Grid computing is about coordinating and sharing of computing and network resources across geographically dispersed organisations. However, this is hard to do as standards and technology are still being developed.

The Australian Partnership for Advanced Computing (APAC) and QCIF grid infrastructure is supporting e-research programs in the Earth Science domain. Gateway servers have been deployed in several grid sites including Earth Systens Science Computational Centre (ESSCC). ESSCC is developing a portal to provide remote access to computer facilities, and software and hardware in a secure fashion. The challenge is to integrate and offer this service on the APAC grid.

Background

The ESSCC at the University of Queensland focuses on understanding the physics, chemistry and mechanics of solid earth processes over a broad range of spatial and temporal scales. ESSCC researchers are developing computer models to simulate how fault systems interact in order to address questions such as fault behaviour and the physics of earthquake. Understanding these processes can be used for instance, to design safer high-rise buildings.

The group developed escript, a python based environment for implementing and running computational models based on coupled, non-linear, time-dependent partial differential equations that characterise geophysical models. escript is open-source and can be downloaded from the ESSCC web site; it supports parallelisation through OpenMP for distributed shared memory supercomputers such as the Australian Computational Earth Systems Simulator (ACcESS).  This 200 processor SGI Altix supercomputer is co-located with the QCIF supercomputer and shares the QCIF data archival facility.

The Method

As part of the APAC portal project led by Raj Chabbra, Elspeth Thorne is using GridSphere, a portal framework developed under the European Union funded GridLab project, (Novotny 2004; GridSphere 2006), to create a web portal to the ACcESS facility. GridSphere provides standards and libraries to facilitate the development of modular web components that can be shared and exchanged. Figure 1 shows a screenshot of the login page of the portal.

Figure 1: Screenshot of the Grid portal login page to the ACcESS supercomputer.

This project is still under development and not available as a service yet. When in production, the portal will be deployed on the APAC Gateways servers in QCIF at UQ and at CSIRO in Perth. Users with an APAC grid certificate will be able to access the computing and data facilities and run their simulation codes remotely.

Benefits

One of the main benefits of grid computing is consolidation of resources by allowing seamless access to computing and network infrastructure. The portal allows authenticated users to use and run specific simulation codes without having to create computer accounts on each resource.

Participants

Elspeth Thorne, ESSCC -University of Queensland
Dr Lutz Gross, ESSCC - University of Queensland

References

Earth Systems Science Computational Centre
(ESSCC).  Updated 2006. (Accessed 10 August 2006).

Australian Computational Earth Systems Simulator (ACcESS).  Updated 2006. (Accessed 10 August 2006).

Australian Partnership for Advanced Computing (APAC).  Updated 2006. (Accessed 10 August 2006).

GridSphere. Updated 2006. (Accessed 10 August 2006).

Jason Novotny, Michael Russell, Oliver Wehrens. 2004. GridSphere: An Advanced Portal Framework. In, Proceedings of 30th EUROMICRO Conference (EUROMICRO'04) Rennes, France, September 1-3, 2004, pp. 412-419.