CI-Team:Index
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Coastal and Estuarine Science Cyberinfrastructure Training and Deployment
Overview
This NSF-sponsored project educates and trains coastal and estuarine science and engineering communities on the use and development of applications in simulation and modeling which can benefit from the availability of high-performance and high-throughput computing cyberinfrastructures (CI).
As a cornerstone of this effort, we leverage the Grid Appliance to allow users who are not familiar with tools or do not have access to high-throughput computing infrastructures can run powerful CI software and access a realistic Grid computing CI from their own desktops, within minutes.
The Grid appliance is being used to provide hands-on education and training to coastal and estuarine scientists using an interactive simulation application CH3D-GTM, a hydrodynamics model (CH3D) applied to the Guana Tolomato Matanzas estuary. Users in other disciplines which have many independent simulations they need to perform (e.g. Monte Carlo analysis, parameter sweeps) can benefit from the CI-TEAM appliance.
You can try the CI-TEAM applications for yourself - just download and install the CSEVA Appliance. Also, please give us feedback through our anonymous online survey. Check our up to date statistics to visualize where our Grid appliances are running and our virtual networking infrastructure deployed over the PlanetLab testbed with interactive Google maps.
Screenshot of the CI-TEAM appliance running on VMware:
Educational Activities
We have conducted a variety of presentations and hands-on training sessions using our Grid appliance in 2007, which are highlighted below: [
- Reno, NV: Figueiredo shared a session in the SC07 Education program with fellow CI-TEAM awardee Henry Neeman. The Grid appliance was used for hands-on Condor tutorials - attendees installed and ran the appliance on the laptops provided for the SC07 education session. The feedback from this session was very positive, and helped fine-tune the content of the tutorial - we had a very limited time frame (about 45 minutes!), still most of the attendees were able to submit demo jobs to an appliance pool. Check the SC07 web site for more information on what happened during this program. Figueiredo also conducted a demo session at the SURAGrid/IBM booth in the morning of Nov. 13. Slides for these two presentation are available here: education session slides; SURAGrid demo.
- Palatka, FL: PIs Figueiredo and Davis, and graduate student David Wolinsky conducted a hands-on CI education session at the St. John's River water management district, attended by district engineers and IT personnel. We brought CDs with the appliance software, and the attendees installed the software themselves in the classroom PC desktops. The training session took a total of three hours, with a combination of a short presentation and hands-on experiments with Condor tutorial applications and the CH3D-GTM model. The sessions ran smoothly; all attendees were able to successfully install and use the software. Since then, engineers at the district started implementing a pilot program which is based on the use of VM appliances customized with their software for the execution of batch simulation jobs within their own domain.
- Madison, WI: PI Figueiredo gave an invited seminar at Condor Week 2007 highlighting the Grid appliance technology used in this project.
- Madison, WI: As part of a related project (nanoHUB), Figueiredo also gave a short hands-on session at the TeraGrid '07 Conference. Attendees were able to run appliances and demonstration job submissions from their own laptops, from images distributed in CDs during the tutorial presentation.
- Washington, DC: PI Figueiredo participated in a panel at the NSF CI-Team Community Building Workshop in Washington D.C. July 9-11, 2007. The CI-TEAM appliance was demoed interactively from a laptop during the poster session at the workshop.
- Switzerland: The Grid appliance was used as an aid in teaching cluster/grid computing concepts in a system services class at the University of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland. Interestingly, the instructor of this class came across the appliance through the VMware appliance challenge (see below).
- VMware Ultimate Virtual Appliance Challenge: Virtual appliances are changing the way software is packages and distributed. In 2006, leading virtual machine vendor VMware posed a challenge to appliance designers world-wide. Among 169 entries, the Grid appliance used as a basis for this CI-TEAM project was one of those to receive an honorable mention
Publications Acknowledging the NSF Support
- Davis, J. R., Figueiredo, R. J., Sheng, Y. P., Fortes, J., Ganguly, A., Paramygin, V. A., Wolinsky, D., Zhang, J. and Tutak, B. "Application of emerging cyberinfrastructure technologies to aid in the education and training of coastal and estuarine scientists," Journal of Ocean Technology, 5(1), pp. 56-80, 2010a.
- Davis, J. R., Paramygin, V. A., Tutak, B., St. Juste, P., Figueiredo, R. J. and Sheng, Y. P. "Advancing educational capacity using the SCOOP Educational Virtual Appliance," In Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Estuarine and Coastal Modeling, ASCE, pp. 201-220, 2010b.
- Figueiredo, R. J., Boykin, P. O., St. Juste, P. and Wolinsky, D. "Social VPNs: Integrating overlay and social networks for seamless P2P networking," In Proceedings of WECITE/COPS, 2008.
- Ganguly, A. Agrawal, P. O. Boykin, R. J. Figueiredo, "IP over P2P: enabling self-configuring virtual IP networks for grid computing," Proceedings of the IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS), 2006a.
- Ganguly, A. Agrawal, P. O. Boykin, R. J. Figueiredo, "WOW: Self-organizing Wide Area Overlay Networks of Virtual Workstations," Proceedings of the IEEE International Symposium on High Performance and Distributed Computing (HPDC), pp. 30-41, 2006b.
- Ganguly, A., Agrawal, A., Boykin, P. and Figueiredo, R. "WOW: Self-Organizing Wide Area Overlay Networks of Virtual Workstations," Journal of Grid Computing, 5(2), June 2007a, pp. 151-172 (Special issue, invited as one of five nominated best papers from HPDC-2006).
- Ganguly, A., Wolinsky, D., Boykin, P. and Figueiredo, R. "Decentralized Dynamic Host Configuration in Wide-Area Overlays of Virtual Workstations," Invited paper. Proceedings of First Workshop on Large-Scale and Volatile Desktop Grids (PCGrid), with IPDPS-2007b.
- Wolinsky, D., Agrawal, A., Boykin,, P. O., Davis, J. R., Paramygin, V. A., Sheng, Y. P. and Figueiredo, R. J. "On the design of virtual machine sandboxes for distributed computing in wide-area overlays of virtual workstations," Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Virtualization Technology in Distributed Computing, Tampa, FL, Nov. 2006 (held in conjunction with Supercomputing 2006).
- Wolinsky, D. I. and Figueiredo, R. J. "Simplifying resource sharing in voluntary grid computing with the grid appliance," In Proceedings Desktop Grids and Volunteer Computing Systems (PCGrid), 2008.
- Sheng, Y. P., Paramygin, V. A., Alymov, V. and Davis, J. R. "A real-time forecasting system for hurricane induced storm surge and coastal flooding," In Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference and Estuarine and Coastal Modeling, ASCE, pp. 585-602, 2006.
- Sheng, Y. P., Tutak, B., Davis, J. R., and Paramygin, V. "Circulation and flushing in the lagoonal system of the Guana Tolomato Matanzas National Estuarine Research Reserve (GTMNERR), Florida," Journal of Coastal Research, SI (55), pp. 9-25, 2008.
Check the Published Work link to download many of these publications.
Partners
- ACIS Lab, Electrical and Computer Engineering, UF (Renato Figueiredo, Jose Fortes)
- Coastal and Oceanographic Engineering, UF (Peter Sheng, Justin Davis)
- Guana Tolomato Matanzas NERR (Rick Gleeson)
- St. John's River Water Management District (Peter Sucsy, Tim Cera)
Sponsor
This work is sponsored by the National Science Foundation Office of Cyberinfrastructure, CI-TEAM program under NSF Award SCI-0537455.
