GU - the Grid University

With over 250 CPUs and multiple Terabytes of disk, the University of Glasgow's Department of Physics and Astronomy recently significantly improved its provision of computational and data storage resources to the world's largest computational grid, the LHC Computing Grid (LCG) project.

Glasgow's Contribution

Of the UK's 2,000 CPUs, Glasgow's contribution now makes up more than 10% of the total. 2.5 Terabytes of data storage are also provided to the LCG Grid. The cluster which supplies these resources (ScotGrid www.scotgrid.ac.uk) is housed in the Kelvin Building.

This significant contribution was accomplished by installing the LCG Grid software stack across the entire ScotGrid cluster. Access to the resources is controlled by two "front end" servers - one for storage and one for computational resources.

Since operations began on June 25th 2002, Glasgow's cluster has accumulated almost 2 million CPU hours and processed more than 200,000 jobs. A shared infrastructure is now used for the Grid and for local University research groups working on experimental and theoretical particle physics analyses, bioinformatics, information retrieval, device modelling and medical imaging. This provides improved overall computing resource utilisation and a firm foundation for improved research output across all faculties of the University.

Building on the talk given to the Distributed IT staff "e-Science at Glasgow: Past, Present and Future", Dr Richard Sinnott, Technical Director for the National e-Science Centre at the University of Glasgow (www.nesc.ac.uk), outlined his vision for the Glasgow Campus Grid infrastructure which has at its heart consolidation of resources and co-ordination of people. Dr Sinnott commented that "Glasgow has a significant lead in e-Science and Grid technologies, as shown through the LCG project and co-hosting of the National e-Science Centre. We need to ensure that this advantage is maintained and ideally extended." To address this, work is now progressing on extending the campus infrastructure to utilise the recently deployed Storage Area Network and other compute clusters with co-ordination between numerous faculty and Computer Services. A primary goal of this infrastructure will be simple access to HPC clusters and fast access to virtual research data sets to ensure that the campus Grid meets the needs of all research communities at Glasgow.

Linda McCormick, Director of Computing Service added: "The Computing Service role in the consolidation efforts and co-ordination of personnel is key for Glasgow to be a leading research lead university. With the SAN and second HPC cluster procurement and their integration into the Glasgow Campus Grid by several faculty and Computing Service personnel, we are already well advanced in this and building on successful partnerships"

ScotGrid

The ScotGrid Tier-2 Centre is a collaboration between the universities of Glasgow, Edinburgh and Durham, as part of the UK-wide Grid for UK Particle Physics (GridPP) project led by Prof. Tony Doyle which operates as part of the wider Enabling Grids for eSciencE (EGEE) project. Prof. Doyle commented that "The UK is the biggest single contributor to international projects, with more than a fifth of the Grid's processing power at its 16 sites. It is a major achievement that the ScotGrid project at Glasgow University has integrated use of local and Grid resources: this development provides a lead for sites elsewhere in the UK and the rest of the world."

The ScotGrid project was funded by SHEFC (now SFC) for the analysis of data primarily from the ATLAS and LHCb experiments at the Large Hadron Collider and from other experiments. It is now providing IBM solutions for Grid Computing in Particle Physics, Bioinformatics as well as Grid Data Management, medical imaging and device modelling simulations.

ScotGrid Technical Coordinator Fraser Speirs said "Improving our contribution to the LHC Computing Grid makes the University of Glasgow a significant part of a project that spans Europe and the worldwide scientific research community".

LCG Resources

The sites participating in the LCG project are primarily universities and research laboratories. They contribute more than 10,000 central processor units (CPUs) and a total of nearly 10 million Gigabytes of storage capacity on disk and tape. More than 2,000 of these CPUs are in the UK, along with one million Gigabytes of storage capacity. LCG receives substantial support from the EU-funded EGEE project, which is a major contributor to the operation of the LCG project, as well as the Life Sciences and other computationally-intensive scientific endeavours.