The DOE Science Grid

Project Principal Investigators: William T.C. Kramer, National Energy
Research Scientific Computing Center at Lawrence Berkeley National
Laboratory, Al Geist, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Keith R. Jackson,
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Jennifer M. Schopf, Argonne
National Laboratory, and Scott Studham, Pacific Northwest National
Laboratory;

Management Council: PIs, R. Bair, ANL, I. Foster, ANL, W. Johnston,
LBNL;

Science Grid Engineering Working Group: K. Jackson, Chair, LBNL, S.
Chan, NERSC, K. Chanchio, ORNL, D. Cowley, PNNL, T. Genovese, ESnet, M.
Helm, ESnet, D. Olson, LBNL

Summary

***DOE's large-scale science projects involve many collaborators at
multiple institutions. This leading edge of science depends critically
on an infrastructure that supports widely distributed computing and data
resources. The DOE Science Grid is being developed and deployed across
the DOE complex to provide persistent Grid services to advanced
scientific applications and problem solving frameworks. By reducing
barriers to the use of remote resources, it is making significant
contributions to SciDAC and in deploying the infrastructure required for
the next generation of science.***

A significant portion of DOE science is already, or is rapidly becoming,
a distributed endeavor involving many collaborators that are frequently
multi-institutional. Rapidly increasing data and computing requirements
must be addressed with resources that are often more widely distributed
than the collaborators. Thus, leading edge science now depends
critically on an infrastructure that supports the process of distributed
science.

The goal of Grid computing is to deliver:

-   Computing capacity adequate for tasks, provided at the time the task
    is needed by the science;

-   Data capacity sufficient for the science task provided independent
    of location;

-   Communication capacity sufficient to support all of the
    aforementioned and provided transparently to both systems and users,
    and;

-   Software services supporting a rich environment that enables
    scientists to focus on the science simulation and analysis aspects
    of software and problem solving systems, rather than on the details
    of managing the underlying computing, data, and communication
    resources.

Grid technology is evolving to provide the services and infrastructure
needed for building "virtual" systems and organizations. A Grid-based
infrastructure provides a way to use and manage widely distributed
computing and data resources in the science environment, and offers an
opportunity for a standard, large-scale computing, data, instrument, and
collaboration environment for science that spans many different
projects, institutions, and countries.

The DOE Science Grid is developing aspects of Grid technology to ensure
that it provides a basis of support for DOE's large-scale science
projects, with components located at multiple laboratories and
universities worldwide. The goal of the DOE SG project is threefold:

-   Reduce the barriers by defining common practices for DOE

-   Assist in the building of needed infrastructure across sites and
    projects

-   Deploy a testbed initially among five project sites 

The project is integrating activities in deployment, research and
development, and application outreach that allow us to develop and
refine the Grid tools and their deployment and support. DOE SG is
focusing on identifying and resolving scalability issues so that the
Grid can support large-scale science collaborations. Close cooperation
with a variety of application projects is ensuring relevance to SciDAC
goals and enabling innovative approaches to scientific computing via
secure remote access to online facilities, distance collaboration,
shared petabyte datasets, and large-scale distributed computation.
Current application interactions include the Genomes to Life project,
the DOE Climate Change Prediction program, and the PLANCK-Grid
astrophysics project.

Major accomplishments to date include:

-   Construction of a Grid across five major DOE facilities with an
    initial complement of computing and data resources;

-   Integration of NERSC's production, large-scale storage systems into
    the Grid.

-   Creation of the *DOEGrids* PKI \[1\], a common PKI service for Grid
    authentication that combines several DOE science VOs, and has been
    expanded to include several organizations funded by NSF.

-   The development of authentication and authorization services, the
    core to the construction of basic Grid services, called the
    *International Grid Federation* (IGF) \[2\]. IGF addresses the
    direct need for U.S., European, and Asian VOs to work together, and
    establishes an infrastructure to facilitate the creation and sharing
    of international Grids, starting with the development of common
    criteria for identity establishment. The current membership in IGF
    consists of 20 countries.

-   Firewall testing to facilitate deployment of Grid services in
    firewalled environments. Joint work between NERSC and the Globus
    Alliance examined various general firewall configurations and
    resulted in the development of a document explaining how Globus
    Toolkit® services interact with firewalls\[3\]. In addition, NERSC
    worked with the Globus Alliance to make NERSC\'s intrusion detection
    system, Bro \[4\], Globus aware.

-   Joint development of a trouble ticket interchange format with the
    NSF-funded iVDGL. Deployment of a top-level support page, to serve
    as a single point of contact for submitting trouble tickets. This
    top-level tool then uses the interchange format to integrate with
    the local site trouble ticket systems to allow routing to the
    appropriate site for resolution.

-   Design of a resource monitoring and debugging infrastructure that
    facilitates managing this widely distributed system and the building
    of high-performance distributed science applications;

-   Establishment of development and deployment partnerships with
    several key vendors, e.g., IBM.

-   Development of Python-wrapped Globus services toolkit \[5\] that
    enables developers to build experimental Grid system-administration
    tools to help support the production usage of Grid resources across
    the DOE SG sites. These include graphical tools for checking the
    status of Grid resources, managing Globus configuration, adding new
    Grid users, etc.

-   Use of the Grid infrastructure by applications from several
    disciplines -- computational chemistry, ground water transport,
    climate modeling, bioinformatics, etc.

-   A number of demonstrations of DOE Science Grid technology were given
    at SC 2003

These are important steps in developing and deploying a realistic-scale
Grid environment that supports advanced Grid services for DOE science.

For more information visit www.doesciencegrid.org or contact
<kramer@nersc.gov>.

**References:**

\[1\] DOE Grids PKI, http://www.doegrids.org/

\[2\] International Grid Federation, http://www.gridpma.org

\[3\] V. Welch, "Globus Toolkit Firewall Requirements",
http://www.globus.org/security/v2.0/
Globus%20Firewall%20Requirements-5.pdf

\[4\] V. Paxton, "Bro: A System for Detecting Network Intruders in Real
Time, Proceedings of the 7^th^ USENIX Security Symposium, 1998.

\[5\] www-itg.lbl.gov/Grid/projects/pyGlobus/