Events & News
Colloquium
| Category | Lecture |
| Date | Wednesday, February 11, 2009 |
| Time | 9:30 am |
| Location | GS 906 |
| Details | Special day and time! |
| Speaker | Miron Livny |
| Affiliation | Computer Science Department, Univ. of Wisconsin |
The GLOW and OSG experience
The Grid Laboratory of Wisconsin (GLOW) is a NSF and UW funded, distributed facility at the University of Wisconsin – Madison campus. It is part of the newly formed Center for High Throughput Computing (CHTC) and consists of more than 2500 processing cores and 150 TB of storage located at six different sites. Since its inception in the winter of 04, it has been serving a broad range of disciplines ranging from Biotechnology and Computer Sciences to Medical-Physics and Economics. Each of the GLOW sites is configured as an autonomous locally managed Condor pool that can operate independently when disconnected from the other sites. Under normal conditions, the six pools act like a single Condor system that is coordinated via a highly-available campus-wide matchmaking service. On-campus and off-campus users interact with GLOW through job-managers located on their desktop computers or community gateways.
The Open Science Grid (OSG) is a DOE and NSF co-funded US national distributed computing facility that supports scientific computing via an open collaboration of researchers, software developers and computing, storage and network providers. The OSG Consortium is building and operating the OSG facility, bringing resources and researchers from universities and national laboratories together and cooperating with other national and international infrastructures to give scientists access to shared resources world-wide. The particular characteristics of the OSG are to: Provide guaranteed and opportunistic access to shared resources; operate a heterogeneous environment both in services available at any site and for any Virtual Organization, and multiple implementations behind common interfaces; Support multiple software releases at any one time; Interface to campus and regional grids; Federate with other national and international cyber-infrastructures.
In the talk, we will discuss how the High Throughput computing (HTC) principals that have been guiding us for more than two decades are implemented in the context of these two facilities. Capabilities to "elevate" local GLOW jobs to the national OSG infrastructure will be discussed. These capabilities follow our long standing "bottom-up" approach to the construction and operation of large scale distributed computing infrastructure that maximize reachable capacity while preserving local access, environment and autonomy.