TGQR 2010Q2 Report.pdf - Teragridforum.org

demonstrate collaborations with other grids, across several domains, or with international
partners.
The TRAC Deadline Announcement is disseminated by Leake each quarter about two weeks
prior to the deadline. The announcement is published in HPCWire, iSGTW, Supercomputing
Online, and other relevant external media, as well as TeraGrid User News and the TG.org news
site. We typically wait until we have the statistics from the previous cycle, and include those in
the announcement. Therefore, it serves a dual purpose—deadline announcement and summary of
the previous cycle’s applications and awards. Although TeraGrid’s allocation process is
becoming progressively more oversubscribed, we have been increasing efforts to push this
announcement in hopes of engaging a broader user base with TeraGrid resources. The increased
competitive element could result in more creative uses of TeraGrid resources, better justification
of resources, and better allocation applications overall.
Misc. External Relations Working Group Activity in Q210
All TG-ER team members conduct external relations efforts for their RP sites, and disseminate
Science Highlights, represent TeraGrid, and write related content for local, regional, and national
sources. Many attend professional conferences on behalf of TeraGrid.
In April, Leake attended the fifth Enabling Grids for E-SciencE (EGEE) user conference in
Uppsala Sweden, upon the invitation of Bob Long, director of EGEE. Since this was EGEE’s
final conference, just prior to their transition to the European Union’s European Grid Initiative
(EGI), the event paralleled the NSF-funded TeraGrid’s transition to the eXtreme Digital (XD)
phase of cyberinfrastructure . Leake had the opportunity to discuss their external relations
experience with navigating the transition with their administration and the European Editor of
International Science Grid This Week (iSGTW). Leake wrote two stories highlighting topics
relevant to both TeraGrid and EGEE users. One story, about Science Gateways and Portals,
highlighted middleware bridging efforts—what it takes for users to successfully leverage both
American and European CI’s. The second story identified the global need for long-term storage
solutions that will serve generations to come.
TeraGrid’s content management system, LifeRay, continued to have issues which delayed the
wiki transition, and ER training efforts we had hoped to undergo this quarter. Leake was granted
minimal content management rights, but changes were limited, and often stalled, due to ongoing
problems with LifeRay. Efforts to train Williams will be made in Q310 so that she can take an
active role in a website facelift, and wiki look-and-feel (the content will continue to be
maintained by Dudek and he will transition wiki content to the LifeRay environment once
Williams designs a new look-and-feel (skin) and organization of content). Both Dudek and
Williams will interface with the User Facing Projects working group in Q310.
TeraGrid’s collaboration with International Science Grid This Week produced a statement of
work. Efforts to identify funding sources were made by OSG and iSGTW administration.
In late April, Leake was invited to Marquette University, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to talk with
their administration and staff about TeraGrid in conjunction with a CI Days event. Faculty from
the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee also attended. Marquette has a new computational
science program, and two new TeraGrid campus champions. They were looking for ways to
leverage TeraGrid in the classroom. Since their Fall ’10 curriculum included coursework about
cloud computing, Leake suggested they contact Carol Song and others at Purdue University, to
explore the use of Wispy—TeraGrid’s first cloud production environment. They did, and the
exchange resulted in a Marquette TeraGrid cloud computing course (utilizing
Hadoop/Mapreduce) that is now optimized for the classroom beginning Fall ’10.
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