Update – August 2007

 

  

NEWS

- - SURAgrid Fall Meeting - -

The SURAgrid Fall meeting will be held Wednesday September 26 through Friday September 28 at SURA Headquarters in Washington, DC. A block of rooms has been reserved at the Morrison Clark Inn, 1015 L Street, NW Washington, DC 2001 (walking distance from the SURA office). Please call 202-289-8580 and reference the SURA Block Room rate, which is $189 per night.  The cut off date for making your room reservations at the Morrison Clark Inn is August 25th. There are several rooms being held for the night of September 25 in case you need to travel the day before in order to make the lunchtime start on September 26.

 

The draft agenda includes:

Wednesday 9/26/07

·         Accounting Install Fest (SURAgrid Usage Records)

Thursday 9/27/07 through Friday 9/28/07

·         SURAgrid Governance Committee Report and Membership Structure Discussion

·         Accounting Working Group and Install Fest Report

·         Packaged SURAgrid Install (TTU one button install development and testing)

·         SURAgrid Stack Update

·         SURAgrid Bridge CA (Status and iKey Distribution)

·         SURAgrid Applications

·         SURAgrid Communications and Outreach including SC07 Preparations

 

Send email to Mary Fran at maryfran@sura.org to provide input on the agenda.

 

- - New SURA Grid Infrastructure Specialist - -

On July 30th, Dr. Dali Wang joined the SURA IT staff as our new Grid Infrastructure Specialist. Prior to joining SURA, Dali was a Research Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Research Associate of The Institute for Environmental Modeling at The University of Tennessee, Knoxville. From 1996-1998, he was a faculty member at the Nankai University, China. Dali has published over 25 refereed journal and conference publications including:  “A Grid Service for Natural Resource Managers”, IEEE Internet Computing; “Toward Ecosystem Modeling on Computing Grids”, Computing in Science and Engineering magazine; and “Parallel Fish Landscape Model for Ecosystem Modeling on a Computing Grid”, Simulation journal. Dali is a member of the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee. He holds a MS degree in Computer Science, a MS certificate in Computational Science and Engineering, and a Ph.D. in Environmental Engineering (scientific computation) from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He also holds a BS degree in Environmental Planning and Management and a MS degree in Environmental Chemistry from Jilin University, China.

 

 

- - Application Highlight • SCOOP 2007 - -

Researchers from Maine to Texas are collaborating through the SURA Coastal Ocean Observing and Prediction (SCOOP) program to provide community-wide information services and technologies that advance the sciences of prediction and hazard planning for our nation's coastal populations. The SURAgrid team is working with SCOOP researchers to supply the computing power and technology required to run the simulation suite that is used to study and predict hurricane related weather events.

 

The subset of SCOOP models that are of interest for grid use include the ADCIRC Coastal Circulation and Storm Surge Model, WW3 (the Wave Watch III Ensemble Forecast System), CH3D (Curvilinear Hydrodynamics in Three Dimension), and ELCIRC (Eulerian-Lagrangian CIRCulation). ADCIRC was successfully implemented on SURAgrid through the work of UNC Chapel Hill Institute of Marine Sciences, Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI), MCNC, and SAIC during the 2006 hurricane season. Our goal for this year is to implement WW3 on the new IBM Power5 systems at Georgia State University, Louisiana State University, and Texas A&M University. In addition to porting the application to the IBM and grid environments, this includes developing the mechanisms and procedures required for event driven computing to enable WW3 to suspend other running jobs when it becomes necessary to predict the behavior of hurricanes heading toward our coastline.

 

For more information on SCOOP, see http://scoop.sura.org/.

 

- - SURAgrid Governance Committee - -

The SURAgrid Governance Committee is an elected body charged with two core purposes:

  • Ensuring that institutions and organizations investing in SURAgrid have an appropriate role in its governance;
  • Supporting the sustainable growth of active community participation and cooperative engagement in enhancing the SURAgrid infrastructure.

 

The first conference call of the newly elected SURAgrid Governance Committee (SGC) held on June 22, 2007 included a review of SGC responsibilities as stated in the Proposed SURAgrid Governance and Decision Making Structure of March 1, 2007. The SGC elected Art Vandenberg as Chair and Mike Sachon Co-Chair, and starting July 2 began meeting bi-weekly. Key topics for discussion by the SGC will include: the governance process, membership definition and criteria, SURAgrid Strategic Advisory Group liaison, SURAgrid working groups, and SGC communications. The current topic of discussion is the definition of SURAgrid membership criteria with the overall intent of encouraging an active and engaged SURAgrid membership. A SURAgrid web page is being prepared on which SURAgrid Governance Committee meeting notes and other SGC documents will be posted.

 

UPCOMING Events

SURAgrid participants will be exhibiting and presenting at the following upcoming events.

- - GRID2007 September 19 - 22 in Austin, TX, http://www.grid2007.org - -

- - SURAgrid Fall Meeting, Washington, DC, September 26 – 28 - -

- - SC07, Reno, NV, November 11 – 16, http://sc07.supercomputing.org/index.php - -

 

Send your upcoming events to Linda Akli at akli@sura.org for inclusion in the newsletter and posting on the SURA and SURAgrid websites.

 

 

All issues of SURGrid update can be found at http://sura.org/programs/sura_grid_communications.html. Please submit comments and contributions for inclusion to Linda Akli at akli@sura.org.