The
overall mission of the Information Power Grid (IPG) is to provide
NASA's scientific and engineering communities a substantial increase
in their ability to solve problems that depend on use of large-scale
and/or distributed resources.
The project team is focused on creating an infrastructure and
services to locate, combine, integrate, and manage resources from
across NASA centers. An important goal of the IPG is to produce
a common view of these resources, and at the same time provide
for distributed management and local control.
Through
the IPG project, NASA joins several other national organizations
working to build the Grid, including the NCSA
Alliance led by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications
and the National Partnership for
Advanced Computational Infrastructure led by the San Diego Supercomputing
Center.
NAS’s
role in researching, building, and testing the IPG fulfills requirements
set by three of NASA’s funding programs: The Advanced Computing,
Networking and Storage element of the Information
Technology Program; the Computational Aerosciences (CAS) portion
of the High Performance Computing
and Communications Program; and the Consolidated
Supercomputing Management Office.
The
IPG team at NAS is working to develop:
- Independent but consistent tools and services that support
various programming environments for building applications in
widely distributed systems.
- Tools, services, and infrastructure for managing and aggregating
dynamic collections of resources: CPUs, data storage/information
systems, communications systems, real-time data sources and
instruments, and human collaborators.
- Facilities for constructing collaborative, application-oriented
workbenches and problem solving environments across NASA, based
on the IPG infrastructure and applications.
- A common resource management approach that addresses areas
such as systems management, user identification, resource allocations,
accounting, and security.
- An operational Grid environment incorporating major computing
and data resources at multiple NASA sites in order to provide
an infrastructure capable of routinely addressing larger scale,
more diverse, and more transient problems than is possible today.
One
of the IPG project’s central tasks has been to equip each
site with "middleware" that makes the systems interoperable.
The starting point for the middleware effort is the Globus metacomputing
toolkit, a set of commands that lets researchers execute computational
jobs on remote systems. Members of the Globus
Project, a joint effort of Argonne National Laboratory and
the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute,
are teaming with NASA researchers to implement Globus software
on the Information Power Grid.
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