The impact of grid computing on UK research

R Perrott

Queen’s University

Belfast

On-demand creation of powerful virtual computing systems

The Grid: The Web on Steroidshttp://

http://

Web: Uniform access to HTML documents

Grid: Flexible, high-perf access to all significant resources

Sensor nets

Data archives

Computers

Softwarecatalogs

Colleagues

Why Now?• The Internet as infrastructure

– Increasing bandwidth, advanced services

• Advances in storage capacity

– Terabyte for < $15,000

• Increased availability of compute resources

– Clusters, supercomputers, etc.

• Advances in application concepts

– Simulation-based design, advanced scientific instruments, collaborative engineering, ...

Grids– computational grid

• provides the raw computing power, high speed bandwidth interconnection and associate data storage

– information grid

• allows easily accessible connections to major sources of information and tools for its analysis and visualisation

– knowledge grid

• gives added value to the information and also provides intelligent guidance for decision-makers

Grid Architecture

Knowledge GridKnowledge Grid

Information GridInformation Grid

CommunicationsCommunications

Data to Knowledge

Data to Knowledge

ControlControl

Computation & Data GridComputation & Data Grid

Application Layer

Middleware

Base Layer

Program suite that can search out data and services, to satisfy job requirements. User-level API and libraries.

Schedulers to launch the work in the right places. The authentication, authorisation, etc. to allow it to happen.

Local resources that form local contributions to federal resource.

Software Suppliers

Application Users

UK Research Councils Approx.. funding for 2000/01 (£M)

• Biotechnology and Biological Sciences 200Research Council (BBSRC)

• Engineering and Physical Sciences 400Research Council (EPSRC)

• Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) 70

• Medical Research Council (MRC) 350

• Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) 225

• Particle Physics and Astronomy 200Research Council (PPARC)

• Council for the Central Laboratory of the 100Research Councils

UK Grid Development Plan

1. Network of Grid Core Programme e-Science Centres

2. Development of Generic Grid Middleware

3. Grid Grand Challenge Project

4. Support for e-Science Projects

5. International Involvement

6. Grid Network Team

1. Grid Core Programme Centres• National e-Science Centre to achieve

international visibility

• National Centre will host international e-Science seminars ‘similar’ to Newton Institute

• Funding 8 Regional e-Science Centres to form coherent UK Grid

• DTI funding requires matching industrial involvement

• Good overlap with Particle Physics and AstroGrid Centres

Cambridge

Newcastle

Edinburgh

Oxford

Glasgow

Manchester

Cardiff

Soton

London

Belfast

DL

RL Hinxton

Centres will be Access Grid Nodes• Access Grid will enable informal and

formal group to group collaboration

• It enables:

– Distributed lectures and seminars– Virtual meetings– Complex distributed grid demos

• Will improve the user experience (“sense of presence”) - natural interactions (natural audio, big display)

Access Grid

2. Generic Grid Middleware• Continuing dialogue with major industrial

players

- IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Sun, HP ..

- IBM Press Announcement August 2001

• Open Call for Proposals from July 2001 plus Centre industrial projects

• Funding Computer Science involvement in EU DataGrid Middleware Work Packages

3. Grid Interdisciplinary Research Centres Project

• 4 IT-centric IRCs funded

- DIRC : Dependability

- EQUATOR : HCI

- AKT : Knowledge Management

- Medical Informatics

• ‘Grand Challenge’ in Medical/Healthcare Informatics

- issues of security, privacy and trust

4. Support for e-Science Projects

• ‘Grid Starter Kit’ Version 1.0 available for distribution from July 2001

• Set up Grid Support Centre

• Training Courses

• National e-Science Centre Research Seminar Programme

5. International Involvement

• ‘GridNet’ at National Centre for UK participation in the Global Grid Forum

• Funding CERN and iVDGL ‘Grid Fellowships’

• Participation/Leadership in EU Grid Activities

- New FP5 Grid Projects (DataTag, GRIP, …)

• Establishing links with major US Centres – San Diego Supercomputer Center, NCSA

6. Grid Network Team

• Tasked with ensuring adequate end-to-end bandwidth for e-Science Projects

• Identify/fix network bottlenecks

• Identify network requirements of e-Science projects

• Funding traffic engineering project

• Upgrade SuperJANET4 connection to sites

Network Issues• Upgrading SJ4 backbone from 2.5 Gbps to

10 Gbps• Installing 2.5 Gbps link to GEANT pan-

European network• TransAtlantic bandwidth procurement

– 2.5 Gbps dedicated fibre– Connections to Abilene and ESNet

• EU DataTAG project 2.5 Gbps link from CERN to Chicago

Early e-Science DemonstratorsFunded• Dynamic Brain Atlas• Biodiversity• Chemical Structures

Under Development/Consideration• Grid-Microscopy• Robotic Astronomy• Collaborative Visualisation • Mouse Genes• 3D Engineering Prototypes• Medical Imaging/VR

Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council (PPARC)

• GridPP (http://www.gridpp.ac.uk/)

• to develop the Grid technologies required to meet the LHC computing challenge

• collaboration with international grid developments in Europe and the US

Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council (PPARC)

• ASTROGRID (http://www.astrogrid.ac.uk/)

• a ~£4M project aimed at building a data-grid for UK astronomy, which will form the UK contribution to a global Virtual Observatory

EPSRC Testbeds (1)

• DAME : Distributed Aircraft Maintenance Environment

• RealityGrid : closely couple high performance computing, high throughput experiment and visualization

• GEODISE : Grid Enabled Optimisation and DesIgn Search for Engineering

EPSRC Testbeds (2)

• CombiChem : combinatorial chemistry structure-property mapping

• MyGrid : personalised extensible environments for data-intensive experiments in biology

• Discovery Net : high throughput sensing

Distributed Aircraft Maintenance

Environment

Jim Austin, University of York

Peter Dew, Leeds

Graham Hesketh, Rolls-Royce

In flight data

Airline

Maintenance Centre

Ground Station

Global Network

Internet, e-mail, pager

DS&S Engine Health Center

Data centre

Aims

• To build a generic grid test bed for distributed diagnostics on a global scale

• To demonstrate this on distributed aircraft maintenance

• Evaluate the effectiveness of grid for this task• To deliver grid-enabled technologies that

underpin the application• To investigate performance issues

Computational Infrastructure

LeedsLocal Grid

Onyx 33D InteractiveGraphics &Conferencing

Lab. Machines

teradataCluster

Shared Mem.

White Rose Computational Grid

(SAN)

York Shared Memory

Sheffield Dist. Memory

RunningAcrossYHMAN

Super Janet

MyGrid

Personalised

extensible environments for

data-intensive experiments

in biology

ibm

Professor Carole Goble,University of Manchester

Dr Alan Robinson,EBI

Consortium

• Scientific Team– Biologists

– GSK, AZ, Merck KGaA, Manchester, EBI

• Technical Team– Manchester, Southampton, Newcastle, Sheffield, EBI,

Nottingham

– IBM, SUN

– GeneticXchange

– Network Inference, Epistemics Ltd

Comparative Functional Genomics

• Vast amounts of data & escalating

• Highly heterogeneous– Data types– Data forms– Community

• Highly complex and inter-related

• Volatile

MyGrid e-Science Objectives

Revolutionise scientific practice in biology• Straightforward discovery, interoperation, sharing• Improving quality of both experiments and data• Individual creativity & collaborative working• Enabling genomic level bioinformatics

Cottage Industry to an Industrial Scale

On the shoulders of giants

We are not starting from scratch…• Globus Starter Kit …• Web Service initiatives …• Our own environments …• Integration platforms for bioinformatics …• Standards e.g. OMG LSR, I3C …• Experience with Open Source

Specific Outcomes

• E-Scientists– Environment built on toolkits for service access,

personalisation & community

– Gene function expression analysis

– Annotation workbench for the PRINTS pattern database

• Developers– MyGrid-in-a-Box developers kit

– Re-purposing existing integration platforms

Discovery Net

• Yike Guo, John Darlington (Dept. of Computing),

• John Hassard (Depts. of Physics and Bioengineering)

• Bob Spence (Dept. of Electrical Engineering)• Tony Cass (Department of Biochemistry),• Sevket Durucan (T. H. Huxley School of Environment)

• Imperial College London

Discovery Net

AIM

• To design, develop and implement an infrastructure to support real time processing, interaction, integration, visualisation and mining of massive amounts of time critical data generated by high throughput devices.

The Consortium

• Industry Connection : 4 Spin-off companies + related companies (AstraZeneca, Pfizer, GSK, Cisco, IBM, HP, Fujitsu, Gene Logic, Applera, Evotec, International Power, Hydro Quebec, BP, British Energy, ….)

Industrial Contribution

• Hardware : sensors (photodiode arrays), systems (optics, mechanical systems, DSPs, FPGAs)

• Software (analysis packages, algorithms, data warehousing and mining systems)

• Intellectual Property: access to IP portfolio suite at no cost

• Data: raw and processed data from biotechnology, pharmacogenomic, remote sensing (GUSTO installations, satellite data from geo-hazard programmes) and renewable energy data (from remote tidal power systems)

High Throughput Sensing

Characteristics

Different Devices but same computational characteristics

•Data intensive &

• Data dispersive

•large scale,

•heterogeneous

•distributed data

•Real-time data manipulation Need to

• calibrate

• integrate

• analyse

GRID issues:

Data issues:

Information issues:

Discovery issues:  

Distributed DevicesDistributed

warehousing

Distributed Reference DBs

Distributed Users

Collaborative applications

Testbed ApplicationsHTS Applications

Large-scale Dynamic Real- time Decision support

Large-scale Dynamic System Knowledge Discovery

Bio Chip Applications

Protein-folding chips: SNP chips, Diff. Gene chips using LFIIProtein-based fluorescent micro arrays

Renewable energy Applications

Tidal EnergyConnections to other renewable initiatives (solar, biomass, fuel cells), & to CHP and baseload stations

Remote Sensing Applications

Air Sensing, GUSTOGeological, geohazard analysis

1-100

10-100

>50000Image

RegistrationVisualisation

PredictiveModelling

RT decisions

1-100010-1000 >10000

Data QualityVisualisationStructuringClusteringDistributed Dynamic

Knowledge Management

Throughput(GB/s)

Size(petabytes)

Node Number

operations

1-10 1-10

>20000

StructuringMiningOptimisationRT decisions

Large-scale urban air sensing applicationsEach GUSTO air pollution system produces 1kbit per second, or 1010 bits per year. We expect to increase the number (from the present 2 systems) to over 20,000 over next 3 years, to reach a total of 0.6 petabytes of data within the 3-year ramp-up.

GUSTO

GUSTO

NO

simulant 6.7.2001

The useful information comes from time-resolved correlations among remote stations, and with other environmental data sets.

You are here

The IC AdvantageThe IC infrastructure: microgird for the testbed

ICPC Resource

+20 TB of disk storage

+25 TB of tape storage

3 Clusters

(> 1 Tera Flops)

Network upgrade

Over than 12000 end devices

10 Mb/s – 1Gb/s to end devices

1 Gb/s between floors

10 Gb/s to backbone

10 Gb/s between backbone router matrix and wireless capability

2x1Gb/s to LMAN II

(10Gb/s scheduled 2004)

Access to disparate off-campus sites: IC hospitals, Wye College etc.

Core router switches

Building router switches

Floor switches

End devices

Core Fibre

Core to Building Fibre

Building Riser Fibre

Cat 5 floor wiring

London MANJANET

Proposed firewall

workstation cluster

storage

SMP

Central Computing Facilities

wireless

End devices

Floor switches

Building Router Switches

Core Router Switches

Proposed Firewall

London MAN/ JANET

£3m SRIF funding

150 Gflops Processing

>100 GB Memory

5 TB of disk storage

Conclusions• Good ‘buy-in’ from scientists and engineers• Considerable industrial interest • Reasonable ‘buy-in’ from good fraction of

Computer Science community but not all• Serious interest in Grids from IBM, HP,

Oracle and Sun• On paper UK now has most visible and

focussed e-Science/Grid programme in Europe

Now have to deliver!

US Grid Projects/Proposals• NASA Information Power Grid• DOE Science Grid• NSF National Virtual Observatory• NSF GriPhyN• DOE Particle Physics Data Grid• NSF Distributed Terascale Facility• DOE ASCI Grid• DOE Earth Systems Grid• DARPA CoABS Grid• NEESGrid• NSF BIRN• NSF iVDGL

EU GridProjects

• DataGrid (CERN, ..)• EuroGrid (Unicore)• DataTag (TTT…)• Astrophysical Virtual Observatory• GRIP (Globus/Unicore)• GRIA (Industrial applications)• GridLab (Cactus Toolkit)• CrossGrid (Infrastructure Components)• EGSO (Solar Physics)