About

UABgrid is a pilot project of UAB IT to develop a research computing system that provides researchers access to analysis and data resources. UABgrid leverages the federated systems model to harness on- and off-campus tools and services into a common framework for collaboration. Our current efforts are focused on expanding compute capacity and supporting data sharing.

History

Development of UABgrid has gone through several stages since its inception. A brief time-line provides an overview of this history:

• 2003 - Concept for campus grid infrastructure emerges from participation in NMI Testbed
• 2004-2006 - NSF funded project to explore construction of federated systems environments using NMI tools and open source software leads to development of myVocs and openidp.org
• 2007 - Launch of UABgrid Pilot to explore production use of federated systems environment
• 2008 - Testing migration large-scale HPC work flows to the grid; expanding pilot users
• 2009 - Development expands to support key UAB campus initiatives of caBIG and CTSA

Publications

Gemmmill, Robinson, Scavo, Bangalore Cross-domain authorization for federated virtual organizations using the myVocs collaboration environment (2009)

Robinson, Gemmill, Joshi, Bangalore, et. al. Web-Enabled Grid Authentication in a Non-Kerberos Environment (2005)

Presentations

Much of the work related to and leading to the development of UABgrid has been documented at campus, regional, national and international venues. A time-line of related presentations follows:

2009

• October 2009 UAB National Cyber-security Awareness Day (no link yet)

• October 2009 UAB HPC Bootcamp Scaling HPC Applications using the Grid (no link yet)

• May 2009 Spring Internet2 Meeting Building A Sustainable Cyberinfrastructure In the Campus and Across the Region

2008

• August 2008 UAB CIDay Cyberinfrastructure for Researchers

• June 2008 Educause Southeast Conference UABgrid Identity Infrastructure

• April 2008 Internet2 Spring Member Meeting UABgrid: Down the Road A Piece

2007

• September 2007 UAB HPC Bootcamp Introduction to Grid Computing

• April 2007 Internet2 Spring Member Meeting Constructing Campus Grids Experiences adapting myVocs to UABgrid

2006

• September 2006 Common Solutions Group Invited Presentation myVocs

• May 2006 TERENA Building Systems with Shibboleth: Integrated VO Management with myVocs and GridShib

• April 2006, Spring Internet2 Member Meeting myVocs and GridShib: Integrated VO Management

2005

• Nov 2005, IEEE Workshop on Grid Computing Web-Enabled Grid Authentication in a Non-Kerberos Environment

• May 2005 Internet2 Spring Member Meeting My Virtual Organization Collaboration System

Funding

The development of the research computing system has been funded primarily by the UAB's Office of the Vice President for Information Technology. Initial funding to explore the development of federated systems was provided by a 3-year NSF grant NMI Enabled Open Source Collaboration Tools for Virtual Organizations (2003-2006).

We welcome participation in this project and engagement for new funding opportunities.

Thank you to all supporters of this project.

Related Links

Development of the UABgrid research computing system has benefited from our engagement in a number external projects:

• Campus participation in caBIG and CTSA are the major drivers in the continued development of the campus research computing system pilot. The requirements identified by these projects are actively influencing feature development and time-lines.

• SURAgrid - UAB is a founding member of the SURAgrid collaboration. SURAgrid is a collaborative effort to expand the availability of high-performance computing resources at member campuses across the Southeastern United States and beyond. SURAgrid has developed a governance structure and 4-year strategic plan (2008-2012) for HPC Cyberinfrastructure development at member campuses and originated as voluntary continuation of the campus grid dialogs begun during the NMI Testbed. Participation in SURAgrid has been key to developing understanding of research requirements, gathering requirements for system development, and expanding our engagement across the region.

• Open Science Grid - OSG is an operational grid infrastructure that supports the exchange of high-throughput computing cycles across a large pool of computational resources. Engagement with the OSG Engage project is leading the expansion of compute resources available the campus research computing system environment UABgrid.

• Internet2 - Internet2 is a national organization that provides high-performance networks to institutions and has lead the development of web-based components for federated systems, most notably Shibboleth and InCommon. The projects that helped develop the software used in the core of UABgrid was a leading adopter of Shibboleth-based authentication and a helped pioneer integration with grid resources in the context of myVocs and GridShib integration.

• The D-Grid Interoperability and Integration of VO-Management (IOVM) Technologies effort evaluated several international VO management technologies in as part of their effort to redesign the VO management solution of D-Grid. Their June 2007 Work Package 1: Evaluation of international Shibboleth-based VO Management Projects is a comparative analysis of key technologies including myVocs, VOMS, MAMS, Switch, and PERMIS. This analysis provided helpful feedback on the benefits and limitations of myVocs and plan improvements to our research computing system.

• openidp.org an open registration provider to facilitate participation in collaborations using Shibboleth was developed as part of the initial federated systems environment and is still used today for testing and light-weight identity needs.

• myVocs is the core of the federated systems framework developed as part of the research into building campus grids and collaboration environments. This software packaged as myVocs-box forms the core of today's UABgrid Pilot environment.