Grid Computing
Astronomy faces a data avalanche. Breakthroughs in telescope, detector, and computer technology have allowed astronomical surveys to produce terabytes of images and catalogs. The NSF-funded NVO is a multiyear effort to build tools, services, registries, protocols, and standards that can extract the full knowledge content of these massive, multi-frequency data sets. The NVO has proposed to initiate the process whereby the computational resources of the NSF TeraGrid project can be combined with the NVO to enable astronomers to explore and analyze these new data sets in order to understand the physical processes that drive the formation and evolution of our universe. In this initial component of a multiyear effort we propose to use the TeraGrid to (1) expose massive data to massive computing through NVO protocols, (2) run representative applications to explore that data, (3) foster new projects in astronomy that use NVO services and TeraGrid resources, and (4) encourage new ways to use supercomputing facilities for science.
The initial seven projects in this effort are:
- NVO-TeraGrid Testbed
Reagan Moore and George Kremenek, San Diego Supercomputer Center - Atlasmaker: A Grid-based Implementation of the Hyperatlas
Roy Williams, California Institute of Technology - Resolving star formation in galaxies
Andrew Connolly, University of Pittsburgh
Alex Szalay and Tamas Budavari, Johns Hopkins University - Montage
Bruce Berriman, IPAC, California Institute of Technology
Ewa Deelman, ISI, University of Southern California
and many others - Fitting Quasar Spectra
Dan Vanden Berk, University of Pittsburgh
Sebastian Jester, Fermilab
Robert Nichol, Carnegie-Mellon University - N-Point Correlation Functions of Galaxies
Robert Nichol, Carnegie Mellon University
Jeffrey Gardner, Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center
Andrew Connolly and Joerg Colberg, University of Pittsburgh
Jim Gray, Microsoft Corporation - The Cosmic Microwave Background Grid
Christopher Miller and Robert Nichol, Carnegie Mellon University
Full details can be read in the NVO TeraGrid proposal.