Initiative in Innovative Computing @ Harvard

Seminar Series

Wednesday, February 28, 2007; 4:00pm

Joy Sircar, CIO, Harvard Engineering & Applied Sciences, Project Director, The Harvard Crimson Grid Project

Seminar Title: Building a Campus eInfrastructure: the CrimsonGrid Experience

Abstract

The past decade has witnessed the emergence of eScience as a key enabling framework to support the rapidly growing trend in large scale, multidisciplinary and collaborative research, yet most university campuses today lack the infrastructure to support eScience.

The computing grids that evolved to serve as a foundation for many of the early eScience initiatives focused primarily on ‘resource scavenging’ within vertical communities of domain specific researchers. However, we believe that unless these community and national grids are tightly and seamlessly coupled to the numerous distributed networked assets on campus—computing, storage, and information— researchers on many university campuses will not be able to fully leverage the benefits of eScience. In addition to leveraging all available resources, university infrastructures will also require to be integrated with an extended capability that will bridge the many local centers of disciplines, policy, funding, and administrative oversight in a federated manner. The CrimsonGrid Project at Harvard has a dual objective. First, strategically re-think the design of extended campus infrastructures, eInfrastructures, to enable eScience and innovative uses of computing for research. Second, enable the federation of computing efforts on campus to those in the regional virtual research communities.

In our talk, we provide an overview of our experiences, both technical and social, as we begin to deploy and leverage local resources within the campus and federate these resources to regional and community grids. Using open standards as a foundation, the CrimsonGrid connects locally managed HPC clusters, knowledge repositories, management tools, and web services across the many resource centers on campus and beyond. The new eInfrastructure supports a "bottom-up" approach to the construction and operation of large-scale distributed/grid computing platforms that may also operate independently when disconnected from the other sites.

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