The project, called the Scalable Intracampus Research Grid (SInRG), will mirror the underlying technologies and interdisciplinary research collaborations that are characteristic of the national technology grid being developed by the NSF's Partnerships for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (PACI) and other government agencies. While the SInRG infrastructure will eventually become a node on this national grid, its primary purpose is to provide a technological and organizational microcosm in which key research challenges can be attacked with better communication and control than wide-area environments usually permit.

SInRG will use special system software to integrate high-performance networks, computers, and storage systems into a unified system that can provide advanced computing and information services. "Of course we're excited by the opportunity to build on and experiment with the integration of our different projects to create SInRG's system software," says Dongarra. "But we also plan to leverage the work that's being done by the PACIs and the other parts of the national grid community. Our work with SInRG will be one part, an important one we hope, of a much larger story about the transformation of computing and information systems that computational grids will bring about."

Nearly all of SInRG's funding is targeted for purchasing special Grid Service Clusters (GSCs), which are hardware ensembles specifically designed and configured to fit SInRG's multifaceted research agenda. Each GSC will consist of a compute engine, a mass storage device, and a fast data switch integrating them all and connecting them to the campus' high-performance network. "You can think of a GSC as a next generation workgroup cluster in an advanced local area network," says research team member Micah Beck. "Each of them will be assigned to one of the collaborating teams and customized to meet their special needs. But they'll also be designed from the ground up to be nodes on the grid, so the computational power can be moved around as needed and the resources can be flexibly shared by the whole SInRG community."

"By the end of the five years, we will have seven GSCs spread among six different locations around the campus, including one across the Tennessee River at the UT Medical Center," says Computer Science Department Head and SInRG co-principal investigator Bob Ward. "In one form or another we expect to encounter all the problems that the community building the national technology grid will see and we're looking forward to the special opportunity that this unique infrastructure will give us to address them."

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