IT Plans Campus Research Grid by Year End
Jim McKinney, director of IT’s Campus Information Systems, Dr. Brian W. Beck of the Center for Bioinformatics (CFB) and Department of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology, and Aron Smetana, director of IT’s Campus Computing, stand in the new IT server room where the campus grid will be located. (Photo by: Theresa Danna-Douglas)
Tuesday, October 10, 2006
By: Jan Jones
Aron Smetana, director of Campus Computing in the Information Technology (IT) division, announced recently that the University has committed space to house the ‘seed’ cluster and administration for a campus computer grid. Such a grid would eventually link a vast array of computing, visualization, and storage resources located throughout the UNR campus, regardless of location.
This cluster of servers -- or grid -- will be housed in the newest Information Technology server room on the north end of campus. In addition, the campus will be hiring a dedicated Systems Administrator for the central cluster of servers and to assist with administration of the grid. Equipment for the seed cluster has been ordered from Sun Microsystems and IT expects the system to be online before the end of the year.
After successful integration of these initial clusters into the grid, IT hopes to establish a centralized services model in which researchers buy more centrally managed capacity for the grid, rather than individually purchasing and developing their own services.
Furthermore, after the grid is established, IT will begin working to integrate unused night and weekend computer capacity in teaching labs across campus. This strategy will enable the campus to leverage a lot of “downtime” power for research purposes.
Future Potential & Benefits
Having a campus grid has the potential to attract more research projects that otherwise might not have considered our University. For example:
* Once the grid infrastructure is built, money can be used for actual research instead of building the technology for research, making us more attractive to research grants.
* As the local business community becomes aware of the campus grid and its support/research teams, it will encourage them to collaborate with the University instead of going out of state for these resources (a point made by our new University president, Dr. Milton Glick, in his inaugural speech on Sept. 29).
* Campus researchers will be able to rely on centralized support.
* Any department that participates in the grid will be able to leverage their money to obtain more computing power.
The idea of a campus grid was originally proposed to IT by Dr. Brian W. Beck, associate director of Structural Bioinformatics and Molecular Modeling for the Center for Bioinformatics (CFB) and the Department of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology, and later development of this concept was made by a team composed of Dr. Beck, Prof. Lee Weber (INBRE program director and faculty in the Departments of Biology and Biochemistry & Molecular Biology), Prof. Fred Harris (Computer Science and Engineering), Aron Smetana (IT), Jim McKinney (IT), and Prof. Roberto Mancini (Physics).
A pilot program to establish a campus computer grid was initiated with joint support from the Nevada IDeA Network for Biomedical Research Excellence (INBRE) grant (NIH 2 P20 RR-016464), the Information Technology division, and the Office of the Vice President for Research.
