APPLICATIONS

The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) has been awarded a three year grant totaling $2.1M from the Department of Energy (DoE) Mathematics, Information, and Computational Sciences (MICS) program to support the DoE Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing (SciDAC) Collaboratory projects through the development of new web portal technologies. "The overall goal of this project is the development and deployment of interoperable portal and web services that can be used by a large number of independent users across the entire DoE Science Grid," said Mary Thomas, TACC Grid Computing Group Manager and Principal Investigator for the project. Other members of the team, who will receive portions of the grant based on their contributions, include Co-Principal Investigator Geoffrey Fox from Indiana University (IU) and Co-Investigators Reagan Moore of the University of California at San Diego (UCSD), Dennis Gannon of IU, and Dave Schissel of General Atomics (GA). "The team that will be working on this grant is well qualified to provide an important component in supporting the collaboratory software environment," said Dr. Mary Anne Scott, MICS Program Manager for Collaboratory Research. The recently funded SciDAC program promotes the advancement of scientific and computational problem solving capabilities for the DoE Office of Science (SC). Within this program, three areas are defined: Scientific Challenge Codes, Computing Systems and Mathematical Software, and Collaboratory Software and Infrastructure. Collaboratory projects will build a uniform support environment in which DoE SC users will be able to run jobs and experiments and to manipulate data on the Grid. Grid portals provide the scientific community with familiar, simplified interfaces to the Grid and Grid services, with the SciDAC program bringing the Grid to the DoE community, there will be a need to deploy grid portals onto the SciDAC Grids and Collaboratory. Grid portals are now being used on production grids for large organizations such as the National Science Foundation (NSF) Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (PACI), National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Information Power Grid (IPG), and National Institutes of Health (NIH) Biomedical Informatics Research Network (BIRN). The software used to build these portals has been converted to generalized application portal development toolkits that simplify the application developers' task of accessing the complex grid technologies used for grid services. The emergence of web service technologies has provided the Grid and portal communities with an opportunity to develop interoperable protocols and standards that can be used for grid services and portals. This will simplify the use of grids and grid technologies and will encourage the use and deployment of scientific applications and experiments on the Grid. The efforts of this team will concentrate on research, development, and deployment activities within four primary tasks: the development of portal systems, management of data collections, migration of technologies from the DoE sponsored Common Component Architecture (CCA) project, and the development of web services in support of the above activities. Initial deployment of these technologies will be on the National Fusion Collaboratory, with plans to explore deployment onto the DoE Science Grid, the Collaboratory for Multi-Scale Chemical Science, and other collaboratories in the later phases of the project.