Dan Fraser

The Earth System Grid: Enabling Access to Multimodel Climate Simulation Data

By leveraging current technologies to manage distributed climate data in a unified virtual environment, the Earth System Grid (ESG) project is promoting data sharing between international research centers and diverse users. In transforming these data into a collaborative community resource, ESG is changing the way global climate research is conducted. Since ESGs production beginnings in 2004, its most notable accomplishment was to efficiently store and distribute climate simulation data of some 20 global coupled ocean-atmosphere models to the scores of scientific contributors to the Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC); the IPCC collective scientific achievement was recognized by the award of a 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. Other international climate stakeholders such as the North American Regional Climate Change Assessment Program (NARCCAP) and the developers of the Community Climate System Model (CCSM) and of the Climate Science Computational End Station (CC...

A Science Driven Production Cyberinfrastructure--the Open Science Grid

This article describes the Open Science Grid, a large distributed computational infrastructure in the United States which supports many different high-throughput scientific applications, and partners (federates) with other infrastructures nationally and internationally to form multi-domain integrated distributed systems for science. The Open Science Grid consortium not only provides services and software to an increasingly diverse set of scientific communities, but also fosters a collaborative team of practitioners and researchers who use, support and advance the state of the art in large-scale distributed computing. The scale of the infrastructure can be expressed by the daily throughput of around seven hundred thousand jobs, just under a million hours of computing, a million file transfers, and half a petabyte of data movement. In this paper we introduce and reflect on some of the OSG capabilities, usage and activities.

Early Kick Detection Methods and Technologies

Early Kick Detection (EKD) is one of the most important areas for improvement in well control safety. The need for earlier, more accurate, more reliable kick detection across a wide range of drilling operations has become increasingly important as more operations are being conducted in deep water with increasingly tight pressure margins. In order to accomplish this, it is important to start measuring the indicators that have the greatest impact. This paper identifies and proposes two risk based Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) related to kicks: how long it takes to positively identify a kick, and how long it takes to respond to a kick once the identification is made. These KPIs are the Kick Detection Volume (KDV) and the Kick Response Time (KRT) respectively. They provide the ability to directly measure kick detection and management approaches. A third metric, the Drilling Mode Kick Frequency (DMKF), while not a performance indicator, is critical to help determine the point at which drilling operation kicks are most likely to occur and thereby to aid in the evaluation of kick detection methodologies. This paper discusses and compares technical approaches to early kick detection including how they relate to safety, efficiency, and reliability over a range of common deep water operations. By identifying “actionable” indications of a kick, a general approach is suggested to help focus on technologies leading to the most likely improvements for EKD. Irrespective of the EKD optimization path chosen however, the proposed KPIs can be used to quantitatively evaluate and compare the performance of different technologies and operational strategies. Introduction: The Significance of Early Kick Detection Early Kick Detection (EKD) is one of the most important focus areas for preventing Loss of Well Control (LWC) events in the Gulf of Mexico and elsewhere. The definition of Loss of Well Control as provided by the Bureau of Environmental Enforcement (BSEE) isi:  Uncontrolled flow of formation or other fluids. The flow may be to an exposed formation (an underground blowout) or at the surface (a surface blowout).  Flow through a diverter.  Uncontrolled flow resulting from a failure of surface equipment or procedures. EKD research and testing have been ongoing for the past decade although the importance of EKD has been amplified in the post-Macondo era. When kicks are accurately detected and recognized early they can be more readily managed and stress levels on equipment and personnel can be reduced, thereby lowering the risk of adverse consequences. Normal operations can resume safely and quickly. Two recent observations related to the importance of EKD are:  An analysis of the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement’s (BSEE’s) incident database has shown that approximately 50% of drillingii related LWC events could have been prevented or ameliorated with early kick detection. iii  Not properly reading or interpreting kick indicators was a key factor in the Macondo accident. This suggests that an EKD system providing direct and unambiguous indications of a kick could have alerted the crew significantly

Accessing opportunistic resources with Bosco

Bosco is a software project developed by the Open Science Grid to help scientists better utilize their on-campus computing resources. Instead of submitting jobs through a dedicated gatekeeper, as most remote submission mechanisms use, it uses the built-in SSH protocol to gain access to the cluster. By using a common access method, SSH, we are able to simplify the interaction with the cluster, making the submission process more user friendly. Additionally, it does not add any extra software to be installed on the cluster making Bosco an attractive option for the cluster administrator. In this paper, we will describe Bosco, the personal supercomputing assistant, and how Bosco is used by researchers across the U.S. to manage their computing workflows. In addition, we will also talk about how researchers are using it, including an unique use of Bosco to submit CMS reconstruction jobs to an opportunistic XSEDE resource.

Enabling Distributed Petascale Science

Petascale science is an end-to-end endeavour, involving not only the creation of massive datasets at supercomputers or experimental facilities, but the subsequent analysis of that data by a user community that may be distributed across many laboratories and universities. The new SciDAC Center for Enabling Distributed Petascale Science (CEDPS) is developing tools to support this end-to-end process. These tools include data placement services for the reliable, high-performance, secure, and policy-driven placement of data within a distributed science environment; tools and techniques for the construction, operation, and provisioning of scalable science services; and tools for the detection and diagnosis of failures in end-to-end data placement and distributed application hosting configurations. In each area, we build on a strong base of existing technology and have made useful progress in the first year of the project. For example, we have recently achieved order-of-magnitude improvements in transfer times (for lots of small files) and implemented asynchronous data staging capabilities; demonstrated dynamic deployment of complex application stacks for the STAR experiment; and designed and deployed end-to-end troubleshooting services. We look forward to working with SciDAC application and technology projects to realize the promise of petascale science.

Data transfers in the grid: workload analysis of globus GridFTP

One of the basic services in grids is the transfer of data between remote machines. Files may be transferred at the explicit request of the user or as part of delegated resource management services, such as data replication or job scheduling. GridFTP is an important tool for such data transfers since it builds on the common FTP protocol, has a large user base with multiple implementations, and it uses the GSI security model that allows delegated operations. This paper presents a workload analysis of the implementation of the GridFTP protocol provided by the Globus Toolkit. We studied more than 1.5 years of traces reported from all over the world by Globus GridFTP installed components. Our study focuses on three dimensions: first, it quantifies the volume of data transferred and characterizes user behavior. Second, it attempts to show how tuning capabilities are used in practice. Finally, it quantifies the user base as recorded in the database and highlights the usage trends of this software component.

Building a Global Federation System for Climate Change Research: The Earth System Grid Center for Enabling Technologies (ESG-CET)

The recent release of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 4th Assessment Report (AR4) has generated significant media attention. Much has been said about the U.S. role in this report, which included significant support from the Department of Energy through the Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing (SciDAC) and other Department of Energy (DOE) programs for climate model development and the production execution of simulations. The SciDAC-supported Earth System Grid Center for Enabling Technologies (ESG-CET) also played a major role in the IPCC AR4: all of the simulation data that went into the report was made available to climate scientists worldwide exclusively via the ESG-CET. At the same time as the IPCC AR4 database was being developed, the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), a leading U.S. climate science laboratory and a ESG participant, began publishing model runs from the Community Climate System Model (CCSM), and its predecessor the Parallel Coupled Model (PCM) through ESG. In aggregate, ESG-CET provides seamless access to over 180 terabytes of distributed climate simulation data to over 6,000 registered users worldwide, who have taken delivery of more than 250 terabytes from the archive. Not only does this represent a substantial advance in scientific knowledge, it is also a major step forward in how we conduct the research process on a global scale. Moving forward, the next IPCC assessment report, AR5, will demand multi-site metadata federation for data discovery and cross-domain identity management for single sign- on of users in a more diverse federation enterprise environment. Towards this aim, ESG is leading the effort in the climate community towards standardization of material for the global federation of metadata, security, and data services required to standardize, analyze, and access data worldwide.

Campus grids: Bringing additional computational resources to HEP researchers

It is common at research institutions to maintain multiple clusters that represent different owners or generations of hardware, or that fulfill different needs and policies. Many of these clusters are consistently under utilized while researchers on campus could greatly benefit from these unused capabilities. By leveraging principles from the Open Science Grid it is now possible to utilize these resources by forming a lightweight campus grid. The campus grids framework enables jobs that are submitted to one cluster to overflow, when necessary, to other clusters within the campus using whatever authentication mechanisms are available on campus. This framework is currently being used on several campuses to run HEP and other science jobs. Further, the framework has in some cases been expanded beyond the campus boundary by bridging campus grids into a regional grid, and can even be used to integrate resources from a national cyberinfrastructure such as the Open Science Grid. This paper will highlight 18 months of operational experiences creating campus grids in the US, and the different campus configurations that have successfully utilized the campus grid infrastructure.

The Open Science Grid – Support for Multi-Disciplinary Team Science – the Adolescent Years

As it enters adolescence the Open Science Grid (OSG) is bringing a maturing fabric of Distributed High Throughput Computing (DHTC) services that supports an expanding HEP community to an increasingly diverse spectrum of domain scientists. Working closely with researchers on campuses throughout the US and in collaboration with national cyberinfrastructure initiatives, we transform their computing environment through new concepts, advanced tools and deep experience. We discuss examples of these including: the pilot-job overlay concepts and technologies now in use throughout OSG and delivering 1.4 Million CPU hours/day; the role of campus infrastructures- built out from concepts of sharing across multiple local faculty clusters (made good use of already by many of the HEP Tier-2 sites in the US); the work towards the use of clouds and access to high throughput parallel (multi-core and GPU) compute resources; and the progress we are making towards meeting the data management and access needs of non-HEP communities with general tools derived from the experience of the parochial tools in HEP (integration of Globus Online, prototyping with IRODS, investigations into Wide Area Lustre). We will also review our activities and experiences as HTC Service Provider to the recently awarded NSF XD XSEDE project, the evolution of the US NSF TeraGrid project, and how we are extending the reach of HTC through this activity to the increasingly broad national cyberinfrastructure. We believe that a coordinated view of the HPC and HTC resources in the US will further expand their impact on scientific discovery.

Enabling Campus Grids with Open Science Grid Technology

The Open Science Grid is a recognized key component of the US national cyber-infrastructure enabling scientific discovery through advanced high throughput computing. The principles and techniques that underlie the Open Science Grid can also be applied to Campus Grids since many of the requirements are the same, even if the implementation technologies differ. We find five requirements for a campus grid: trust relationships, job submission, resource independence, accounting, and data management. The Holland Computing Centers campus grid at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln was designed to fulfill the requirements of a campus grid. A bridging daemon was designed to bring non-Condor clusters into a grid managed by Condor. Condor features which make it possible to bridge Condor sites into a multi-campus grid have been exploited at the Holland Computing Center as well.