Proposal for the Special Event Track Polish National Grid Project:

"CLUSTERIX: National Cluster of Linux Systems"

Short description of the project:

The main objective of the CLUSTERIX project is to develop mechanisms and tools that allow the deployment of a production Grid environment with the basic infrastructure comprising local PC-clusters based on 64-bit Linux machines. Local clusters will be located in geographically distant independent centers connected by the fast backbone interconnect provided by the Polish Optical Network PIONIER. All existing PC-clusters, as well as new clusters with both 32- and 64-bit architecture, will be dynamically connected to the basic infrastructure. As a result, a distributed PC-cluster will be obtained, with a dynamically changing size, fully operational and integrated with the existing services.

The CLUSTERIX project includes a pilot installation consisting of 12 local clusters intercon- nected via dedicated 1 Gb/s channels provided by the PIONIER optical network. The core of the testbed is equipped with 258 Itanium2 (1,4 GHz, 3 MB cache) processors managed by Linux OS (Debian distribution with kernel 2.6.x). The middleware created within the project will allow for:

managing, making available and monitoring the resources with an integrated interface;
support for dynamically changing configuration of local clusters, including temporarily attached PC clusters;
submitting, executing and monitoring HPC and HTC applications accordingly to user's preferences, with support for creating parallel applications;
effective management of network resources, with utilization of IPv6;
respecting local administration and infrastructure management policies within independent domains;
efficient management of users and virtual organizations;
providing a required level of reliability and security.

The software is developed in an Open Source technology, based on Linux and Globus Toolkit 3.x package After the system is built, it will be tested on a set of pilot distributed applications created as a part of the project. The list of application includes among others: FEM modeling of castings solidification; modeling transonic flows and design of advanced tip devices; prediction of protein structures from a sequence of aminoacids, and simulation of protein folding; investigation of properties of bio-molecular systems, for drug design; large-scale simulations of blood circulation in micro capillaries; package GAMESS in the CLUSTERIX environment.

The important goal of the project is also to support potential CLUSTERIX users in preparation of their distributed applications, thus creating a group of people being able to use the cluster in an optimal way after the research and deployment works are finished.

The project started on December 2003. It is being implemented by 12 Polish supercomputing centers and metropolitan area networks. The entire project lasts 30 months with two stages: research and development stage (first 18 months), and deployment stage. The total budget is ca. 1,1 ME with 47 % founded by the Polish government, and the rest - by the consortium members.

Contents of the proposed special event:

The proposed event should run for half a day. It will cover the following topics:

detailed presentation of the CLUSTERIX architecture
design and implementation of the task/resource management system
data management
management of users account and virtual organizations
security mechanisms in a PC cluster
management of network resources
utilization of IPv6
monitoring of cluster nodes and distributed applications
user interface
attachment of a local PC cluster to the backbone
tools for an automated installation/reconfiguration of nodes within the entire cluster
checkpointing mechanism
end-user‚s applications

The event will include demos showing CLUSTERIX in action.

Responsible persons: Roman Wyrzykowski, Czestochowa University of Technology, roman@icis.pcz.pl Norbert Meyer, Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center, meyer@man.poznan.pl