Initiative in Innovative Computing @ Harvard
Seminar Series
Wednesday, February 28, 2007; 4:00pm
60 Oxford Street, Room 330
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.
***Parking is available in the 52 Oxford Street Garage. Please tell
the attendant that you are attending the IIC Seminar.
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