IT Update SURA Board of Trustees Meeting, November 9-10, 2006
This SURA IT Committee update is part of a package of materials prepared for the Fall 2006 SURA Board of Trustees meeting. These materials include this SURA IT Program Update, the SURA – IBM Partnership Press Release and a September 7 Letter from Jerry Draayer to Doug Van Houweling, the content of which is discussed below. These items are also available on the SURA website at: http://www.sura.org/news/2006/trustees_fall06.htm IT COMMITTEE ACTIVITIES The SURA IT Committee held a summer meeting on July 27, 2006 in Atlanta, Georgia. This meeting was very well attended with 52 people present from SURA member institutions. A summary of the meeting and copies of presentations made at the meeting can be found at: http://www.sura.org/events/ITMtgAtl072706.htm The meeting was essentially broken into two major pieces with the morning spent reviewing the history and current status of high performance network development activities in the SURA region. The rest of the day was focused on generating a dialogue that in general can be divided into two major discussion areas: 1) Leveraging SURA member investments in RONs for maximum benefit to the region, independent of what happens with the national backbones - to improve service and drive down connectivity costs throughout the region 2) General concern and frustration about the breakdown in Internet2-NLR merger talks and the desire by the SURA membership to have an appropriate influence on the governance structures of these two organizations. As a result of this dialogue two working groups were formed. The first focused on examining opportunities for leveraging regional investments in RONs to drive down network connectivity costs and improve services across the region and is being led by Larry Conrad (Florida State University). A white paper is being prepared by this group that will be reported on at the Fall IT Committee meeting. The second group, lead by John Mullin (Georgia Tech) examined ways in which the SURA region can leverage its collective investments in Internet2 and NLR to influence the governance and communications processes of these national academic networking organizations. This effort resulted in a letter from Jerry Draayer to Doug Van Houweling expressing concerns related to the lack of representation of the SURA community in the governance of I2 and the impact of the break down of I2 – NLR merger negotiations on our region. This letter (included as an attachment to this update) resulted in a meeting with Doug Van Houweling and several members of the SURA IT Committee which took place on Thursday, October 26. The outcomes of these discussions are part of the agenda for the Fall IT Committee meeting. The IT Steering Group has endorsed a SURAgrid strategic planning effort, co-chaired by Ed Seidel (LSU) and Alan Blatecky (UNC). Ed and Alan have agreed to lead a planning effort to work with the existing SURAgrid community to review and update the vision and goals for
SURAgrid and develop a strategy for growing the SURAgrid Program over the next 2-3 years. This group is still being formed and is planning an initial meeting during the SC06 event in November. SURAgrid ACTIVITIES General SURAgrid Update Since the SURA Board of Trustees May 2006 resolution recognizing SURAgrid as a major SURA program, progress has continued steadily at the “grass roots” level while preparations have also begun towards more formal structure and planning to enable sustainable growth. One immediate and important next action will be the addition of new SURA resources to support the SURAgrid program. A full-time contractor is already participating, with primary emphasis on resource and application deployment; two full-time staff positions have been developed and posted. The SURA IT staff is also coordinating with the SURA Director of Communications & Relations to develop “products” necessary for increased public relations and visibility (e.g., SURAgrid logo, overview literature, funding and contacts strategy). Several other activities and milestones also mark this as a period of transition for SURAgrid: Increase in SURAgrid participating institutions, resources and applications • Three additional institutions have joined SURAgrid since May: Kennesaw State University, Bowie State University, and Clemson University. Fourteen out of 27 participating institutions are now contributing resources for grid-wide use, with an additional 6 institutions actively working to deploy. Combined capacity is just over 3 teraflops of computing capability, with 8 terabytes of storage. Ten applications are running on or in the process of being ported to SURAgrid, with three recent additional possibilities being explored. o GSU/Multiple Genome Alignment o TTU/Grid-Enabled ENDyne o LSU/SCOOP-Wave Watch 3 o LSU/UCoMS Petroleum Simulation o ODU/Whole Body Tissue Bio-Simulator o UFL/SCOOP-CH3D (using UFL “Grid Appliance”) o UNC/SCOOP-ADCIRC o NCSU/Urban Water Contamination Simulation/Optimization w/EPANET o SURA/SURAgrid Teaching Environment
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o VCU/Virtual Parasite Project (pending further discussion) o ODU/File xfers ODU/Physics to JLAB (pending further discussion) o SURA/others/SERCAT (pending further discussion) The discovery and deployment of applications is being supplemented through two related external grants to SURA: o TATRC (Telemedicine & Advanced Technology Research Center), “Developing Regional Grid Technology Support for TATRC Programs” (Award #W81XWH-06-0419) o NSF SGER (Small Grants for Experimental Research), “Creating a Catalyst Application Set for the Development of Large-Scale Multi-purpose Grid Infrastructure” (NSF OCI0545550). As part of the SGER project SURA is conducting a survey that includes all SURA members, to more completely understand the scope of grid applications and deployment throughout the region. The survey is designed to provide a more complete understanding of the breadth and depth of advanced science and research applications and identify those applications that could benefit from access to resources or regional collaboration through SURAgrid. Survey data will provide direct input into SURAgrid's current infrastructure development and deployment, helping it to become an essential research and education tool for SURA members and their collaborators. Information from the survey will be compiled in a final report, which will be shared with all SURA members in order to increase awareness of the current state of grid activities across the membership and the potential for the development of regional scale projects and proposals.
SURAgrid In-person meeting, September 21 & 22, SURA DC office SURAgrid held its third in-person bi-annual project meeting, with an emphasis on organizational aspects such as mission/goals, structure and participation. A supplemental lab session was also included to further critical progress in testing and deployment of new group account management tools. From this, a SURAgrid project planning working group is being formed to develop and document a multi-year project strategy and implementation plan. Presentations and notes from this meeting will be available on the SURA website at: http://sura.org/programs/sura_grid_communications.html SURAgrid External funding pursuits SURAgrid funding exploration is taking place in multiple forums with SURA IT staff providing overall coordination. Concept development ranges from support for foundational aspects of SURAgrid infrastructure or program to specific uses of SURAgrid by application teams. Programs under review or discussion include: NSF Cybertrust, NSF Major Research Instrumentation (MRI), NSF STCI (Strategic Technologies for Cyberinfrastructure), NSF CCLI (Course, Curriculum, and Laboratory Improvement). EPSCoR Cyberinfrastructure, NSF Cat5: Development of Cyberinfrastructure for the Earth Sciences (Geoinformatics), NIH: Support for Conferences and Scientific Meetings. Plans to advance SURAgrid access management Through ongoing collaboration with the University of Virginia, SURAgrid is developing a twotiered PKI to provide multiple levels of assurance for sharing within SURAgrid and eventually beyond. The system will support production services and also provide a basis for integration into a more global grid fabric. As importantly, it will remain accessible to participants whose local grid deployment or local authentication mechanisms are in test or development.
More information on SURAgrid is available on the SURAgrid Web site at http://www.sura.org/suragrid, or by contacting SURA IT Program Coordinator, Mary Fran Yafchak, maryfran@sura.org. SURAGRID-SCOOP Collaboration Applications coming out of the SURA SCOOP program continue to be a focal point for SURAgrid deployment, providing necessary additional resources to SCOOP while serving as primary examples to refine SURAgrid processes for application and resource deployment and support. • UNC’s grid-enabled version of ADCIRC was the first model from the SCOOP community to be ported to the SURAgrid environment, for forecasting within the 2006 hurricane season. It is currently running at three sites (TAMU, UAH, ULL) with seven others at various stages of configuration and test (UArk, LSU, GSU, UVA, KSU, ODU, GMU). • Grid-enabled WaveWatch3 from LSU began deployment on SURAgrid in early summer as the second SCOOP modeling application for potential use in the 2006 season. Preparation to verify or meet system requirements is in progress at five sites (TAMU, UAB, TACC, UVA, USC) with four others intending to support the application pending resource changes at their end (UMich, UArk, Tulane, GSU) • UFL has proposed to run the CH3D modeling application on SURAgrid as an extension of their local compute pool based on virtualization technologies. ULL is the first SURAgrid site to install and explore this capability; the configuration has been verified and handed off to UFL for initial model runs. As part of SURA’s partnership with IBM, SURA IT has arranged for IBM’s participation in a collaborative SCOOP Program demonstration at the upcoming SuperComputing’06 event (November 13 – 16). IBM is providing SCOOP with SC06 show floor booth space in the IBM area and will be providing access to IBM systems as part of the SCOOP demo. SURAgrid resources will be utilized in the SCOOP demo. While the primary objective of the demo is to showcase SCOOP science and architecture, it also provides a valuable opportunity to highlight SURAgrid and SCOOP-SURAgrid collaboration at an important venue. SURA IT and SCOOP collaborated in the design and management of a two-month study (June – July) to assess the potential value and timing for a Science Gateway to the Teragrid. Independent contractor Judith Utley, formerly representing Old Dominion University in SURAgrid, completed the work. Options reviewed include a SCOOP-specific gateway directly to Teragrid resources, a SURAgrid gateway to bridge access to the Teragrid for SCOOP and other SURAgrid applications, and development of a SCOOP-SURAgrid gateway using the Teragrid gateway process as a model. SURAgrid Corporate Partnership Development Plans to expand the existing SURAgrid infrastructure include the development of non-exclusive corporate partnerships with commercial developers of HPC systems and software. Leveraging the well-developed corporate relationships of the SURA membership, SURA is engaging interested commercial entities with the dual goals of expanding the physical resources available to SURAgrid through substantial product discounts or donations, and the development of mutually beneficial joint research and development partnerships.
The first such partnership was finalized with IBM and announced on August 11, 2006 (http://sura.org/news/docs/IBMSURAgrid.doc). This agreement between IBM and SURA is a three year agreement under which IBM will provide SURAgrid member institutions with specially discounted hardware and software, collaborate on SURAgrid projects, and work closely with university researchers to exploit the large-scale computing capability of SURAgrid. Deployments of IBM high performance computing systems acquired through this partnership are currently in progress at Louisiana State University, Georgia State University and Texas A&M University. For more information about the SURA – IBM partnership contact Gary Crane (gcrane@sura.org). Also, this summer SURA was awarded one of ten Sun Grid Education Grants for 100,000 CPU hours on the Sun Grid Utility platform. This resource will be utilized in support of the Virtual Parasite Project at the Virginia Commonwealth University. For information on VCU’s Virtual Parasite Project see: www.vcu.edu/csbc/vpp/. SURA intends to seek additional corporate partnerships with other providers of HPC hardware and software and is currently exploring potential relationships with Sun Microsystems and Dell.
BIOHEALTH / BIOINFORMATICS PROGRAM DEVELOPMENT SURA IT Fellow Don Riley, Jay Sanders (Telemedicine Consultant) and SURA staff have been working with members of the SURA community and external organizations to explore the utilization of SURAgrid and grid technologies in support of biomedical and bioinformatics applications. Current candidates include: (1) engaging the SURA research community in exploring grid-enabled data mining capabilities using large healthcare data repositories; (2) development, testing and production of medical simulation and modeling programs that can be shared and operated via the grid; (3) linkage of regional medical modeling and simulation capabilities with the delivery of improved training & education applications for medical and military personnel. Specific discussions are underway with the Telecommunications and Advanced Technology Research Center (TATRC) and the Military Health System regarding making their large electronic health records database available for research. SURA is seeking collaborators from within the SURA membership that have applications that could benefit from access to the evolving SURAgrid capabilities and is prepared to assist in seeking funding to support the development of targeted projects in this area. Initial discussions have also been held with the Clinical Research Forum (a consortium of the 50 largest academic medical clinics in the country). Don Riley and Gary Crane have been invited to attend their “IT Roundtable” meeting in DC on October 31; it is expected that Jerry Draayer will be invited to address the CRF Annual Meeting in DC in early April. SURA also supported an unsuccessful proposal for a “Regional Telehealth Resource Center” led by the University of Virginia. We are also tracking the recently announced FCC Rural Telehealth Pilot program and are prepared to support any requests for help in proposal submission from telehealth networks within the region. Arising out of these activities, we expect to host another workshop in April on Biomedical and Bioinformatics Research and Grid Applications.
NETWORK INFRASTRUCTURE ACTIVITIES Atlantic Wave AtlanticWave (A-Wave) represents a distributed exchange and peering fabric along the Atlantic coast of North and South America to facilitate exchange and peering services for the national and international networks that interconnect at the international exchange and peering points at MANLAN in NYC, MAX in Washington DC, AMPATH in Miami, and ANSP (the Academic Network of Sao Paulo) and RedCLARA (Cooperação Latino-Americana de Redes Avançadas – Latin American Cooperation of Advanced Networks) in Sao Paulo, Brazil. The A-Wave service on the East Coast will also link to the StarLight international exchange in Chicago and the PacificWave (P-Wave) service, led by CENIC and the Pacific Northwest GigaPoP (PNWGP), which links the international exchanges in LA and Seattle. A-Wave is establishing a 10G wave service between Miami, Washington DC, and New York, interconnected with the NSF-funded link from Miami to Sao Paulo to enable a hybrid of scheduled temporary use and permanent use network services to support discipline-specific and general-purpose high performance computing and networking research collaborations between North, South America and Europe. A Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between SURA and the A-Wave partners has been signed by all parties. The MoU documents the financial commitments by all parties, and provides the initial governance structure for collaborative management of the operation of AWave. Governance will occur through a Governance Committee; engineering and technical guidance will be provided through an Engineering Committee. Additional committees can be established or disbanded by the Governance Committee. A-Wave consists of a 10GigE wave (lambda) provisioned over FLR from Miami to Jacksonville, and over NLR from Jacksonville to New York City. All equipment has been acquired and is in place, and initial testing has been completed; additional testing is underway and should be completed before the November SURA board meeting. Agreements have also been reached with StarLight in Chicago to connect A-Wave and StarLight over a 10GigE wave provided by StarLight (called the TransLight wave) and with CANARIE (Canada) to connect A-Wave to StarLight via a CANARIE-provided 10GigE wave from NYC MANLAN. Connectivity between StarLight and the West Coast Pacific Wave is already in place. This full connectivity between all U.S. international exchange points will be in place by the November 9, 2006 SURA board meeting. The national Supercomputing 2006 conference is being held in Tampa, FL, in mid-November. For this conference, A-Wave is also connected to a 10GigE wave from Miami to Tampa, and AWave will be used to support a number of demonstrations that will fully demonstrate the
connectivity across the country, as well as the international links to Latin America, Canada, Europe and Asia Pacific. The demonstrations planned to utilize A-Wave for SC06 include the following, which will use various bandwidth capacities over A-Wave from 1Gbps to the full 10Gbps: “High Speed Data Gathering, Distribution and Analysis for Physics Discoveries at the Large Hadron Collider” in CERN, led by Caltech; “Enhanced Virtual Machine Turntable” led by Nortel; “Application Specific Network for Support of eVLBI Radio Astronomy Collaboration” and “UltraGrid Video” under the NSF-supported DRAGON (Dynamic Resource Allocation via GMPLS Optical Networks) led by University of Maryland and MAX; “Optical Multicast Layer1 Demo” and “Optical Multicast Layer2 Demo” led by Northwestern University; “OptIPuter Visualization” led CalIT2 center in San Diego and Northwestern University; and the “Teraflow Testbed” led by Naval Research Labs and Northwestern University. The CalTech demo will link multiple sites in U.S. with the LHC project at CERN in Geneva. The DRAGON demo will link radio telescopes in U.S., Europe and Japan to produce real-time image correlation results to Tampa. International Connectivity SURA IT Fellow Don Riley is participating in the organizing committee and is conference cochair for CANS 2006, Chinese American Networking Symposium, to be held in Chicago December 6-7, 2006, in conjunction with the Internet2 Fall Member Meeting in Chicago. Dr. Riley is also participating in helping to launch a new initiative for high speed network connectivity for R&E to India – in partnership with Internet2, CTIS Inc., the IEEAF, Stanford University, MIT and a number of Indian institutions and organizations. Among the participants on the Indian side are the Center for Development of Advanced Computation (CDAC), the ERNET academic network, and the Indian Knowledge Commission. A parallel effort is also beginning to support the Indian Health Information Network (I-HIN) development, also under the Indian Knowledge Commission. Dr. Riley also participated in the Optical Networks Testbed (ONT-3) workshop sponsored by and the GLIF (Global Lambda Integrated Facility) workshop in Tokyo in September. ONT-3 was Co-Sponsored by the US Department of Energy (DOE) and National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Japanese National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT), organized in cooperation with the Federal Large Scale Networking Coordination Group (LSN). AT&T Collaboration Update In December of 2003, AT&T and SURA announced the AT&T – SURA GridFiber Collaboration Agreement that allows the nation’s research and education community to use AT&T’s newest national network infrastructure (NexGen Network) for the development of regional network initiatives. Requests for access to the AT&T dark fiber available through SURA include CENIC (California), MOREnet (Missouri) and the PNWGP (Pacific Northwest GigaPop on behalf of the Norther Tier Networking Consortium). Below is a summary of the current status of the use of the AT&T fiber:
AT&T GridFiber Summary Total no cost IRU miles available Committed AT&T Fiber Routes Segment Jacksonville - Houston New Orleans - Lake Charles Shreveport - Monroe Houston - San Antonio - Dallas HOU -BEAU, DAL - LONG Monroe, LA - Little Rock Little Rock - Tulsa Eugene - Portland Portland - Seattle Seattle - Spokane Spokane - Bozeman Bozeman - Billings Salt Lake City - Ely Kansas City - Frontenac, KS Kansas City - St Louis, MO San Fran - Cloverdale, CA Billings - Minneapolis (for NTNC) Total Committed Total In Progress or Planned Use Total Completed Total Uncommitted Committed but no Planned Use Uncommitted Plus No Planned Use Potential Future Requests (based on recent inquiries) MoreNet: St Louis-Chicago Potential Future Requests 6000 as of October 27, 2006 Miles 1004 234 108 0 244 169 338 147 213 433 472 152 282 119 283 107 920 5225 2708 147 775 1450 Committed NLR LONI LONI LEARN LEARN LOTA LOTA NERO NERO PNWGP PNWGP PNWGP Utah KANREN MOREnet CENIC PNWGP Planned Implementation No Yes No No Yes Yes No Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Comments Used alt fiber - No planned use In planning phase Using alternate fiber Return to pool 7-13-06 Possible future use Possible future use AT&T not completing route AT&T implementation complete In progress In progress Future plans for completion In progress Possible future use In early planning phase In Progress In Progress Request granted 10/23/06
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