International Collaboration
International collaboration is a pervasive aspect of our proposal and so does not need additional description. Instead,
we list here the statements of support for iVDGL research from our European counterparts.
Statement of support from UK PPARC:
"The UK Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council wishes to join the US GriPhyN collaboration and the
EU funded DataGrid project in establishing an international Virtual-Data Grid Laboratory. PPARC is funding
infrastructure for Grid activities within the EU DataGrid project and this, together with computing facilities which
are being commissioned to offer remote access to the data generated from experiments at SLAC and
Fermilab, would be used to test new middleware and demonstrate transatlantic Grid functionality for several
scientific projects. A national (Tier 1) centre is foreseen at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, and university
regional (Tier 2) centres are foreseen at Bristol, Glasgow/Edinburgh, Manchester, London and Liverpool."
Statement from Fabrizio Gagliardi, Project Director of the European Union DataGrid Project
“The EU DataGrid Project supports the statement made by UK PPARC and also supports the establishment of the
International Virtual-Data Grid Laboratory”.
Statement of support to LIGO from Virgo gravitational wave experiment
“While LIGO is actively participating in establishing grid-based tools to enhance it baseline capabilities for data
analysis, similar efforts are underway in both VIRGO and GEO. The Italian part of the Virgo collaboration is
actively involved in the Italian Grid project. The first phase is the installation of a number of geographically
separated (e.g. Rome, Naples, Florence) nodes (their "Tier 2 Centers") for prototyping tests. This phase corresponds
to the deployment of prototype testbeds for GriPhyN that is being proposed here.
The second phase is the design and implementation of software toolkits which are representative of gravitational
wave data analysis processes, and which will be used to test the Grid environment and its long term utility to Virgo.
Similar to LIGO'9s interests in the US Grid as embodied in the GriPhyN Project, the focus for Virgo is to use the
Grid for very computationally intensive tasks, not otherwise feasible, to search for periodic sources and coalescing
compact binary objects.
The Grid project at this stage is an R&D activity. In particular an official position on committing Virgo to its
utilization is still being formulated. An evident advantage of the Grid project is that it will provide a robust
infrastructure for high bandwidth communication, and in this sense it will be very useful in order to implement
collaborative data analysis activities.”
Statement of support to LIGO from UK part of GEO600 gravitational wave experiment
“In the UK the Grid project has received excellent support. The PPARC plans to invest up to 22.5 million pounds
(US $ 31 million) on particle physics and astronomy related Grid development. The GEO600 project is one of the
test beds for a proto-Grid that is being developed at Cardiff University. Initially, the testbed will test the data transfer
rate (1-2 MBytes per second) and reliability between University of Hannover, in Germany, and Cardiff University,
in the UK. In the future GEO600 intends to exploit the computational resources of the Grid network for the all sky
and all frequency GW searches. GEO600 is also proposing its quick look analysis system, Triana, as a standard for
distributing analysis jobs over a network. Triana is one of the most powerful applications written in Java that works
with a set of data analysis, image and text processing toolboxes interfaced by a GUI. Program units from these tool
boxes can be graphically connected together to perform complex tasks on both numerical as well as text, graphical
and metadata. Triana can automatically distribute each unit, or a group of units, of a complex analysis routine to a
different processor on a heterogeneous network of different platforms, create and maintain logs, etc. It has obviously
the potential to set up one of the crucial functionalities required in the Grid network, namely parallel computation
over a large number of heterogeneous platforms. Triana has been proposed to be used as a standard for both particle
physics and astrophysics applications in the PPARC program.”
List of Institutions and Personnel
Co-PIs
Paul Avery
Ian Foster
Harvey Newman
Alexander Szalay
Rob Gardner
University of Florida
University of Chicago
California Institute of Technology
The Johns Hopkins University,
Indiana University
Collaborators
Only a fraction of these people would be funded by this proposal. No laboratory personnel will be funded.
Darin Acosta
James Annis
Remzi Arpaci-Dusseau
Keith Baker
Rich Baker
Julian Bunn
Peter Couvares
Koen Holtman
John Huth
Stephen Kent
Carl Kesselman
Albert Lazzarini
Miron Livny
Reagan Moore
David Malon
Ed May
Shawn McKee
Ken McFarlane
Lawrence Price
Joseph Romano
Jenny Schoepf
Jim Shank
Chris Stoughton
Valerie Taylor
Ani Thakar
Craig Tull
Roy Williams
University of Florida
Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory
University of Wisconsin
Hampton University
Brookhaven National Lab
California Institute of Technology
University of Wisconsin
California Institute of Technology
Harvard University
Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory
University of Southern California
California Institute of Technology
University of Wisconsin
San Diego Supercomputing Center
Argonne National Lab
Argonne National Lab
University of Michigan
Hampton University
Argonne National Lab
University of Texas, Brownsville
Northwestern University
Boston University
Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory
Northwestern University
Johns Hopkins University,
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
California Institute of Technology