August 15, 2006
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CTWatch Quarterly (05/06) Vol. 2, No. 2,Catlett, Charlie; Beckman, Pete; Skow, Dane
The authors use the TeraGrid project as an example of the costs and functions associated with the provision of a national cyberinfrastructure, with a focus on the software infrastructure and policies that are necessary to combine a variety of elements into a reliable and persistent national-scale facility. A grid facility's software components include science applications, middleware, infrastructure support services, and the tools for configuring community-developed systems or "Science Gateways," which most often take the form of Web portals. "We have partnered in the TeraGrid project not only with gateway providers but also with other grid facilities to identify and standardize a set of services and interaction methods that will enable Web portals and applications to invoke computation, information management, visualization, and other services," state the authors. A national-scale grid facility taps software infrastructure that supplies a set of common services, an architecture that enables unique facility exploitation, and the infrastructure required to coordinate the user-supportive efforts of resource providers. A successful grid facility involves close collaboration and cooperation between all participating organizations, and the identification of specific common service coordination and provision responsibilities, which in most grid projects is a function executed by a system integration team. A general-purpose grid facility must adjust to its user community's changing ideas and requirements, and the optimal model for user support is one that fully harnesses all available human links to users and their problem domains, most frequently by having the user support personnel local to the resource providers. Each of the facility's resource providers will supply documentation and training for locally provided resources and services, and proactively integrating these materials requires a communication framework that offers structure and common interfaces and formats for the materials, as well as the curation of the general systems. A national grid facility must use an operational infrastructure as its platform, while collaboration systems and processes that support virtual and distributed teams must be carefully attended to.
For the complete article, see http://www.ctwatch.org/quarterly/articles/2006/05/creating-and-operating-national-scale-cyberinfrastructure-services
Posted by rab5 at 09:34 PM
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