Grid Credit Where Credit is Due

There’s been a ton of discussion this week about the whopping $150-million in funding that the TeraGrid effort secured. So where’s all that money going? Accoring to TeraGrid director, Charlie Catlett …

“The $150 million just secured is for a five year period and it is primarily to operate, manage, and evolve the TeraGrid system so the funding is primarily for staffing. Two thirds of the funding will go toward operation and management of the resources at the eight resource provider sites, along with user support and related services provided by those partners. The remaining $50 million [over five years] is for software integration and engaging the user community through programs such as the Science Gateways initiative and a coordinated support program called Advanced Support for TeraGrid Applications, or ASTA.

The Science Gateways program involves partnerships with projects that are putting infrastructure in for entire communities, where we are working on a set of rapid prototypes aimed at developing a capability that will allow any number of such ‘science gateways’ to integrate with TeraGrid. In some cases, that would be a portal project such as the Nanohub at Purdue University. This is a portal that is offering tools and data and applications to a community of people interested in microelectronics and nanotechnology. That community includes about 40 or 50 university courses at six or seven universities. We’re putting the TeraGrid behind the nanoHUB as a provider of computing and storage and other resources. And by doing that, we get to work with the nanoHUB group, and provide services to an entire community.

Another example of a Science Gateway involves an NIH project at the University of Chicago, called the National Microbial Pathogen Data Resource Center. They’re providing desktop applications to several hundred pathogen researchers, funded by NIH. And while it’s not a portal, we’re embedding within those applications the capability to reach out and use TeraGrid resources from the desktop. So that’s another kind of a science gateway.”

I think it’s been great for enterprise IT pros to hear about TeraGrid, because so much of the groundwork for Grid has in fact originated in e-Science / academia — and enterprise IT hasn’t had a whole lot of visibility into the early history of Grid. Muddying the waters even further, as Ian Foster recently discussed, special interest Grid groups have been extremely divisive recently, suggesting that e-Science Grid pros don’t understand the rigors of enterprise environments.

When you look back to the early days of the Internet (ARPANET –> USENET –>extensive DoE, DoD contributions –> TCP/IP standards), much of the critical infrastructure and design was accomplished in government and academia before it was ultimately picked by enterprise and commercialized. The history of Grid is very similar. e-Science and academic Grid pros have been hard at work for years on the various technical challenges that Grid and distributed computing are introducing — and their progress and findings are certainly making their way into the commercial-level Grid offerings being rolled out by enterprise Vendors.

So lets give credit where credit is due. There are great Grid things happening in the academic and research world. Scientific advances, new discoveries and even more jobs being created.

It seems to me that in order to execute on a project of this scale one must absolutely understand the rigors of enterprise environments. Perhaps it is the enterprise community that doesn’t understand the resolve and determination of those in research.