ExTENCI: Extending Science Through Enhanced National Cyberinfrastructure

As the conduct of scientific and engineering research and the provisioning of cyberinfrastructure (CI) to support that research evolve and mature, new opportunities for leverage and technology sharing and codevelopment to provide increasing levels of support and services to the computationally-enabled research community are emerging. TeraGrid (TG) and Open Science Grid (OSG) have been working over the past year to identify such opportunities, and this project (ExTENCI: Extending science Through Enhanced National CyberInfrastructure) will in part advance the support and capabilities provided to a set of key research activities that represent pathfinders in their respective communities in harnessing CI resources and services.

ExTENCI will work with several representative research applications for which a limited but sustained CI effort will significantly increase the science they deliver. These applications span a range from large collaborative science to small research groups and include earthquake engineering, biology, protein structure, physics, and environmental studies. The team will work with specialists from these research areas to exploit enhancements made in four technology areas: (1) Workflow and client tools that permit an application to exploit either TeraGrid and OSG resources, to use both simultaneously or to utilize new resources (e.g., clouds); (2) Distributed file systems operating across wide area networks that simplify access to and delivery of data; (3) Virtual machine technologies that can hide the complexity of application environments and allow them to run in developing environments such as clouds; (4) New job submission paradigms that utilize distributed grid resources more efficiently.

One important goal of ExTENCI will enable the Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC) to advance their hazard prediction curves by providing extended workflow capabilities and a new distributed storage solution, to support data transfer and to allow integrated use of OSG and TeraGrid resources appropriate for each part of the workflow. The extended workflow capabilities will also permit protein 3-D structures to be determined for significantly longer amino acid sequences. The distributed storage mechanism will also significantly improve access by U.S. universities to Large Hadron Collider data and will simplify the sharing of simulated data by institutions participating in the Lattice Quantum Chromodynamics (LQCD) project. Additionally, ExTENCI's goal is to provide improved Virtual Machine (VM) and job submission capabilities to extend the range of CI resources available to applications as diverse as experiments at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) and oil reservoir simulations dependent on the Ensemble Kalman Filter algorithm.