ACADEMIA

The Southeastern Universities Research Association (SURA) has approved plans for expanding its SURAgrid program. SURAgrid was launched last year as a regional collaboration to provide high performance computing resources in support of research, education and economic development within the Southeast region. The SURA Board of Trustees authorized $1 million over the next three years to “support further development of the SURAgrid Program.” The expansion of SURAgrid will add resources and staff to support development of new “grid communities” across the region, with a particular emphasis on coastal ocean observing and prediction and health and biomedical research and services. “By building regional expertise and capabilities in the use of grid computing and creating operational capabilities within the region, SURA, through the SURAgrid initiative, is improving our members’ ability to seek allocations on NSF funded HPC systems and attract federal support for an improved regional cyberinfrastructure,” said SURA Board Chair Otis Brown. Jerry P. Draayer, SURA President and CEO, added, “With our Board expressing its strong support for enhancing SURAgrid as an essential tool for research and development, the region can take a leadership position in building our scientific capacity and knowledge base.” Grid technologies enable the combination of high speed network connectivity with distributed high performance computing (HPC) as a way to support distributed scientific collaboration. SURAgrid is a regional grid initiative focused on improving access to and use of grid computing technologies within the region by creating a sustainable production level distributed grid infrastructure in support of research and education. In parallel to creating this accessible regional resource, efforts are needed to enhance the SURA research community’s ability to develop, port, execute and optimize applications in a distributed HPC grid environment. With its unique emphasis on diversity, heterogeneity and inclusion, SURAgrid will also be positioned to extend these benefits to other communities that are underrepresented in their use of and access to high performance and grid-based computing. “We envision not only building regional infrastructure and machines, but more importantly, we want to build the computational expertise and application communities we know will really advance scientific research across many disciplines. SURA is taking this big next step in grid computing thanks to the vision and participation of many of its member institutions,” said Edward Seidel, director of the Center for Computation & Technology at Louisiana State University and working group co-chair of the SURA HPC-Grid Initiatives Planning Group. The SURAgrid initiative has achieved success in its first stage of development through the involvement of a growing community of SURA member institutions and their voluntary contribution of computing resources – with 25 institutions now participating and contributing a combined total resource pool of nearly 900 processors with combined peak computing capacity of nearly 3 TFlops. Board level support for the SURAgrid initiative investment will allow SURAgrid to develop into a widely available and broadly useful regional resource capable of creating and supporting new communities of science collaborators. For more information about SURAgrid see its Web site.