Collaborative research in a regional grid

Abstract

Research teams collaborating across institutional, geographical and cultural boundaries are increasingly common. Funding agencies including the National Science Foundation (NSF) and National Institutes of Health (NIH) strongly encourage virtual organization building and collaboration across institutions and disciplines. A set of software tools that enables scientists to efficiently share information and resources with distributed collaborators is key to facilitate collaboration of research teams across institutional and geographical boundaries. Utilizing HUBzero, we have implemented a regional infrastructure supporting the High Performance Computing Consortium (HPC2) initiative within New York State. This hub consists of a web-portal infrastructure that allows investigators and research groups to easily create and share research materials as well as computational and storage resources among their members. In this paper, we describe the process of launching the hub and providing access to a regional grid consisting of three supercomputing sites with heterogeneous computing platforms and security/access policies. We address issues of capacity and security that arose as we road-tested this evolving platform.