In June 2008, São Paulo State University(UNESP) began to set up the largest computational cluster in Latin America, on seven different sites in the State of São Paulo. GridUNESP, powered by Sun Microsystems’ technology, will give university research groups access to the highest levels of data processing and storage capacity for particle physics, genetics, meteorology, medicine, and other areas of scientific investigation.
The central system, to be installed at the UNESP campus in Barra Funda, São Paulo, will have 2,048 processing cores and a performance capacity of about 23.2 teraflops. The total system, consisting of the central cluster and another seven, will reach 33.3 teraflops. The central cluster and the seven secondary clusters will be set up at the campuses at Araraquara, Bauru, Botucatu, Ilha Solteira, Rio Claro, São José do Rio Preto and São Paulo.
GridUNESP is major facility that will serve not only the LHC program, but research in a wide range of disciplines. It has established a partnership with the OSG, which has computational resources at 50 sites in the USA, Europe, Asia and Latin America. It becomes part of a group made up of TeraGrid, in the USA; Enabling Grids for E-sciencE (EGEE), in Europe; NorduGrid, in Scandinavia; TWGrid, in Taiwan; the Australian Partnership for Advanced Computing (APAC), in Australia; and NYSGrid, in New York, amongst others. GridUNESP will use OSG middleware and equitably share its computational resources.
Note: Given collaborations with CERN (for LHC), the European Union EGEE program and NorduGrid, this major computational resource is relevant to TransLight/StarLight. Several months ago, TransLight/StarLight provisioned two VLANs on the CHI/AMS link to connect Tier2 sites in Brazil – HEPGrid (RNP/CLARA) and SPRace (Sao Paulo/ANSP) – to CERN (via WHREN-LILA to AMPATH, then over AtlanticWave to Washington DC, to CAVEwave to Chicago, over TransLight/StarLight to Amsterdam, and then to CERN via SURFnet). This route will most likely be used for global collaboration.
URL:
www.isgtw.org/?pid=1001237
http://unesp.br/grid/
Collaborators:
Brazil:
São Paulo State University (UNESP); ANSP; RNP
Europe:
CERN; Enabling Grids for E-sciencE (EGEE)
USA:
NorduGrid
Nordic countries:
Chinese University of Hong Kong; University of Hong Kong
Taiwan:
TWGrid
Australia:
Australian Partnership for Advanced Computing (APAC); Australia
