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This practices and experience paper describes the coordination, design, implementation, availability, and performance of the Pacific Rim Applications and Grid Middleware Assembly (PRAGMA) Grid Testbed. Applications in high-energy physics, genome annotation, quantum computational chemistry, wildfire simulation, and protein sequence alignment have driven the middleware requirements, and the testbed provides a mechanism for international users to share software beyond the essential, de facto standard Globus core. In this paper, we describe how human factors, resource availability and performance issues have affected the middleware, applications and the testbed design. We also describe how middleware components in grid monitoring, grid accounting, grid Remote Procedure Calls, grid-aware file systems, and grid-based optimization have dealt with some of the major characteristics of our testbed. We also briefly describe a number of mechanisms that we have

Dedicated optical connections have significant advantages over shared internet connections. The OptIPuter project (www-optiputer-net) uses medical and earth sciences imaging as application dnvers. Quartzite (UCSD) and Starlight (Chicago) create unique combinations of OEO routers and 000 and wavelength-selective optical switches. 8 2005 Optical Society of America OCIS codes: (060.2330) Fiber optic communications, (170.01 10) Imaging systemsOver campus and state fiber networks, the National Lambda Rail, and internationally, scientists are beginning to use private, 1 or 10 Gbit/s (Gbps) light pipes (termed "lambdas") to create deterministic network connections coming right into their laboratories. These dedicated connections have a number of significant advantages over shared internet connections, including high bandwidth, controlled performance (no jitter), lower cost per unit bandwidth, and security. By connecting scalable Linux clusters with these lambdas, one creates "metacomputers" on the scale of a nation or even the planet Earth. One of the largest research projects on LambdaGrids is the NSF-fhded OptIPuter (www.optiputer.net), which uses large medical and earth sciences imaging as application drivers. The OptIPuter has two regional cores, one in Southern California and one in Chicago, which has now been extended to Amsterdam. One aim of the OptIPuter project is to make interactive visualization of remote gigabyte data objects as easy as the Web makes manipulating megabyte-size data objects today. This requires parallel scaling up PCs to 100-1 OOOx in display, storage, and compute power, whik maintaining personal interactivity.The NSF has recently funded an extension of the OptIPuter project, called Quartzite, so that we can efficiently investigate and compare campus-scale terabit-class lambda network architectures that span from optical-circuits-only to packet-switched-only networks and a range of hybrid combinations in between. Quartzite connects over 300 individual cluster nodes on the UCSD campus with a novel switching core. The Quartzite core is comprised of a leading edge commercial packet switch tightly coupled to a commercial MEMS passive optical switch and then to an experimental wavelength-switchable device. Laboratory clusters supporting specialized instruments, computation, visualization, and storage serve as ideal parallel endpoints. Because Quartzite enables soft reconfiguration (from optical circuit to optical packet) of an endpoint, we will be able to better understand the where, how, and why of the packet vs. circuit architectural tradeoff, what protocols (both optical signaling and higher-level messaging) are effective, and how dynamic virtual collections at the campus scale can be knitted together with high-speed parallel networks to form an effective analysis platform for the next-generation of scientific research.

High performance computing, storage, visualization, and database infrastructures are increasing geometrically in complexity as scientists move towards grid-based computing. While this is natural, it has the effect of pushing computational capabilities beyond the reach of scientists because of the time needed to harness the infrastructure. Hiding the complexity of networked resources becomes essential if scientists are to utilize them effectively. In this work, we describe our efforts to integrate various computational chemistry components into a scientific computing environment. We briefly describe improvements we have made to individual components of the chemistry environment as well as future directions, followed by a more in-depth discussion of our strategy for integration into a grid workflow environment based on web services, which enables access to remote resources while shielding users from the complexities of the grid infrastructures. A preliminary schema for storing data obtained from computational chemistry calculations is also described.0-7695-1524-X/02 $17.00 © 2002 IEEE

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