SYSTEMS

AUSTIN, TX -- Sun Microsystems has donated a multi-cpu iForce commercial web server system to assist TACC Grid researchers. Led by Mary Thomas, the TACC Grid Technologies Group will use these systems for grid research and development as well as for production operation of Grid-based portals and tools. TACC will use this gift, valued at approximately $200,000, to expand substantially its Grid portal hosting and development capabilities. Included in the donation are: -- two dual-processor Sun Enterprise E220R application servers, each processor with 1 GB memory and 36 GB disk storage and a Sun StorEdge D100, 72 GB disk array; -- two dual-processor Sun Enterprise E220R data servers, each processor with 1 GB memory and 36 GB disk storage and a Sun StorEdge D100, 108GB disk array; and -- two single-processor Netra T1 portal servers, each server with 0.5 GB memory and 18 GB disk storage. -- System software includes the Solaris 8 Operating Environment software, Code Warrior, and the Sun Developer Essentials Enterprise Edition with iPlanet Netscape software. Given the size and breadth of the donation, TACC will have the opportunity to use the equipment for numerous projects. TACC will use some of the hardware to support production portals and to develop and host its new Portal Web Services project. These projects will be providing services for the NSF funded National Partnership for Applied Computational Infrastructure (NPACI), the NASA Information Power Grid (IPG), the Department of Energy's Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing (DoE SciDAC) program as well as the National Biomedical Computation Research (NBCR) project. In addition to these organizations, TACC will be developing a Texas wide grid in support of TACC, UT, and the High Performance Computing Across Texas (HiPCAT) organizations. TACC will use these systems to research and host Grid infrastructure using Globus, Sun Grid Engine, and the Storage Resource Broker (SRB) software, developed by Dr. Reagan Moore and his team at SDSC. Using current and future versions of GridPort software, TACC will also host and develop portals for NPACI and the Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (PACI), such as the NPACI HotPage. Finally, TACC will host and develop application portals for UT researchers with this hardware. The TACC Grid program will also use this hardware in its collaborations with groups throughout the world. Amongst these are: -- the San Diego Supercomputing Center (SDSC); -- researchers at the NASA Ames Research Center in Palo Alto; -- members of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) Alliance program including the Chief Computer Scientist, Dr. Dennis Gannon, and Dr. Geoffrey Fox, both from the Indiana University; -- Grid developers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL); -- Robert J. Allan of the CLRC Daresbury Laboratory, UK; -- Malcom Atkinson and the National e-Science Center, Edinburgh, Scotland; -- Satoshi Matsuoka, Tokyo Institute of Technology; and -- Satoshi Sekiguchi of National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, Japan. TACC noted the generosity of Sun Microsystems, Inc. and stated that it looks forward to achieving great progress in Grid development as a result of this relationship.