From its inception, the rapidly growing movement to build "computational grids" to support advanced modeling and simulation in nearly every scientific field requires new environments and tools for high performance, grid-enabled scientific computing. This topic is addressed in the proposed US-France cooperative research project between the University of Tennessee's Innovative Computing Laboratory and the Laboratoire de l'Informatique du Parallelism of French National Institute for Informatics and Applied Mathematics (INRIA) and the Ecole Normale Superieure de Lyon. Led by US and French principal investigators, Jack Dongarra and Frederic Desprez respectively, this collaborative effort extends their prior joint research on a set of tools for portable and efficient parallel scientific software. Over the last few years, their effort led to well-known research software such as LAPACK, Netsolve, and Scilab. The focus areas of their new research effort include: (1) exploration of easy-to-use systems for Grid-enabled computing and ways to combine NetSolve (University of Tennessee) middleware with Scilab (INRIA) to solve problems in Grid computing; (2) creating of self-adapting, grid-aware numerical libraries; (3) building of performance monitoring tools for clusters and grids; and (4) construction of next generation software repositories to deploy scientific software in grid-computing environments.
This award represents the US side of a joint proposal to NSF and INRIA. NSF provides travel funds and living expenses to US investigators, postdoctoral researchers and students for visits to France to participate in collaborative research and joint workshops. INRIA supports the visits of French researchers to the United States. The joint activities take advantage of combined US-French expertise in parallel and distributing computing and use of advanced-computer architectures. The project advances NSF's priority area - cyberinfrastructure research and development - which will enable collaboration among scientists and engineers across disciplines and national boundaries.
