UT Grid: a comprehensive campus cyberinfrastructure

Abstract

UT Grid is a comprehensive campus cyberinfrastructure project to integrate the numerous and diverse computational, visualization, storage, data and information, and instrument/device resources of The University of Texas at Austin (UT). This joint project between UT Austin and IBM has a focus and approach with important fundamental differences from multiinstitution grids and discipline-specific grids. These distinctions, coupled with new locally-developed software for providing both portal and shell-based user interfaces to numerous grid software technologies, facilitate rapid deployment, adoption, and evolution of UT Grid, while enabling it to serve as a platform for both production computing (for research and education) and grid computing research. The first stages of UT grid are well under way after only two months: the construction of grid user portals and grid user nodes as interfaces, and the integration of serial and parallel computing resources for high-throughput computing.