Research Leadership

• Improve UCLA's capabilities in these three areas as tools for research.
• Provide training and resources to build stable, high-quality competencies in these three areas among graduate students, undergraduate students, faculty, and staff.
• Improve capabilities in these areas in order to promote externally funded research.

Status of Projects and Initiatives are updated in January, May, and September.

Computational-based Research Leadership

UCLA Grid

The UCLA Grid software brings computational clusters together into a Grid and provides a single through-the-web interface to all of them. This month the UCLA Grid Team will release Version 2.0 of the UCLA Grid software. The software as released will be deployed as the Grid at UCLA (http://grid.ucla.edu) by Jan. 31. Version 2.0 is built on top of Globus ToolKit 4.0, GridSphere and Java Portlets, while version 1.0 was built on Globus ToolKit 3.2 and Java Servlets.

The UCLA Grid consists of two parts:

• The UCLA Grid Portal, a Globus ToolKit 4.0 and Jakarta Tomcat-based webserver, that is the UCLA Grid front end. It provides the user interface and communicates with the Grid Appliances.

• The Grid Appliances. The addition of a Grid Appliance to a cluster is what enables the cluster to join the Grid. Adding a Grid Appliance to a cluster in no way modifies policy decisions at the cluster level.

Any participating cluster can always also be used directly, without having to go through the Grid Portal.

The computational clusters that make up the Grid, as it is run at UCLA, are each owned by a different research group or department and each user may have access to one or more of these different clusters. It is especially convenient for those users who access more than one cluster to use the UCLA Grid Portal as a single interface to all of them, because it: 1) provides a single login 2) hides differences among clusters and 3) it makes it easy to work with multiple clusters at once.

The UCLA Grid team is vigorously continuing development on the Grid and have a number of important enhancements planned for the future.

UC Research Computing Group

A UC-wide Research Computing Group has been formed and will meet for the first time at UCLA of Feb. 1. The mission of the UCRCG is to promote information exchange, discussion and substantive collaboration among its members to enhance research computing and cyberinfrastructure for UC campuses and national laboratories.

The goals of the UCRCG are to:

• share knowledge and information on research-computing and cyberinfrastructure
• leverage synergies that lead to a more efficient utilization of research computing and cyberinfrastructure resources system-wide
• evaluate potential research computing and cyberinfrastructure funding opportunities and collaborations between campuses
• develop and recommend "best practices" for assembling, administering and enhancing research computing and cyberinfrastructure resources

Members in the UCRCG come from every UC campus and participating laboratory. They are nominated by members of the Information Technology Leadership Council. Bill Labate, from UCLA and Frank Wessel, from UCI have been chosen as co-chairs of the group.

Proposed agenda items for the first UCRCG meeting are:

• establish mechanisms for maintaining a UC inventory of resources and capabilit
• explore the NSF announcement of opportunity “High Performance Computing System Acquisition: Towards a Petascale Computing Environment for Science and Engineering”
  http://www.nsf.gov/publications/pub_summ.jsp?ods_key=nsf05625
• discuss the creation of a system-wide unified framework for accessing and administering Beowulf clusters
• explore ideas for a system-wide Grid infrastructure for access to and sharing of computational resources