Campus-wide Grid

The VCGR has begun deploying a campus-wide grid on the grounds of the University of Virginia. The goal of the campus-wide grid is to support the research efforts of scientists and others at the University who require large amounts of computing resources or need to store and share data across organizations at the University. This work is being done in conjunction with the University's Information Technology and Communication (ITC) which is responsible for UVA's computing and networking infrastructure and with funding from the University's Provost for Research.

Phase I

Phase I of the campus-wide grid was completed in the Spring of 2005. Phase I was designed to bring up a basic grid to test our grid software on several platforms and provide access to two medium sized clusters in the Department of Computer Science. The initial deployment was completed in the Spring of 2005 and has been running since, with temporary additions and subtractions of machines over time. In its final form Phase I encompassed:

• Several windows desktops and laptops (CS Department)
• Several Intel machines running Linux (CS Department)
• XX-way YY cluster running Linux and fed via a Sun Grid Engine queue (CS Department)
• 64-way XX cluster running Linux and PBS queue Several windows desktops and laptops (CS Department)

Phase II

Phase II of the campus-wide grid is currently in pre-release testing and is expected to be completed in August 2005. The goal of Phase II is to incorporate many of the University's Windows desktops from computer laboratories and class rooms. The machines will be setup with usage policies to only run jobs during certain times or when the machines are idle. Within the grid, they will be dedicated to performing high throughput jobs for researchers that would otherwise have inadequate computing resources or would have used some of the University's more specialized and over-subscribed cluster machines which can better be used for more tightly coupled applications. Thus the longer range goals of Phase II are to increase the University's available computing resources, improve job turn around time, and potentially reduce the need to acquire new relatively expensive cluster hardware. At end of Phase II deployment we expect the following resources to be incorporated into the campus-wide grid:

• Several windows desktops and laptops (CS Department)
• Several Intel machines running Linux (CS Department)
• XX-way YY cluster running Linux and fed via a Sun Grid Engine queue (CS Department)
• 64-way XX cluster running Linux and PBS queue Several windows desktops and laptops (CS Department)
• approximately 400 Windows XP machines in UVA labs (ITC administered resources spread over many departments)

Campus-wide Grid Information

Contacts for campus-wide grid:

• In need of support for the grid (including account inquiries)?:   Send mail to campus-wide-grid-support@virginia.edu


• Want to subscribe to announcements about the campus-wide grid?:   Subscribe to the campus-wide-grid-announce mailing list. To subscribe, XXXX