Scientists leading the WestGrid project in Canada have announced that the major resources of this $48 million project are available for general use by the research community. Canadian particle physicists have already applied WestGrid successfully to ongoing experiments, and plans are underway at TRIUMF to link the WestGrid Linux cluster to the LHC Computing Grid (LCG).
The aim of the WestGrid project is to provide high-performance computing in western Canada, based on resources at several universities in Alberta and British Columbia, and at TRIUMF. It currently consists of the following: a 256 cpu shared-memory machine (SGI Origin) for large-scale parallel processing at the University of Alberta; a cluster of multiprocessors (36 x 4 cpu Alpha nodes) at the University of Calgary, connected by a high-speed Quadrics interconnect that is also for parallel jobs; a 1008 cpu Linux cluster (3 GHz IBM blades) at the University of British Columbia (UBC) and TRIUMF for serial or loosely coupled parallel jobs; and a network storage facility (IBM) at Simon Fraser University, initially with 24 TeraBytes of disk space and about 70 TeraBytes of tape. As of November 2003, the WestGrid Linux cluster at UBC/TRIUMF ranked 58th in the “TOP500 Supercomputer Sites” rankings.
The Grid-enabled infrastructure also includes major collaborative facilities known as Access Grid nodes, with a total of seven institutions interconnected over dedicated research “lightpaths” on the existing provincial and national research networks. The new resources are expected to support advances in research in many disciplines where large amounts of data are typically involved, such as medical research, astronomy, subatomic physics, pharmaceutical research and chemistry.
Two particle-physics experiments, TWIST at TRIUMF and D0 at Fermilab, have already participated in the testing phase at the UBC/TRIUMF site. Both experiments benefited greatly from access to significant computing resources during the tests. For the future, it is planned to connect WestGrid indirectly to the LCG through the LCG site at TRIUMF. Work is ongoing to develop the software necessary to achieve this without the need to install LCG tools on WestGrid itself.
Further reading
For further information on the project, see www.westgrid.ca.
