Grid Computing Activities within the Department of Computer Science at UNC-Charlotte

ITSC 8110 Introduction to Information Technology Research 7:30 pm, Thursday, August 30, 2007

Barry WilkinsonDepartment of Computer ScienceUNC-Charlotte

Outline

• Brief description of Grid computing

• Some Activities:

• Supercomputing 2003 conference demonstration• Original Grid Computing Course (2004-2006)• New Grid Computing Course (2007-)• VisualGrid Project (2005-2006)• SURAGrid• PhD project (2007-)

“The grid virtualizes heterogeneous geographically disperse resources” from "Introduction to Grid Computing with Globus," IBM Redbooks

Using geographically distributed and interconnected computers together for computing and for resource sharing.

Grid Computing

Usually, involves teams working together on a common goal, sharing computing resources and possibly experimental equipment.

Crosses multiple administrative domains.

Geographically distributed grid computing team called a virtual organization.

Applications

Originally e-Science applications– Computational intensive

• Not necessarily one big problem but a problem that has to be solved repeatedly with different parameters.

– Data intensive.– Experimental collaborative projects

Now also e-Business applications to improve business models and practices.

Supercomputing 2003 Demonstration

First personal contact with Grid computing (November 2003).

Participant in Supercomputing 2003 demo organized by the University of Melbourne (Raj Buyya).

21 countries, numerous sites.

Grid Computing Course Taught on North Carolina

Research and Education televideo network that connects all 16 state campuses and also private institutions

Fall 2004: 8 sites Fall 2005: 12 sites Spring 2007: 3 sites

(experimental)

Undergraduate/graduate ITCS 4146/5146

14 Participating Sites (total)

Western Carolina University

UNC Greensboro

Appalachian State University

UNC AshevilleWinston-Salem State

University

UNC Chapel Hill

NC State University

NC Central University

Lenoir Rhyne College

UNC Wilmington

Elon University

UNC Pembroke

UNC Charlotte

Wake Tech. Comm. College

© World Sites Atlas (sitesatlas.com)

SOUTH CAROLINA

VIRGINIA

TENNESSEE

GEORGIA

NORTH CAROLINA

http://www.cs.uncc.edu/~abw/ITCS4146S07

Spring 2007 Course Home Page

Course portal (OGCSE2/Gridsphere)

Portal provides single sign-on to all grid resources.

Getting an accountGo to portal and select “register”

New User

Course on-line registration form

CA/SystemAdministrator

Create accounts, set access control, sign certificate, …

Fill in formProvide password and other information

Email• Request Confirmation• Acknowledgement

Contact other grid resource administrators if users requests account on their resource

Assignment 1 Using Grid computing portal

Assignment 2 Using the Grid through a command line.

Assignment 3 Using a scheduler (Condor-G)

Assignment 4 Installing GT4 core. Creating, deploying, and testing a GT4  Grid service.

Assignment 5 Installing and using GridNexus workflow editor to create and execute workflows.

Assignment 6 Implementing a portlet with OGCSE2/Gridsphere portal.

Assignment 7 MPI assignment on Grid

Mini-project Developing grid computing assignment

Programming Assignments (Spring 2007)

Assignments 4, 5, and 6 require students to install significant software packages on their own computer.

GridNexus Workflow

using Grid Services

Developed by UNC-Wilmington

Guest Speakers (2004) Professor Daniel A. Reed, Chancellor's Eminent Professor,

Vice Chancellor for IT and CIO, UNC-Chapel Hill, Director of Institute for Renaissance Computing, UNC Chapel Hill, Duke University, and NC State University:

– “Grid computing: 21st Century Challenges.”

Dr. Wolfgang Gentzsch, Managing Director, MCNC Grid Computing and Networking Services:

– “Grid Computing in the Industry”

Chuck Kesler, Director, Grid Deployment and Data Center Services, MCNC:

– “Security Policy, Legal, and Regulatory Challenges in Grid Computing Environments”

Professor Ian Foster, Argonne National Laboratory and University of Chicago:

– “The Grid: Beyond the Hype.” Taped presentation (originally given at Duke University, Sept. 14th, 2004).

Guest Speakers (2005)

Jeff Schmitt, genesismolecular.com Jim Jokl, University of Virginia, Art Vandenberg, Georgia

State University, Mary Fran Yafchak, SURA:– "Development and Implementation of an Inter-Institutional Multi-

purpose Grid”

Lavanya Ramakrishnan, The Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI), UNC Chapel Hill, NC State University, and Duke University:

– "Leveraging the Grid: Application Perspective”

Guest Speakers (2007)

Purushotham Bangalore, University of Alabama at Birmingham, “Experiences building and using UABgrid”

Joel Hollingsworth, Elon University, "The Implementation of an Evolutionary-Based Engineering Optimization Framework for the Grid”

Carla Hunt, MCNC, “EnLIGHTened computing: Highly-dynamic Applications Driving Adaptive Grid Resources”.

Some Publications• B. Wilkinson and C. Ferner, “Teaching Grid

Computing across North Carolina Part I and Part II,” IEEE Distributed Systems Online, vol 7, no 6-7, 2006.

• M. A. Holliday, B. Wilkinson, and J. Ruff, “Using an End-to-End Demonstration in an Undergraduate Grid Computing Course,” ACMSE 2006, March 10-12, 2006.

• B. Wilkinson, M. Holliday, and C. Ferner, “Experiences in Teaching a Geographically Distributed Undergraduate Grid Computing Course,” Workshop, IEEE Int. Symp. Cluster Computing and the Grid, Cardiff, UK, May 9 - 12, 2005.

• B. Wilkinson and M. Holliday, “State-Wide Collaborative Grid Computing Course,” 2005 Teaching and Learning with Technology Conference, March 30, 2005.

• M. A. Holliday, B. Wilkinson, J. House, S. Daoud, and C. Ferner, “A Geographically-Distributed, Assignment-Structured Undergraduate Grid Computing Course,” SIGCSE 2005, February 23 - 27, 2005.

National Publicity

Science Grid This WeekFeature story

Gridtoday.com

Successes

This course was first offered in Fall 2004 and is probably the first such course in the country, and possibly in the world, to involve undergraduate students and so many distributed sites using a televideo system such as NCREN and a truly distributed grid infrastructure.

VisualGrid Project (Completed) Goal: Collaborative environmental visualization research using

a grid computing infrastructure Jan 2006 – Dec 2006 Involves two sites:

– UNC-Charlotte– UNC-Asheville

plus Environment Protection Agency, Raleigh, NC (funding agency)

EPA

Project Structure at UNC-C(Virtual Organization)

Visualization Charlotte Visualization Center

Bill Ribrasky, Bank of America Endowed Chair of Information Technology (VisualGrid PI)

Aidong Lu, Asst. Professor of Computer Science Environmental Studies Global Inst. of Energy & Environmental

Syst.

Hilary Inyang, Duke Energy Distinguished Professor

Sunyoung Bae, Research Associate

Grid InfrastructureBarry Wilkinson, Professor of Computer Science

Development System(Four 3.4 Ghz dual Xeons)

visualgrid.uncc.eduVisualization

lab data server (4 Tbytes)

Compute resources52-node (104 processor)

University Research Cluster

Software: Globus 4.0, Condor.

CA

CA

Certificate Authority

UNC-Charlotte resources

UNC-Asheville resources

transylvania.tr.cs.unca.edu(8-node system)

VisualGrid ConfigurationVisualGrid portal

National AttentionListed as one of the portals to use OGCE2

UNC-Asheville

Bioinformatics hardware accelerator

52-node UNC-Charlotte university research cluster

UNC-C Dept of CS grid computing development system

4TB Windows 2003 data server reached through coit-grid02.uncc.edu (samba mount)

Sample VisualGrid portlets

One CMAQ script editing portlet

CMAQ portlet, main page

CMAQ settings portlet Tabs for various CMAQ actions

Other work: Collaboration with SURAGrid

PhD Grid Computing Project

Jeremy Villalobos PhD student (Fall 2007 - )

Previously worked on an MS thesis on Grid Computing, exploring synchronous computations on a Grid computing platform and ways to improve performance.

First paper written:“Latency Hiding by Redundant Processing (LHRP): A Technique to Reduce WAN Latency in Grid-enabled, Iterative, Lightly Coupled Synchronous Parallel Programs,” J. Villalobos and B. Wilkinson

AcknowledgementsSupport for the work described here was provided by the National Science Foundation, and University of North Carolina Office of the President.

• National Science Foundation, “Introducing Grid Computing into the Undergraduate Curricula,” ref. DUE 0410667, PI: A. B. Wilkinson, co-PI’s Mark Holliday and D. Luginbuhl, 2004-2007, Additional Funding,” ref. DUE 0533334, PI: B. Wilkinson, 2005-2007

• University of North Carolina Office of President, “A Consortium to Promote Computational Science and High Performance Computing,” PI: B. Kurtz (Appalachian State University) co-PIs: B. Berg, W. Campbell, W. Hightower, M. Holliday, J. Hollingworth, R. Hull, D-H Hwang, S. Lea, Y. Li, S. V. Providence, D. Powell, R. Shore, S. Suthaharan, R. Tashakkori, and B. Wilkinson, 2004-2006.

• University of North Carolina Office of President, “Fostering Undergraduate Research Partnerships through a Graphical User Environment for the North Carolina Computing Grid,” PI: R. Vetter (UNC-Wilmington), co-PIs: L. Bartolotii, D. R. Berman, R. Boston, J. Brown, C. Ferner, T. Hudson, T. Janicki, N. Martin, M. McClelland, J. Porter, A. Stapleton, and B. Wilkinson, 2004-2006.

Questions?