UF receives $2.5 million grant to further worldwide research efforts

July 26, 2005

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — The University of Florida has been awarded $2.5 million for its role in the Data Intensive Science University Network, a multi-university computer grid that will provide support for advanced research activities worldwide.

The money is part of a $10 million grant funded jointly by the National Science Foundation’s Mathematical and Physical Sciences and Computer and Information Science and Engineering directorates. It will enable more than 200 physicists to study the fundamental properties of particles and forces by providing access to data from the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment at the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, at the European Organization for Nuclear Research in Geneva.

“The LHC experiments will produce vast quantities of data that will overwhelm even the computing systems at national laboratories,” said Paul Avery, a UF professor of physics and leader of two national grid projects, GriPhyN and the International Virtual Data Grid Laboratory. “However, by harnessing the combined power of computing systems around the world, grid computing provides researchers with the capability to analyze this data.”

The network is a collaboration of five U.S. universities that will develop, deploy and operate a system of geographically distributed computing and storage systems. Avery emphasized that network resources will be relevant to researchers and students in a wide range of scientific and education communities.

“DISUN’s distributed grid computing and optical networking resources will provide a powerful test-bed for computer scientists, developers of grid middleware, network specialists, physicists, scientists from other fields and students in universities and laboratories across the country,” he said.

Sanjay Ranka, a UF computer science professor and a leader of several grid-computing projects supported by the National Science Foundation said, “The experience gained in DISUN for efficiently transmitting, storing and processing hundreds of gigabytes of data in real-time will translate into defining the future of Internet for consumer applications such as video-on-demand and interactive video.”

Ranka and Avery added that the technology will be particularly beneficial to research groups at UF, building on existing grid collaborations between the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, the College of Engineering, Computing and Network Services and the new High Performance Computing activity.

In addition to UF, the other three DISUN universities that will contribute computing, storage, network, middleware and personnel resources to the network are the California Institute of Technology, the University of California, San Diego and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

The grant corresponds with the Open Science Grid Consortium’s July 20 inauguration of the Open Science Grid, or OSG, a national grid computing ”cyberinfrastructure” that will serve many science and education communities.

A cyberinfrastructure consists of advanced software tools, hardware and support services required to support scientific collaborations, said Ranka. He added that many collaborations, including High Energy Physics, work with terabytes of data that is geographically distributed among multiple centers worldwide.

The consortium currently has more than 30 member universities and laboratories contributing manpower and resources to a common cyberinfrastructure, said Avery. Research groups from these institutions contribute to the use and operation of the grid and have access to resources shared by more than 10,000 computer processors. The grid also can be used by small and large research groups nationwide from many different scientific disciplines.

According to the OSG Web site, the grid’s purpose is to merge new and existing grid resources used in U.S. labs and universities into a single grid.

The grid will be used in the LHC experiments as part of the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid, said Avery.

Currently under construction, the LHC will begin operating in 2007 as the world’s highest-energy accelerator. Data collected from the experiment will be sent over high-speed networks to large laboratory-based computer facilities worldwide.

Additional information can be found on the OSG Web site at www.opensciencegrid.org.