This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
Bellarmine University will acquire a 64-node Supercomputing Cluster with approximately 22TB of RAID6 disk storage space to conduct grid-enabled computational research in High Energy Physics using the Open Science Grid (OSG) cyberinfrastructure. The collaborative research activities will be carried out in close partnership with University of Oklahoma, State University of New York at Albany, Purdue University at Calumet, Southwestern University, and a Historically Black Minority-Serving institution, Benedict College. Using the grid middleware resources, this partnership will essentially create a virtual organization that will link all the research participants by bringing together geographically and organizationally dispersed computational resources and people from the six institutions from six different states by developing a platform for shared systematic use of the supercomputing cluster and effective utilization of computational tools. We plan to search for the Higgs Boson and SUSY (Supersymmetric) particles in specific decay channels using the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) data. The physics studies will first be carried out and tested on detailed simulations of particles and their interactions with the detector using the GEANT monte-carlo package. This multi-institutional research team will focus on the development of evolutionary algorithms and computational code to carry out the complex data analyses tasks by studying the various detector parameters - focusing on data reduction and filtering methodologies and pattern recognition techniques for extracting ?discovery level signals? from petabyte-scale datasets.
The availability of a supercomputing cluster will serve as a powerful stimulus for the recruitment of undergraduate students in the sciences, especially from the underrepresented groups. The computational research activities with OSG will not only have a significant and a broad societal impact on the educational training of undergraduate students of all races and ethnicity at Bellarmine University, but also has the potential to bring in a new era of grid-enabled scientific research capability at this institution via infusion of this new knowledge. The grid-enabled supercomputing cluster will create precisely the kind of exciting learning environment that will provide the next generation of students at all seven participating institutions with an accessible entry to research and education at the frontiers of computational science, information technology, and cluster/grid computing. These trained students will acquire a solid computational background with broad technical skills and expertise in high performance parallel cluster computing techniques and grid middleware technologies. Using this supercomputing facility, we plan to incorporate the grid-enabled research activities into the academic curriculum by developing an innovative interdisciplinary course in ?Computational Science using Grid Technology.? Additionally, we plan to host a hands-on OSG Summer Grid Workshop/School at Bellarmine University for the undergraduate students from the regional public, private, and minority-serving institutions in Kentucky.
Major Research Instrumentation funding from NSF’s Office of Cyberinfrastructure program (Award: 0922923) has established a state-of-the-art grid-enabled supercomputing facility at Bellarmine University (BU) using the national Open Science Grid (OSG) cyberinfrastructure. OSG is a distributed computing infrastructure in the US to enable large-scale scientific research. The 51-node supercomputer, equipped with 408 cores, 1300GB of RAM and 375TB of hard disk space is the third-largest supercomputer in Kentucky. It is Kentucky’s only OSG grid site and OSG’s first grid site located at a predominantly undergraduate institution in the US. The supercomputer is currently being used for the CERN-LHC (Large Hadron Collider) ATLAS high energy physics experiment as a dedicated Tier3 OSG grid site in the US under University of Oklahoma’s Tier2 OSG grid site. BU’s Tier3 grid site is also part of the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG) and can provide computing and storage resources to others via the grid cyberinfrastructure. Various web portals have been implemented for monitoring the Tier3 cluster’s performance (which is running Scientific Linux-5.4) using PCM (Platform Cluster Manager), Cacti (a web-based graphing tool) and Nagios (a network monitoring software application). An OSG monitoring dashboard has been established for the Tier3 Supercomputer using Netvibes. In addition, a web portal has been implemented to monitor the temperature and relative humidity of the room that houses the Supercomputer. Using MONALISA (MONitoring Agents using a Large Integrated Services Architecture), the OSG Grid network traffic to and from the Supercomputer can be monitored while the grid jobs are being transferred among the grid sites. The research team members come from six states, two Research-I universities and four predominately undergraduate institutions. The institutions represented include the University of Oklahoma, State University of New York at Albany, Bellarmine University, Purdue University - Calumet, Southwestern University, and Benedict College (HBCU). The research team members have formed a "VO" (Virtual Organization) which allows them to share resources and more easily conduct their data-intensive research tasks via Supercomputer over the network. Additionally, any registered grid user in the US and Europe can have access to the Supercomputer using the OSG grid middleware resources to submit and run their grid jobs. Since January 2011, the supercomputer has processed over 7000 grid jobs submitted via OSG and 570 grid jobs submitted via WLCG and have since clocked in over 62,000 CPU hours processing various grid jobs. Since 2010, members of this research team who are also from the ATLAS experiment (Mahmood, Severini, Alam, and Skubic) and from the CMS experiment (Parashar) have co-authored a number of peer-reviewed research papers along with their collaborators from the ATLAS and CMS experiments. The grid-enabled supercomputer project is providing a state-of-the-art computing infrastructure for scientific research, contributing to the advancement of grid technology in Kentucky, and helping students to bridge the "digital divide" gap in our state. At Bellarmine University, the project allows faculty to participate in the world’s largest international scientific research project, the high profile LHC-ATLAS experiment. Of significant value are the infusion of new knowledge and the creation of new research opportunities in scientific exploration and discovery for Bellarmine undergraduate students. Such unique opportunities to work with a supercomputer using grid technology are very rare in the US at the undergraduate level. Using CERN’s Atlantis and Hypatia software packages, Mahmood (PI) and five undergraduate physics students at Bellarmine University have been analyzing both Monte-Carlo and ATLAS data (from the 2010 LHC data run) to search for the Higgs boson in specific decay modes and studying the particle tracks and their decay patterns. The PI and his undergraduate students have focused on filtering methodologies and pattern recognition techniques in order to extract potential "discovery level signals" from large datasets. The PI at Bellarmine University has developed an upper level undergraduate course that has been incorporated into the Physics curriculum, called "Computational Physics with Cluster Computing". Severini (Co-PI) from the University of Oklahoma served as one of the co-organizers and co-leaders of the OSG Grid School that was held at UNESP, Sao Paulo, Brazil, December 6 - 10, 2010. Mahmood (PI) was invited to attend NSF‘s Advisory Committee for Cyberinfrastructure Task Force Campus Bridging Cyberinfrastructure Workshop and contributed to the final workshop report. This project was chosen as one of the case studies that was featured in the final workshop report - NSF Campus Bridging Technologies Workshop: Data and Networking Issues Workshop Report. G.T. Almes, D. Jent and C.A. Stewart, eds., 2011.
