NPACI Archive Page
The NPACI program ended on September 30, 2004. This site is presented for archival purposes only.
For current resources at each of the partner sites, please refer to the appropriate institution site.
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Advanced cyber-infrastructure for the
NPACI Community
The goal of the NPACI Grid is to provide
an advanced cyber-infrastructure for the scientific computing
requirements of the NPACI community. This production
class grid consists of hardware, software, network, and data
resources located at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC),
the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) in Austin, TX,
and the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. The NPACI
Grid will soon be deployed at the California Institute of
Technology. These resource
sites have deployed an integrated set of grid middleware and
advanced NPACI applications to enable a robust environment
for your computing needs and enable
you to perform scientific research at ever increasing levels
of simulation and sophistication.
NPACI represents a classic Virtual Organization
and a great opportunity for grid technologies:
- the resources comprising the grid belong to four different
administrative domains, each with their own rules, regulations,
requirements, accounting procedures, etc.
- the resources are heterogeneous and distributed: a large
AIX cluster in San Diego; two AMD based Linux clusters in
Michigan; and three large shared-memory server nodes in
Texas; etc.
Some of the advantages to using the grid
interface to these resources include:
- Security: single
sign on for multiple hosts in various administrative
domains
- Scheduler abstraction: using the Resource
Specification Language from the Globus Toolkit, users
don't need to code job submission in different formats depending
on whether the job(s) will be submitted to LoadLeveler,
PBSPro, or forked
- Advanced job submission and monitoring using Condor-G
- Resource discovery and status through the HotPage
and a web interface to the Globus
monitoring service
- Network bandwidth monitoring
and prediction between resource sites via the Network Weather
Service
- Distributed data analysis and management capabilities
through DataCutter and SRB
There are currently 14
software packages that have been deployed across the resource
sites to form the NPACI Grid. Based on the NSF Middleware
Initiative and including other key NPACI applications, these
complex software packages have varying levels of integration
and interoperability. The NPACKage team has assembled
a collection of versions that is regularly tested for interoperability
on both internal and production systems. Details of
the complete software stack are available on the NPACKage
site.
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