The iPlant Collaborative (iPlant) is a United States National Science Foundation (NSF) funded project that aims to create an innovative, comprehensive, and foundational cyberinfrastructure in support of plant biology research (PSCIC, 2006). iPlant is developing cyberinfrastructure that uniquely enables scientists throughout the diverse fields that comprise plant biology to address Grand Challenges in new ways, to stimulate and facilitate cross-disciplinary research, to promote biology and computer science research interactions, and to train the next generation of scientists on the use of cyberinfrastructure in research and education. Meeting humanity's projected demands for agricultural and forest products and the expectation that natural ecosystems be managed sustainably will require synergies from the application of information technologies. The iPlant cyberinfrastructure design is based on an unprecedented period of research community input, and leverages developments in high-performance computing, data storage, and cyberinfrastructure for the physical sciences. iPlant is an open-source project with application programming interfaces that allow the community to extend the infrastructure to meet its needs. iPlant is sponsoring community-driven workshops addressing specific scientific questions via analysis tool integration and hypothesis testing. These workshops teach researchers how to add bioinformatics tools and/or datasets into the iPlant cyberinfrastructure enabling plant scientists to perform complex analyses on large datasets without the need to master the command-line or high-performance computational services.
Natural hazards engineering plays an important role in minimizing the effects of natural hazards 9 on society through the design of resilient and sustainable infrastructure. The DesignSafe 10 cyberinfrastructure has been developed to enable and facilitate transformative research in natural 11 hazards engineering, which necessarily spans across multiple disciplines and can take advantage 12 of advancements in computation, experimentation, and data analysis. DesignSafe allows researchers to more effectively share and find data using cloud services, perform numerical 14 simulations using high performance computing, and integrate diverse datasets such that researchers can make discoveries that were previously unattainable. This paper describes the design principles used in the cyberinfrastructure development process, introduces the main components of the DesignSafe cyberinfrastructure, and illustrates the use of the DesignSafe cyberinfrastructure in research in natural hazards engineering through various examples.
In this paper, we present a bandwidth-centric job communication model that captures the interaction and impact of simultaneously co-allocating jobs across multiple clusters. We compare our dynamic model with previous research that utilizes a fixed execution time penalty for co-allocated jobs. We explore the interaction of simultaneously co-allocated jobs and the contention they often create in the network infrastructure of a dedicated computational multi-cluster.We also present several bandwidth-aware co-allocating meta-schedulers. These schedulers take inter-cluster network utilization into account as a means by which to mitigate degraded job run-time performance. We make use of a bandwidth-centric parallel job communication model that captures the time-varying utilization of shared inter-cluster network resources. By doing so, we are able to evaluate the performance of multi-cluster scheduling algorithms that focus not only on node resource allocation, but also on shared inter-cluster network bandwidth.
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