Speaker
Description
Detailed analysis
In order to properly enable these resources and provide a serious platform for collaboration, a grid based on the gLite middleware from EGEE is currently being deployed at various sites in South Africa. These sites include all of the major universities and the national laboratories, and will use the national research network as well as the large centre for high-performance computing. Several scientific collaborations at the international level, including two of the LHC experiments (ALICE and ATLAS) as well as the WISDOM grid (operating in the biomedical field) are operating currently in South Africa and are poised to provide significant computing to these collaborations. Apart from the big international collaborations, the sites in South Africa will provide computing resources through grid services to researchers in several fields of science, including the astronomy, rational drug design, earth observation, climate modeling, nuclear medicine, etc.
Conclusions and Future Work
A SA certification authority is currently being set up, and discussions with EUGridPMA are under way to provide international certification. This opens the way to for full integration into the EGEE production grid, when the infrastructure in South Africa has been certified production ready. In the short term, the integration into WLCG and the WISDOM grid is fully under way.
Keywords
grid, gLite, e-Infrastructures, WLCG, WISDOM, CHPC, DST
URL for further information
http://sagrid.ac.za
Impact
The deployment of stable grid services in a widely distributed manner, including the high-performance of the national network and large computing centre, presents an opportunity for fundamental shift in the way that South Africans collaborate and do science. The integration of the existing national cyberinfrastructures and the various institutional sites will provide of the order of 1500 cores of computing power and a few hundred terabytes of storage for the use of scientific research. Futhermore, by integrating the BlueGene supercomputer at the CHPC, and by providing access to this to top researchers from the African continent, a world-class resource is made available to them, via grid services, independant of their geographic position.
