GOVERNMENT

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and the University of Virginia have received a National Science Foundation Information Technology Research grant of more than $2 million to research and develop technologies for dependable grid computing. Grid computing is already widely used to facilitate advances in science and engineering, but its use in consumer services and critical infrastructure applications has so far been limited because grids have not achieved the required dependability. Grids face threats from equipment or software failures, physical damage from natural disasters, and cyberattacks. Engineering a system to withstand all such attacks would be prohibitively expensive and complex. Instead, the NCSA/Virginia team aims to develop a survivable system, one that provides one or more alternate services in the event an attack or failure disrupts the primary service. As they work toward that goal, the team will test its innovative techniques and technologies using a Grid Dependability and Survivability Architecture. This architecture will be continuously monitored by a series of instruments, providing a wealth of data to assess the results of different approaches. NCSA senior researcher Jim Basney will lead the center's participation in the project, including establishing a "grid dependability lab" for evaluating software as well as developing dependable software components based on the Globus Toolkit. Testing and experimentation will span the test labs at Virginia and NCSA, and the project will develop software based on multiple grid software toolkits, with Virginia focusing on WSRF.NET (developed at Virginia) and NCSA focusing on the Globus Toolkit.