DOE to Explore Scientific Cloud Computing at Argonne, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories

Berkeley Lab news release: DOE to Explore Scientific Cloud Computing at
Argonne, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories

Media Contacts:
Argonne National Laboratory: Eleanor Taylor, etaylor@anl.gov, 630-252-5510
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory: Jon Bashor, jbashor@lbl.gov,
510-486-5849

online version:
http://newscenter.lbl.gov/press-releases/2009/10/14/scientific-cloud-com...

DOE to Explore Scientific Cloud Computing at Argonne, Lawrence Berkeley
National Laboratories

ARGONNE, IL and BERKELEY, CA – Cloud computing is gaining traction in
the commercial world, but can such an approach also meet the computing
and data storage demands of the nation’s scientific community? A new
program funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act through the
U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) will examine cloud computing as a
cost-effective and energy-efficient computing paradigm for scientists to
accelerate discoveries in a variety of disciplines, including analysis
of scientific data sets in biology, climate change and physics.

Cloud computing refers to a flexible model for on-demand access to a
shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks,
servers, storage, applications, services, and software) that can be
easily provisioned as needed. While shared resources are not new to
high-end scientific computing, smaller computational problems are often
run on departmental Linux clusters with software customized for the
science application. Cloud computing centralizes the resources to gain
efficiency of scale and permit scientists to scale up to solve larger
science problems while still allowing the system software to be
configured as needed for individual application requirements.

To test cloud computing for scientific capability, DOE centers at the
Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF) in Illinois and the
National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) in
California will install similar mid-range computing hardware, but will
offer different computing environments. The combined set of systems will
create a cloud testbed that scientists can use for their computations
while also testing the effectiveness of cloud computing for their
particular research problems. Since the project is exploratory, it’s
been named Magellan in honor of the Portuguese explorer who led the
first effort to sail around the globe and for whom the “clouds of
Magellan” – two small galaxies in the southern sky – were named.

One of the goals of the Magellan project is to explore whether cloud
computing can help meet the overwhelming demand for scientific
computing. Although computation is an increasingly important tool for
scientific discovery, and DOE operates some of the world’s most powerful
supercomputers, not all research applications require such massive
computing power. The number of scientists who would benefit from
mid-range computing far exceeds the amount of available resources.

“As one of the world’s leading providers of computing resources to
advance science, the Department of Energy has a vested interest in
exploring new options for meeting the overwhelming demand for computing
time,” said Michael Strayer, associate director of DOE’s Office of
Advanced Scientific Computing Research. “Both NERSC and ALCF have proven
track records in deploying innovative new systems and providing
essential support services to the scientists who use those systems, so
we think the results of this project will be quite valuable as we chart
future courses.”

DOE is funding the project at $32 million, with the money divided
equally between Argonne National Laboratory and Lawrence Berkeley
National Laboratory, where NERSC is located.

"Cloud computing has the potential to accelerate discoveries and enhance
collaborations in everything from optimizing energy storage to analyzing
data from climate research, while conserving energy and lowering
operational costs," said Pete Beckman, director of Argonne’s Leadership
Computing Facility and project lead. “We know that the model works well
for business applications, and we are working to make it equally
effective for science.”

At NERSC, the Magellan system will be used to measure a broad spectrum
of the DOE science workload and analyze its suitability for a cloud
model by making Magellan available to NERSC’s 3,000 science users. NERSC
staff will use performance-monitoring software to analyze what kinds of
science applications are being run on the system and how well they
perform on a cloud.
“Our goal is to get a global picture of Magellan’s workload so we can
determine how much of DOE’s mid-range computing needs could and should
run in a cloud environment and what hardware and software features are
needed for science clouds,” said NERSC Director Kathy Yelick. “NERSC’s
users will play a key role in this evaluation as they will bring a very
broad scientific workload into the equation and help us learn which
features are important to the scientific community.”

Looking at a spectrum of DOE scientific applications, including protein
structure analysis, power grid simulations, image processing for
materials structure analysis and nanophotonics and nanoparticle
analysis, the Magellan research team will deploy a large cloud test bed
with thousands of Intel Nehalem CPU cores. The project will also explore
commercial offerings from Amazon, Microsoft and Google.

In addition, Magellan will provide data storage resources that will be
used to address the challenge of analyzing the massive amounts of data
being produced by scientific instruments ranging from powerful
telescopes photographing the universe to gene sequencers unraveling the
genetic code of life. NERSC will make the Magellan storage available to
science communities using a set of servers and software called “Science
Gateways,” as well as experiment with Flash memory technology to provide
fast random access storage for some of the more data-intensive problems.

The NERSC and ALCF facilities will be linked by a groundbreaking 100
gigabit-per-second network, developed by DOE’s ESnet (another DOE
initiative funded by the Recovery Act). Such high bandwidth will
facilitate rapid transfer of data between geographically dispersed
clouds and enable scientists to use available computing resources
regardless of location.

“It is clear that cloud computing will have a leading role in future
scientific discovery,” added Beckman. “In the end, we will know which
scientific application domains demonstrate the best performance and what
software and processes are necessary for those applications to take
advantage of cloud services.”

About Argonne and the ALCF
Argonne National Laboratory seeks solutions to pressing national
problems in science and technology. The nation's first national
laboratory, Argonne conducts leading-edge basic and applied scientific
research in virtually every scientific discipline. Argonne operates the
ALCF for the DOE Office of Science as part of the larger DOE Leadership
Computing Facility strategy. DOE leads the world in providing the most
capable civilian supercomputers for science. Argonne researchers work
closely with researchers from hundreds of companies, universities, and
federal, state and municipal agencies to help them solve their specific
problems, advance America’s scientific leadership and prepare the nation
for a better future. With employees from more than 60 nations, Argonne
is managed by UChicago Argonne, LLC for the U.S. Department of Energy's
Office of Science.

About NERSC and LBNL
The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) is the
primary high-performance computing facility for scientific research
sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science. The
NERSC Center currently serves thousands of scientists at national
laboratories and universities across the country, researching problems
in combustion, climate modeling, fusion energy, materials science,
physics, chemistry, computational biology, and other disciplines.
Berkeley Lab is a U.S. Department of Energy national laboratory located
in Berkeley, California. It conducts unclassified scientific research
and is managed by the University of California for the DOE Office of
Science.

For more information about Computing Sciences at Berkeley Lab, please
visit: www.lbl.gov/cs