About the CUNY Grid
From Research Computing
The CUNY Grid Project
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Background
The CUNY Grid is a multi-campus project that began in 2001 with the development of several parallel-LINUX clusters at the CUNY Graduate Center. The GC Provost’s Office decided that it could provide additional support to the science and social science doctoral programs, particularly those that were campus based, by developing computational science capabilities for doctoral faculty and students. In the past year, the grid has grown to include parallel LINUX clusters from two other CUNY campuses: The City College of New York and The College of Staten Island. The clusters are linked through a dedicated virtual private network to form a computational grid that can be used by CUNY faculty and doctoral students. We expect other colleges in the CUNY system to follow suit in the near future.
The CUNY Grid Project serves the research and instructional needs of the diverse active researchers across the CUNY system. The project is centered at The Graduate Center, where doctoral courses and research seminars meet, and is accessible to all the campuses in the CUNY system. The Graduate Center’s Office of Information Resources administers the project; the Project Director is Dr. Florian Lengyel, Assistant Director of Research Computing.
The CUNY grid aggregates high-performance parallel computing facilities developed at The Graduate Center and at other CUNY colleges for use by faculty and graduate students for research and instructional use. The range of disciplines represented by the users of the research grid includes computational chemistry, computational biology, computer science, mathematics, physics and the social sciences. The CUNY Graduate Center currently supports three Technology Fellowship recipients, who assist with the operation, management and design of the grid and with specialized applications. The Technology Fellows also serve as technical liaisons between the Graduate Center and grid users at the various sites. Research groups may recommend their doctoral students for these fellowships.
Implementation
Distributed resource management is implemented at each cluster with the Sun Grid Engine (SGE) (http://gridengine.sunsource.net/), which provides for local, but not wide-area grid computing. The SGE is integrated with the NSF-sponsored Globus Toolkit (http://www.globus.org), which provides job submission to remote clusters.
Broader Impact
The project provides training and assistance to researchers and students who wish to use the grid and participate in its development. It will also foster the exchange of technical know-how among computational research groups, which previously have tended to work in isolation. Seminars and colloquia in grid computing practice and in scientific computing will be held at The Graduate Center and other CUNY colleges.
CUNY Grid users
There are currently 37 faculty users in eight disciplines (biochemistry, biology, chemistry, computer science, engineering, finance, mathematics and physics) from seven CUNY campuses (Baruch College, Brooklyn College, City College, The Graduate Center, Hunter College, Lehman College, Queens College, and the College of Staten Island) and one non-CUNY campus (Yeshiva University, in collaboration with researchers in computational chemistry at Hunter College). There are 39 doctoral student users from eight CUNY campuses. A sample of the research activities includes computational chemistry, photonics, quantal density functional theory, genetic algorithms for phylogenetic analysis, traffic simulation, computational number theory, protein folding and molecular recognition, and combinatorial models of evolutionary processes.
Further information about the CUNY Grid can be gotten from Dr. Florian Lengyel (mailto:flengyel@gc.cuny.edu) or Associate Provost Stephen Brier (mailto:sbrier@gc.cuny.edu).
