbl.gov/.
 -30-

Contact:    John Buscemi
IBM
914-766-4495
jbuscemi@us.ibm.com

Jon Bashor
NERSC
510-486-5849
JBashor@lbl.gov
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