Science Grid Genesis

Cranial Dome writes "According to this Cnet.com story, the Department of Energy (DOE) is working to interconnect the first two computers which will form the genesis of the DOE Science Grid, a virtual supercomputing system which will eventually encompass many more systems at several locations. The larger of the two machines: DOE National Energy Research Science Center's (NERSC) IBM SP RS/6000, a distributed memory machine with 2,944 compute processors. This machine, together with a smaller 160 processor Intel system, will make up a combined 3,328 processor Unix system with 1.3 petabytes(!) of storage space. And this is only the beginning..."

Comments

Hmmm, This and the PS3

[gwizah]

Well it seems as though we may now know what Sony Engineers mean by "Distributed Computing"

Seriously though, What type of security system is the DOE building into this, which is essentially a large mainframe? Its understandable to be worried when the DOE handles things such as nuclear secrets that sometimes slip into the hands of certain researchers, much like they were picking them up at a drive-through.

Im curious to see how the data will be encrypted/decrypted along such a vast system.

The scheme of it all

[fruey]

Go to the link about the actual project. Look at the PDF. It explains things quite well, it's a wicked thang that is happening...

Here, for the lazy, are some of the objectives:

• Computational modeling,multi-disciplinary simulation,and scientific data analysis with a world-wide scope of participants and the use of computing and data resources at many sites.
• High Energy Physics data analysis that involves hundreds of collaborators,and tens of institutions providing data and computing resources
• Observational cosmology that involves data collection from a world-wide collection of instruments, analysis of that data to re-target the instruments,and subsequent comparison of the observational data with simulation results
• Climate modeling that involves coupling simulations running on different supercomputers
• Real-time data analysis and collaboration involving on-line instruments,especially those that are unique national resources
• Generation, management, and use of very large,complex data archives that are shared across global science communities e..g.high energy physics data,earth environment data,human genome data
• Collaborative,interactive analysis and visualization of massive datasets e.g.DOEs Combustion Corridor project
• Multi-disciplinary R&D that integrates the computing and data aspects of the different scientific disciplines.

Thus, the applications are enormous. Not that you couldn't do it distributed across desktops à la SETI, but here we're talking data integrity, and let's not forget that even SETI has a kick-ass centralised server setup or the whole thing wouldn't work anyway.

But especially interesting is the document filename:-

DOE_Science_Grid_Collaboratory_Pilot_Proposal_03_1 4.nobudget.pdf

Now, who can get me the version WITH the budget? I want it. Hehe.