Syracuse University's OrangeGrid uses the HTCondor High Throughput Computing System and a custom virtual machine manager to allow idle computers in offices and student labs to run research-computing tasks. With over 7000 CPU cores, and growing, OrangeGrid is used by Syracuse University's research and teaching community for science and engineering applications. Science drivers for OrangeGrid come from a diverse range of projects, including gravitational-wave astronomy, biological physics, theoretical condensed-matter physics, computational fluid dynamics, high-energy physics, Earth sciences, soft matter physics, and biomedical and chemical engineering.
The CC-NIE Networking Infrastructure project at Syracuse University upgrades the campus network infrastructure to support data-intensive research computing on OrangeGrid. This project increases the campus backbone bandwidth from 10Gbps to 40Gbps and provides 10Gbps links to the buildings providing the largest number of OrangeGrid cores. This project directly affects the usability and productivity of OrangeGrid, opening it to a wider-range of science and engineering projects from SU researchers.
OrangeGrid is an important resource for Syracuse University's faculty and students. The combination of easy access and power make OrangeGrid especially important to beginning researchers and small groups who do not have their own computing resources. Undergraduate and graduate students from the College of Engineering and Computer Science and the College of Arts and Sciences have access to OrangeGrid, giving them early experience with high-throughput research computing. The experiences gained from running OrangeGrid provide a road map for other universities who wish to leverage unused cycles from desktop computing for scientific research.
