INDUSTRY

IBM and The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin) today announced plans to build the largest university grid-computing project in the nation. UT Grid, led by the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at UT Austin, will unite the vast computational resources of the nation's largest university campus, boasting more than 50,000 students and some 20,000 faculty and staff members. TACC will lead the construction of UT Grid in partnership with the university's Information Technology Services (ITS) department, the Institute for Computational and Engineering Sciences (ICES), the Center for Instructional Technologies (CIT), and the College of Engineering. UT Austin Vice President for Research Juan Sanchez hailed the launch as "an important step forward for the campus as a whole and all of its many scientific researchers, for whom grid-based computing is becoming the best way of accessing information and collaborating with researchers around the world. UT Grid is a model of world-class academic and industry organizations collaborating for goals that will benefit society." Grid computing unites tens, hundreds, or even thousands of computers at different locations. The result is a "virtual" system that dramatically changes the landscape of research by boosting compute power and speed to previously unattainable levels. UT Grid will connect computing resources across the university, from the high-end supercomputers at TACC down to personal computers. Researchers, educators, and students will have unprecedented access to massive computing power for simulations, data sharing, and data-intensive calculations in scientific areas ranging from climate modeling, petroleum exploration, and environmental remediation to genomics. UT Grid users will be able to tackle the most challenging computational problems. In addition to computers, UT Grid will integrate access to research databases, educational materials, web servers, and scientific instruments such as imaging scanners, microscopes, and telescopes. By virtualizing such diverse resources, UT Grid will enable significant scientific advances and foster innovative educational programs. "The University of Texas and IBM share a vision of the ability of Grid computing to tackle the world's most complex scientific, technical, and business challenges," said Albert Bunshaft, Vice President, Grid Sales and Business Development, IBM. "Working together, we look forward to exploiting the full potential of open standard's based Grid computing technologies for both research and education at UT Austin." "UT Austin researchers are world leaders in many areas of science and engineering. We look forward to seeing what new problems they can solve using UT Grid, as well as the new paradigms that faculty and students develop to use UT Grid in education," said Dr. Jay Boisseau, Director of TACC. UT Grid incorporates a number of unique features developed by UT and IBM researchers. GridFlow, software developed by TACC, will help campus researchers visualize data wherever they may be, in real time. Another capability is "Roundup," a sub-grid of ordinary PCs across the campus and "volunteered" PCs belonging to faculty, staff, and students. Software supplied for Roundup by United Devices enables the smooth collaboration of any number of these machines, whose spare cycles are in effect a loosely coupled supercomputing resource that can be devoted to scientific problems requiring myriad repetitive computations. Within several years, Boisseau expects that tens of thousands of PCs, laptops, and other devices may be linked by Roundup into UT Grid. The UT Grid Portal, based on TACC's GridPort3 grid portal toolkit, will enable direct use of all UT Grid systems. GridPort3 will also be used to construct specialized science portals that let campus researchers and educators harness the power of UT Grid for their specific applications and visualization needs. IBM and TACC will co-develop grid application software using the Web Services-Resources Framework and Web Services-Notification specifications announced recently at GlobusWorld in San Francisco, the major conference of organizations working to establish open standards and advance Grid computing. In addition, UT Austin plans to link UT Grid to other major Grid projects, including the Texas Internet Grid for Research and Education (TIGRE) and the National Science Foundation's TeraGrid, the world's largest, most comprehensive, distributed infrastructure for open scientific research. Coupling TACC and IBM leadership in Grid computing, UT Austin and IBM have a unique opportunity to explore grid scalability issues, and to apply insights gained from one grid to the other grids.