nanoHUB and TeraGrid Partner
The nanoHUB and the TeraGrid partner to provide state of the art computing resources to the nanoHUB users. With the TeraGrid entering a new phase after its construction, the nanoHUB is becoming a TeraGrid Science Gateway. Compute intensive nanoHUB applications will be able to run on TeraGrid resources and NCN partners will be able to access these resources for their own research.
The TeraGrid is the leading nation wide infrastructure combining leadership class resources at eight partner sites to create an integrated, persistent computational resource. Deployment of TeraGrid was completed in September 2005, bringing over 40 teraflops of computing power and nearly 2 petabytes of rotating storage, and specialized data analysis and visualization resources into production, interconnected at 10-30 gigabits/second via a dedicated national network.
TeraGrid is coordinated by the Grid Infrastructure Group (GIG) led by the University of Chicago. The GIG works in partnership with eight Resource Provider (RP) sites that participated in the TeraGrid construction project from 2001 through 2004.
"The TeraGrid is working closely with the nanoHUB team and the NCN to integrate their middleware to the TeraGrid resources. We are excited to have nanoHB as a science gateway partner, brining tremendous capabilities to the nanoHUB infrastructure by enabling the NCN to offer more comute intensive applications and empowering the NCN researchers to tackle the grand challenge on nanotechnology" says Charlie Catlett the TeraGrid Director.
Science Gateways represent a shift from the traditional high performance computing use by enabling entire communities of users associated with a common scientific goal to use the national resources through a common interface. Science Gateways are enabled by a community allocation whose goal is to delegate account management, accounting, certificates management and user support to the gateway developers.
Some of these gateways are about exposing specific set of community codes to that anonymous scientists can run them. Others are making what we call a :Metaportal:, meaning a community portal that can be used in general to bring new services and applications to the community. A common trait of all gateways is that they will interact with the Teragrid through various service interfaces provided by the Teragrid.
NanoHUB is now a TeraGrid science gateway and the nanoHUB middleware (http://nmi.nanohub.org) supported by the NSF National Middleware Initiative will make the link between the nanoHUB applications and the TeraGrid resources. nanoHUB users will soon see the impact of this partnership and the middleware effort with the ability to run parallel jobs on high capability platforms. The NCN researchers and students will also benefit from the partnership by gaining access to the TeraGrid infrastructure through the NCN community allocation.