Projects

This EPSRC-funded project runs for three years, from 2006 to 2009. It aims to provide lightweight and usable security solutions for computational grid environments. In this context, we use the term "lightweight" to mean that the solution is easy to deploy in a scalable fashion, is easy to maintain, and is not overly complex for the administrator or users to understand and use. We use the term "usable" to mean that the user (subjectively) feels that the software has successfully fulfilled their requirements for that software -- this includes considerations such as ease of use, the gradient of the learning curve, the extent to which the software supports the user's model of how it should be used, etc.

For more details see here.

Three research groups, with joint support from the U.S. National Science Foundation and the U.K. Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, linked the U.S. TeraGrid and the U.K. National Grid Service via transatlantic fiber and used supercomputing systems at multiple sites simultaneously to carry out interactive simulations.

These projects (SPICE, VORTONICS and NekTAR) were showcased at SC|05. A press release on these three US-UK projects at SC|05 can be downloaded here and is available online on the TeraGrid website.

SPICE (Simulated Pore Interactive Computing Experiment) is an ongoing project which uses Grid computing to understand DNA translocation across lipid membranes embedded in protein nanopores. SPICE uses the RealityGrid Steering Library and middleware to run interactive simulations on the UK's National Grid Service and TeraGrid in the U.S. SPICE also exploits UKLight, the UK's high bandwidth (1Gbit/sec) optical network. SPICE has won an HPC Analytics Challenge Award at SC|05.
See here for more information on SPICE and here for a demonstration video.

The VORTONICS project at Tufts University used the Transatlantic Federated Grid to simulate and visualize highly computationally-intensive problems in fluid dynamics. The software is parallelized using MPI, and geographically distributed using MPICH-G2.

The NekTAR project simulated blood flow through the entire network of human arteries by coupling different types of simulation performed on supercomputers in the US and UK.

• A joint paper entitled "Nektar, SPICE and Vortonics: Using Federated Grids for Large Scale Scientific Applications", can be downloaded here. The paper describes the three projects in the Joint US/UK High End Computing collaboration, and has been accepted at the Challenges of Large Applications in Distributed Environments Workshop (CLADE 2006) held in conjunction with the 15th International Symposium on High Performance Distributed Computing (HPDC-15).
• A recently issued position paper entitled "Moving the data to the computation: multi-site distributed parallel computation" which describes outcomes of the VORTONICS project and the new concept of Geographically Distributed Domain Decomposition can be downloaded here.

The TeraGyroid project was an international collaboration linking the U.S.'s TeraGrid and the UK's eScience Grid, jointly funded by the NSF and EPSRC, to perform grid-based lattice-Boltzmann simulations of defect dynamics in amphiphilic liquid crystals.

TeraGyroid won the HPC Challenge Award for Most Innovative Data-Intensive Application at SuperComputing 2003 in Phoenix, Arizona and the ISC2004 Award for Integrated Data and Information Management.

See here for more information on the TeraGyroid project.

RealityGrid is also involved in the EPSRC's Integrative Biology e-Science Pilot Project; BBSRC's IntBioSim e-Science Project; the joint EPSRC/PPARC/MRC/BT-funded ESLEA project for bandwidth intensive exemplars exploiting the new UKLight research network; the EPSRC Best Practise Project on "Rapid Prototyping of Usable Grid Middleware"; the OMII Managed Programme's "Robust Hosting of Applications by WSRF::Lite"; and the EU European Grid Project EGEE.

WEDS is one of the EPSRC funded Best Practise Projects, on "rapid Prototyping of Usable Grid Middleware". WEDS is an lightweight application hosting environment for Distributed Simulations based on WSRF::Lite. More information and download can be found here.

The Application Hosting Environment (AHE) extends the WEDS philosophy to enable application deployment across administrative boundaries. The client is light-weight, making the AHE server-side transparent to the end-user. AHE is being developed jointly as part of the RAHWL (Robust Application Hosting under WSRF::Lite) project which is funded by the OMII (Open Middleware Infrastructure Institute). More information on the AHE can be found here.

http://www.integrativebiology.ox.ac.uk
An EPSRC e-Science Pilot Project aimed at multiscale modelling of heart dynamics and tumour growth.

http://intbiosim.org
IntBioSim: An Integrated Approach to Multi-Level Biomolecular Simulations, IntBioSim is a BBSRC funded project involving the universities of Oxford, Southampton, Bristol, Manchester, and London (UCL). The project will develop an integrated approach to computational systems biology spanning from chemical to cell biological simulations. This approach will be applied to a pharmaceutically important class of proteins, namely monotopic membrane-bound enzymes, e.g. cyclooxygenases and monoamine oxidase. The key e-Science objective of this project is to develop a generic framework within which to conduct multi-level biomolecular simulations. The project will address two areas: (i) development of a biomolecular simulation markup language to enable a hierarchical approach to multi-level simulations; and (ii) development of approaches to computational steering and coupling simulations on heterogeneous resources to enable a hybrid approach. The project will also evaluate the relative performance of hierarchical vs. hybrid approaches to multi-level biomolecular simulations in a GRID environment.

http://www.eslea.uklight.ac.uk
ESLEA (Exploitation of Switched Lightpaths for e-Science Applications) is a two-year project funded by EPSRC, PPARC and MRC aimed at exploiting UKLight for a range of scientific applications, including Particle Physics, Radio Astronomy, Computational Science and e-Health.

http://www.sve.man.ac.uk/Research/AtoZ/MUST/
The goal of the MUST project is to facilitate Multicast Streaming Technology for the Grid. MUST is a collaboration between Complexity Research Group (CRG) of BT Exact and the RealityGrid consortium of EPSRC's e-Science initiative. A list of publications related to this project is available here.

http://foxd.org
The Functional OXide Discovery (FOXD) project is pioneering combinatorial approaches to materials selection and to materials research using a large-scale combinatorial robot. The system will soon be linked to the e-Science network.

For the RealityGrid Middleware and Software see here.

See here for the other EPSRC funded UK e-Science pilot projects.