Need research computing?

Monday, March 03, 2008

UW center addresses research computing needs

UW-Madison is well-placed for research computing. The recently upgraded 21st-Century Network, with its 10 GB/sec backbone connections, provides the speed and transmission capacity that researchers need to exchange large amounts of data with their colleagues. Access to international and regional high-speed networks, such as Internet2 and BOREAS-Net (the Broadband Optical Research, Education and Sciences Network), ensures that campus researchers can collaborate effectively with other universities, government agencies and private entities.

Several large-scale compute-intensive initiatives are already well-established at UW-Madison under the auspices of the Center for High Throughput Computing (CHTC). Led by Computer Sciences Professor Miron Livny, CHTC assembles hardware, software and staff resources to meet the needs of researchers and scientists with compute-intensive applications.

CHTC includes three major threads of activities:

Condor manages distributed computing resources and provides a framework for high-throughput computing for groups on campus. It enables researchers and scientists to effectively harness all of their computing cycles regardless of their location – desktop, classrooms or machine rooms.

A companion to the Condor Project is GLOW, the Grid Laboratory of Wisconsin, a cooperative effort that marshals the resources of autonomous sites across the campus to meet the scientific computing needs of UW researchers and scientists.

The Open Science Grid (OSG) is a national cooperative framework for sharing large-scale distributed computing resources, including processing and storage. With Livny as its Principal Investigator, OSG is a consortium of more than 50 sites that brings massive resources into a uniform grid computing environment.

UW-Madison is broadening the scope of its computing support to more effectively address the needs of researchers. A year-old campuswide effort, called the Research Support and Services Initiative, is sponsored and funded by the CIO's Office,
with the goals of:

  1. identifying researchers' computing needs

  2. facilitating relationships among researchers regarding their computing needs

  3. defining computing services and needs that can be addressed by technical groups on campus, including, but not limited to, DoIT.

"Our effort is focused on finding out what researchers need, not on dictating what they should do with technology," says Hideko Mills, a co-chair (along with Steve Krogull) of the initiative.

"Researchers in the arts and the humanities might not have the budget resources that are available to researchers in the hard sciences," says Mills, who is also Assistant Director of Campus Network Services at DoIT. "They might need high-performance or high-throughput computing and also support for specific applications useful for working with their data. We want to understand what their needs are, including training, data storage, and other services."

"The reality is that research computing in the hard sciences at UW-Madison is working really well," Mills says. "They know what they're doing and have been pioneers in the research computing community. Our job is to find out if they have special needs, such as offloading administrative work on shared systems to free up resources for research activities."

The Research Support and Services Initiative is still in "outreach mode," Mills says. That outreach is taking the form of monthly research computing workshops highlighting the work of researchers across the campus. "We're trying to help facilitate relationships on campus by providing opportunities for researchers, faculty, staff and grad students to network with one another," Mills explains.

The initiative is also helping with major conferences:

  • Research Computing Workshop - Held last April, this workshop featured Daniel Atkins, Director of the Office of Cyberinfrastructure for the National Science Foundation, and Clifford A. Lynch, Executive Director of the Coalition for Networked Information. (For an archived video stream, go to cio.wisc.edu.)

  • NIH Conference on Biological and Biomedical Computing - Held in October 2007, this workshop brought three speakers from the National Institutes of Health to discuss grant opportunities in research computing and the research vision of NIH.

  • Arts and Humanities Symposium 2008 - UW Libraries is hosting this conference in conjunction with the Office of the CIO on May 2, focusing on such computing topics as digital humanities and services, storage of images, technology tools useful in the dance and music arts, and faculty panel discussions.

  • Fall Research Showcase 2008 - Scheduled for fall, this event will enable faculty and researchers to present their work in an exhibit setting and exchange ideas and solutions for research computing.

How does UW-Madison compare to its peers in terms of research computing support? Mills: "Some institutions provide central funding for research computing and hire staff for support and consultation. Others, like us, recognize the need for support and are reaching out to the campus community to find ways to sustain support."

"UW-Madison falls somewhere in the middle in our approach to supporting research computing, due to the autonomy of departments on our campus" she continues. "It's a fluid situation. We don't have all the answers, but we're collaborating with organizations such as the CIC's IT Research Group and the Cyber Infrastructure group in EDUCAUSE."

For more information about UW-Madison's Research Support and Services Initiative, contact Hideko Mills  or Steve Krogull.