Global Ring Network for Advanced Applications Development

Project: NASA Information Power Grid (IPG) Infrastructure

Description: NASA's Information Power Grid (IPG) is a high-performance computing and data grid built primarily for use by NASA scientists and engineers. The IPG has been constructed by NASA between 1998 and the present making heavy use of Globus Toolkit components to provide Grid access to heterogeneous computational resources managed by several independent research laboratories. Scientists and engineers access the IPG's computational resources from any location with Grid interfaces providing security, uniformity, and control. Scientists beyond NASA can also use familiar Grid interfaces to include IPG resources in their applications (with appropriate authorization) because the Globus Toolkit is used in other major Grids, including the Alliance Grid, NPACI Grid, DOE Science Grid, EU DataGrid, and TeraGrid. The IPG infrastructure has been and is being used by numerous scientific and engineering efforts both within and beyond NASA. A few of these are described here (see ""Aviation Safety Project"" and ""AeroDB Trials""), and more are available on the NASA websites listed in this entry.

Participants: NASA Ames, NASA Glenn, NASA Langley, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, NSF Alliance, NSF NPACI

Sponsors: NASA Information Power Grid program, National Science Foundation

Countries Involved: US

Tools: Resources available via the IPG in April, 2003 included an aggregate 1,944 processors, 665 GB of system memory, and 17.7 TB of storage.

Contact: Bill Johnston

Additional Info: [NOTE TO TOM: I suspect that the IPG has been used in large astrophysics simulations done by Ed Seidel's Cactus team (see ""GridLab""), most likely for SCxy conferences, but I'm not certain of this. Might even have been involved in Gordon Bell Award-winning demonstrations.] GRAPHICS: See http://www.nas.nasa.gov/ (esp. http://www.nas.nasa.gov/About/Gridpoints/gridpoints.html)