The Minority Serving Institutions CyberInfrastructure Empowerment
Coalition (MSI-CIEC) is a coalition of leading cyberinfrastructure
figures, projects and resources with the American Indian Higher
Education Consortium, the Hispanic Association of Colleges and
Universities, the National Association for Equal Opportunity in
Higher Education, and the more than 330 MSIs they represent.
MSI-CIEC will provide the Òhuman middlewareÓ Ð the social and
technological mechanisms to meaningfully engage MSIs in CI
research and education.
The Navajo Technical College (NTC) began building high-performance
networking and grid computing for the College and the Navajo nation
working with MSI-CIEC and the TeraGrid. Additionally, through the
TeraGrid Education and Outreach program, a ÒLittle FeÓ computer
cluster was donated to NTC which is among the first to establish the
DinŽ Grid, part of the Navajo nationÕs local CI. Spurred by the
institutionÕs progress, NTC is expanding its educational degree
offerings through the Ph.D. and strengthening the Navajo STEM
education pipeline through partnerships with Navajo K-12 schools and
other colleges and universities. A workshop on Interdisciplinary
Computational Science Education for Educators (ICSEE) was held there
from July 15 to July 21, 2007.
For more information on the MSI-CIEC and the ICSEE see
http://www.msi-ciec.org/eduwiki/
http://205.242.219.99/events/2007_ncsi_workshop.html
http://sc-education.org/community/gallery/07%20Spring%20\
Visiting%20Crownpoint/index.html
Indiana University Cyberinfrastructure News
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Research Technologies has made large strides in the availability of
file system space for researchers this quarter.
Home directories were consolidated in September to a single IBM
Network Attached Storage device for all research clusters. The
default quota, shared across all research systems, is now 10GB.
Users may access their directories on other clusters by changing
directories after logging in. For example, from Big Red you may
"cd ../Quarry" after logging in (if you have an account on both
systems).
The Research File System, based on OpenAFS, can now be used from
Big Red and Quarry. Quotas on RFS have now increased to 10GB for
new users; if you'd like your RFS quota increased, please contact
store-admin@iu.edu. RFS can also be mounted directly from your
workstation or accessed from the web. Details are available in
the Knowledge Base, or in "The Least You Need to Know" at
http://rtinfo.uits.iu.edu/education_and_training/
During September the 266TB GPFS, IBM's General Parallel File
System, has been mounted on Quarry and Libra, in addition to Big
Red. GPFS can be accessed like any other file system at
/N/gpfs/USERNAME (a subdirectory for your USERNAME is created
automatically, at the same time as your home directory).
Similarly the larger, faster, 535TB Data Capacitor, based on
Cluster File Systems' Lustre, is available on Big Red and will be
accessible from Quarry at /N/dc starting October 2nd. The Data
Capacitor is a unique high speed, high capacity filesystem designed
for short-term storage; system use is governed by an allocation
committee. More information is available at
http://www.datacapacitor.org/
The Massive Data Storage System based on HPSS has also been expanded
with the addition of 1PB of new tape. The aggregate uncompressed
capacity is 2.8PB between the Indianapolis and Bloomington campuses. -
New requests are being accepted by the TeraGrid for IU's Big Red
supercomputer and archival storage system. Big Red has been very
popular for molecular dynamics and weather forecasting, and supports
NAMD, Amber, CHARMM, and Gaussian. IU is also offering hundreds of
TeraBytes of storage for use via the TeraGrid as well. IU's HPSS
installation is unique within the TeraGrid in that it stores, by
default, duplicate copies of data in two separate locations
(Indianapolis and Bloomington). Detailed descriptions of all IU
resources available for allocation via the TeraGrid are available at
http://rtinfo.uits.indiana.edu/cyberinfrastructure/resources.shtml
With the recent addition of a number of large new computational
resources to the TeraGrid, the number of CPU hours available for
allocations has grown beyond the total of hours requested. However,
because allocations on the TeraGrid are valuable, applications are
subject to peer review just as any other major instrument funded by
the National Science Foundation. Proposals that do not meet the
proposal guidelines and justify well the resources requested have
in the past been turned down even when available resources have
gone unallocated as a result. Researchers interested in making
use of an IU resource offered via the TeraGrid, are strongly
encouraged to contact IU for assistance in preparing their
proposals. By working with IU (or any TeraGrid partner),
researchers can improve the quality of their proposals and increase
the likelihood that their applications for resources will be
approved the first time they are submitted by assuring that all the
requirements for a properly formatted proposal are met. Contact us
by sending email to
researchtechnologies@iu.edu. -
TeraGrid User Survey, September 4 to October 19, 2007
The TeraGrid general user survey this year focuses on understanding
your practices and requirements as a TeraGrid user, to guide our
efforts to improve our capabilities and services next year and
beyond. Current awards for the operation, user support, and
enhancement of the TeraGrid facility will expire in 2010. By that
date, a petascale computing resource will be on the horizon, the
user community will have grown and diversified, and new policies and
services are likely to be needed to meet the needs of users and the
expanding pool of high-performance computing resources. The planning
process is focusing on the needs of current and emerging user
communities as a critical aspect in the development of a path
forward for TeraGrid in 2010 and beyond.
If you have a grant to use one or more of the National Science
Foundation (NSF) sponsored High Performance Computing systems
listed at
http://www.teragrid.org/userinfo/hardware/resources.php
please visit the following URL and do your part to make the
TeraGrid serve you better:
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=HmWC5lcVfRmdCx5V0jFxPg_3d_3d -
Sunday, October 14, 2007 -- Boston
Indiana University is offering a TeraGrid-related tutorial, "Using
IU's Big Red PowerPC Cluster and IU Storage Resources via the
TeraGrid" at BiBE 2007 (Bioinformatics and Biomedical Engineering),
The primary purpose of this tutorial is to enable TeraGrid users to
learn about the Big Red system so that they can easily use codes
already ported and optimized for that system (e.g. WRF, NAMD, MILC),
or rapidly migrate other applications to Big Red.
In addition, as massive computations often depend upon massive data
sets as input, and produce massive data sets as output, a discussion
of IU's archival data storage system and how to store and access
files using gridftp will be included.
Plan to attend to gain hands-on experience with Big Red and IU's
Research Storage as TeraGrid resources.
This tutorial will be given in conjunction with the Workshop on
Progress Toward Petascale Applications in Bioinformatics and
Computational Biology. For more information, see
http://www.cs.gsu.edu/BIBE07/bibe07_workshopCFP_comp_bio.pdf
http://rtinfo.uits.indiana.edu/hpc/workshops/bibe2007/info.shtml
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Monday, October 15, 4-6pm, Wells Library 001, Bloomington
Network Science Center Open House
You are invited to attend the annual Open House of the
Cyberinfrastructure for Network Science Center. The Center offers
expertise and serves data-software-computing resources for
information visualization such as the Cyberinfrastructure Shell
(CIShell) and the Network Workbench. The Center also supports a
talk series on Networks and Complex Systems, every Monday 6-7pm,
Wells Library 001.
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Wednesday-Friday, October 17-19 -- Bloomington
Indiana University is hosting the HPSS Users Forum, October 17-19.
HUF 2007 is the annual gathering for the HPSS community, bringing
together new and existing HPSS users from around the globe to
discuss best practices, new implementations, and future directions
and releases. Attendees will include technologists, researchers,
faculty, postdocs, and industry representatives involved in the
development, implementation, and management of HPSS software. For
more information, see
http://www.indiana.edu/~uits/huf2007/index.html
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Wednesday, October 31, 12:30-1:30pm -- ICTC 497 & IMU Walnut Room
Research Technologies Round Table: "Implementing Big Red"
Craig Stewart, Associate Vice President and Associate Dean
The purchase order for IU's Big Red was placed on 7 April 2006;
on 28 June 2006, it had earned the 23rd place on the Top500 list
of the most powerful supercomputers in the world. It has since
expanded from 20 to 30.7 TFLOPS.
We will discuss the basic architecture of Big Red, its
implementation and management systems, and the performance
characteristics of the system in some detail. We will also discuss
the challenges of supporting and using a very large Linux cluster
based on IBM's Power architecture in the context of the TeraGrid,
which is heavily dominated by clusters running Intel instruction
sets, and some of the science results obtained with Big Red,
including weather prediction and protein structure. -
Outages
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Sep 25 2007 17:15-21:08 EDT BigRed power outage
Planned maintenance
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The maintenance window for all systems is the first Tuesday of
each month, 7am - 7pm EDT. -
If you have questions pertaining to IU's cyberinfrastructure, or you
are encountering some difficulty, there are several ways to obtain
help.
An introduction and overview titled "Indiana University's
CyberInfrastructure: The least you need to know" has been updated
and is available at http://rc.uits.iu.edu/education_and_training/ .
The IU Knowledge Base (http://kb.iu.edu) is an excellent source of
help on how to do things.
If you have problems which the KB does not enable you to solve,
questions about system outages, or if you just have a problem and
you don't know who to contact, send email to
researchtechnologies@iu.edu.
