Jayanta Sircar from Harvard is talking about the CrimsonGrid. CrimsonGrid is an attempt to bring a (school-based) IT organization approach to supporting grids for science.
The motivation – the future of the Univerity’s research vision is intimately connected to cyber-infrastructure. Interdisciplinary faculty collaborations are a high priority, and IT support must align itself to meet new needs. Research environments cannot be separated from personal productivity environment.
The approach: work at interface innovation and production. Build an ecosystem. Establish role of faculty as stakeholders. Build roles for industry. Serve as a ‘sandbox’ for campus technology test beds – zero penalty for failure.
But what is a campus grid? Many vertical grids? Every fluster tethered to a GT appliance? One fabric hosting many virtual organizations? All of the above, and then some. Last year had the first international workshop on campus grids as part of the global grid forum.
Aspirations – don’t re-invent the wheel whenever possible. Want to leverage the contributions of the OSG community to develop a model for building switched (virtualized) campus cyberinfrastructure – a campus grid.
Crimson Grid initiative started in April 2004 – to engineer a technology fabric. Though the Crimson Grid is housed in Engineering and Applied Sciences, they are reaching out to the rest of campus and bringing others in – the medical school grid is being established as part of the Crimson Grid. They are also collaborating with other campuses, including GLOW at Wisconsin. They’re running about ~750 procs in crimson grid, and linking up with GLOW who are running about 1000 procs for testing resource sharing.
There’s a question on how they determined the sizing of compute power for the campus grid, given the local processing power in departments and the global power available in the open grids. The question didn’t really get answered.
Oren Sreebny 