Table of Contents

  1. Overview
  2. Activities
  3. Components
    1. Computation
    2. Identity
    3. Processes and Files
    4. Communication
    5. Applications
    6. Policies and Practices
    7. Documentation
  4. Support
    1. Mailing Lists
    2. UABgrid Security Announcements
    3. UABgrid Incident Reports
  5. Topics of Interest
  6. Resource support pages
  7. General Help
  8. Trac Plugins

Welcome to the UABgrid Development Project

Overview

The UABgrid Collaboration Environment is a vision for a user controlled collection of applications, tools, and services integrated through a uniform understanding of user identity and the communities (groups) to which the user belongs. This environment enables seamless access to shared resources and facilitates collaborations within departments, across campus and around the globe.

The UABgrid development project is a collaborative effort to build a programatically controlable suite of services to support the construction and operation of research applications. UABgrid is the collection of these resources and the communities surrounding their development.

UABgrid is an open development effort that welcomes participation of those interested in the construction, use, or operation of this infrastructure. The project is supported by the services of the UABgrid Collaboration Environment as a demonstration of its features, as an assertion of confidence in its design, and as a method of ensuring that problems are discovered and resolved effectively. We eat our own dog food.

The computer geek in you may recognize that these themes parallel the development of distributed operating systems. Grid resources are the devices, components, and services at the core of future computer systems. The grid presents interfaces that allow developers to harness resources in ways appropriate for their domain. The platform strives for neutrality so developers can leverage select components to build the federated applications that best meet their needs. Applications can be as simple or complex as needed. Follow the plan that's right for you. Our control system for UABgrid will follow Plan9.

Activities

Our initial focus has been expansion of HPC resources through grid computing. The world wide HPC community gave rise to the grid infrastructure through the Globus Toolkit and other tools designed to harness resources distributed across many organizations. We are continuing to develop access to computational resources by leveraging grid technologies to harness computational resources in the state, regionally via SURAgrid, and nationally via OSG and TeraGrid.

We are also expanding the the infrastructure componenets to improve the features of the collaboration environment and support a broader range of applications. We are engaged in efforts to build support for caBIG and ensure that other research collaborations like CTSA can leverage this infrastructure.

Feel free to keep a pulse on the operation, support and progress of UABgrid by subscribe to an RSS feeds available throughout the project.

Components

Computation

  • Cheaha - 310-core compute platform for research support
  • Open Science Grid (OSG) - leveraging OSG for additional compute power for scientific workflows, like R.

Identity

Processes and Files

  • Stage - meta-scheduling administration and support for UABgrid
  • Files - file storage engine administration and support for grid job management
  • Platform - many of the resources are operated as virtual machines. These pages document this configuration.
  • StorageCity - Storage needs vary widely across research groups, the "storage city" captures this reality and identifies ways data storage resources can be used across the grid

Communication

Applications

  • Wiki - the project pages for the managing the wiki instance.
  • Exploring caBIG - understanding caBIG and the caGrid release and its integration with UABgrid services
  • Projects - the pages for managing the projects instance.
  • Docs - the project managing the documentation tools and resource
  • Portal - the project managing the UABgrid GridSphere? instance.
  • Blogs - the project pages for the managing the blogs instance.

Policies and Practices

Documentation

  • Documentation - the documentation of tools and resources available on UABgrid

Support

If you have a problem using UABgrid please open a ticket and describe your issue.

Mailing Lists

UABgrid Security Announcements

  • UGS-2008-001 - UABgrid User Certificates impacted by Debian OpenSSL Vulnerability

UABgrid Incident Reports

UABgrid Incident Reports (UGI) are non-security related event reports that related to significant unexpected service interruptions.

Topics of Interest

  • Project Structure - how is the UABgrid project structure and what are the issues we face

Resource support pages

  • Cheaha - a 64 node AMD-based compute cluster
  • CoreCluster - The core cluster is the platform that hosts shared infrastructure for the operation and management of UABgrid

General Help

Trac Plugins

Listed here will be interesting plugins to Trac which will help in our documentation more effectively.