Global Ring Network for Advanced Applications Development

Project: NSF Alliance Grid Infrastructure

Description: The Alliance's Grid infrastructure is a high-performance computing and data grid built for use by NSF-sponsored researchers at universities and research laborories. This infrastructure has been constructed in a distributed fashion by the Alliance's ""PACS"" members (with NCSA serving as a coordination point and providing the bulk of the computational resources) between 1998 and the present. The Alliance's Grid infrastructure makes heavy use of Globus Toolkit components to provide Grid access to heterogeneous computational resources managed largely independently by these five organizations. Researchers access the Alliance Grid's resources from any location, using Grid interfaces for security, uniformity, and control. Researchers beyond the Alliance can also use familiar Grid interfaces to include Alliance resources in their applications (with appropriate authorization) because the Globus Toolkit is used in other major Grids, including the NASA Information Power Grid (IPG), NPACI Grid, DOE Science Grid, EU DataGrid, and TeraGrid.

Participants: Boston University, NCSA, Univ. of Kentucky, Albuquerque High Performance Computing Center, Univ. of Wisconsin at Madison

Sponsors: National Science Foundation

Countries Involved: US

Tools: Resources available via the Alliance Grid provide an aggregate 5,344 processors and 600 TB of mass storage.

Contact: Dan Reed