GridPP2: from Prototype to Production
Tue 16 Dec 2003
PPARC has approved funding for GridPP2 of 15.9M plus a possible extra 1M for LHC Computing Grid (LCG) Project. GridPP2, "From Prototype to Production", builds on the success of the current GridPP project "From Web to Grid" to build a production Grid for Particle Physics in the UK as part of LCG which in turn will form the basis of the European Framework VI project, Enabling Grids for e-Science in Europe (EGEE).
The key components of GridPP2 will be the establishment of a production Tier-1 UK Regional Centre at RAL, 4 production Tier-2 Centres in the Institutes, further developments of Middleware, Networking and Security and support for the experiments' applications. Approximately 8M is expected to go to the Universities who are themselves providing the hardware for the Tier-2 centres.
The UK Grid will form one of the World's most powerful "Virtual" Supercomputers with the equivalent of 20,000 1GHz PCs available for use by UK Physicists and collaborators. This will allow UK Physicists to be at the forefront of analysis of data from the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in 2007 where the equivalent of 20 million CDs of data will be produced per year.
The current prototype 'testbed' was up and running for a year from Sept 2002-03 with 10 sites across the UK handling jobs based on the first version of the Grid middleware. Lessons were learnt from this release and the running of the testbed which were incorporated into LCG-1 the major LCG release in Sept 2003, where a worldwide production grid was established for the first time as the LHC Computing Grid went online. For more details see: http://www.gridpp.ac.uk/news/-1064914023.964276.wlg
This prototype Grid was recently demonstrated at the UK e-Science and DTI stand at the premier Supercomputing meeting (SC2003) in Phoenix, Arizona. This showed computing jobs being being flung all around the world from a central "broker" able to find and efficiently utilise the resources in this massive Virtual SuperComputer. For more details see: http://www.gridpp.ac.uk/news/-1069346876.332170.wlg
The new phase, GridPP2, will be based on more intelligent software, interfacing to all the particle physics experiments where the UK participates.
"GridPP2 will test new Grid computing technologies on a scale that we could have barely considered two years ago." said Tony Doyle, the GridPP Project Leader "The Grid deployed in phase 1 taught us about the importance of a series of testbeds where the software is incrementally integrated and tested within an annual deployment lifecycle. Running a stable large-scale grid service will be a major challenge and for this reason a key component of GridPP2 will be the establishment a core production team at the heart of deployment."
"The GridPP2 Grid will address the future computing requirements of all the UK Particle Physics Experiments and should provide efficient sharing of resources between Particle Physics and other disciplines through the Tier-2 centres at the institutes." said Steve Lloyd, GridPP Collaboration Board Chair.
A PPARC press release entitled "World's biggest virtual supercomputer given the go-ahead" is available from http://www.pparc.ac.uk/Nw/GridPP2.asp
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