The Australian Nimrod Testbed (ANT)

Because GrangeNet will link both high-end computational resources and more significant clusters in Australia, it provides an ideal platform for a much more aggressive role out of the Nimrod technology than has been possible to date. In combination, GrangeNet and Nimrod/G will provide the infrastructure required to perform routine parametric computational experiments of the type discussed above. The service will be known as “The Australian National Nimrod Testbed”.

Principal Investigator

David Abramson
School of Computer Science
Monash University

Project

g14

Co-Investigators

Colin Enticott
Slavisa Garic
Distributed Systems Technology Centre
Monash University

RFCD Codes

280399

Significant Achievements, Anticipated Outcomes and Future Work

As part of the Australian Nimrod Testbed, APAC resources were used in the testbed of a large Nimrod experiment. A requirement for GrangeNet was to run a real world experiment on multiple resources on the GrangeNet network. Resources included: hathor.csse.monash.edu.au and sputnik.earth.monash.edu.au (Monash University), brecca-2.vpac.org (VPAC), lc0.apac.edu.au (APAC), altix16.hpcu.uq.edu.au (University of Queensland) and nazgul.qpsf.edu.au (QPFS).

The real world application was provided by Prof. Kim Baldridge and Wibke Sudholt's (UCSD) running a "G.A.M.E.S.S." experiment. The experiment consisted of over 150,000 jobs across resources in 8 different countries. This was demonstrated at Super Computing 2003 in November at Phoenix. Prof. Baldridge was a keynote speaker and presented some of the results in her presentation.

 

Computational Techniques Used

Nimrod (www.csse.monash.edu.au/~davida/nimrod) is a parameter sweep application. It is designed to execute third party applications with different parameter sets on multiple resources. We also used Nimrod/O which optimises parameters to find the best result. During some recent executions, we used it to launch the chemistry application "GAMESS" performing over 150,000 different GAMESS executions.

 

Publications, Awards and External Funding

External Funding and Awards

GrangeNet ANT project

Publications

W. Sudholt, K.K. Baldridge, D. Abramson, C. Enticott and S. Garic. Parameter Scan of an Effective Group Difference Pseudopotential Using Grid Computing. New Generation Computing, Vol.22 No 2 (Special Feature Grid Systems for Life Sciences). February 2004.

Sudholt, W., Baldridge, K., Abramson, D., Enticott, C. and Garic, S., Applying Grid Computing to the Parameter Sweep of a Group Difference Potential, The International Conference on Computational Sciences, ICCS04, Krakow Poland, June 6 - 9, 2004.