What is the Grid
What was previously know as the APACGrid is now operated by ARCS, please see the ARCS web site, http://arcs.org.au
This web site provides some information about the past activities of the APACGrid, generally speaking, you should look to ARCS for any technical or operational matters.
APAC is contributing to the development of national eResearch infrastructure through the design, installation and operation of an ‘industrial strength’ grid, that provides Australian researchers with seamless access to the combined computational and data resources in the National Facility and the APAC partner facilities.
The APAC National Grid connects systems in every state and the ACT to provide a range of advanced services that support research collaboration, nationally and internationally. Those services improve the ease of access to multiple systems, allow data and computation to be distributed across all allocated resources, as well as providng the support for on-line access to scientific instruments, dynamic interaction with large-scale distributed data sets, and advanced collaboration activities such as computational steering through video-conferencing systems like the Access Grid.
Systems on the grid provide more than 4500 processors of compute power with more than 3PB of storage and offer a wide range of software packages installed at various sites.
Gateway Servers
Each site has gateway servers that support specific grid stacks tailored to each supported grid service. In this way the APAC National Grid simultaneously supports GT2, GT4 and LCG operation. At present the grid operates across general access network infrastructure provided by AARNet and GrangeNET, however work is underway to access a dedicated layer 3 private network implmented within the developing AARNet3 network.
Grid Services
A range of services are provided to support users of the grid, some of which run on the gateway servers and some of which run only at specific sites.
| Application support | Gridsphere | on VM NGportal, sourced from ?? |
| Apache/tomcat | on VM NGportal, sourced from VDT | |
| Authentication and Authorisation | CA | at VPAC, sourced from OpenCA |
| Myproxy | at QUT and VPAC, sourced from ?? | |
| AuthTool | on VM NGportal, sourced from APAC | |
| VOMS/VOMRS | at voms.grid.apac.edu.au, sourced from ?? | |
| Data Management | GridFTP | on VM NG1/2, sourced from VDT/globus |
| SRB | on VM NGdata and store servers, sourced from ?? | |
| Information Services | MDS2 | on VM NG1, sourced from VDT |
| MDS4 | on VM NG2, sourced from globus | |
| GIIS | on VM NG1/2 at SAPAC | |
| Job Management | GRAM2 | on VM NG1, sourced from VDT |
| GRAM4 | on VM NG2, sourced from globus | |
| Nimrod | at Monash University, sourced from Monash | |
| LCG | at University of Melbourne, sourced from EGEE |
In addition, servers available through the grid run compatible PBS based schedulars, have clients for GridFTP and SRB installed to support remote data access, and are configured to provide standardised execution environments (including support for agreed local and shared storage semantics) and can load pre-defined exection environments for specific software through the use of modules.
Grid Users
The APAC National Grid is being developed with the assistance of leading grid user communities.
Compute intensive projects include:
- Chemistry workflow
- Experimental High Energy Physics
- Genome annotation
- Geoscience workflow
- Gravitational wave research
- Molecular Docking
- Theoretical Astronomy
- Theoretical Physics
Data intensive projects include:
- Earthbytes
- Earth Systems Science workflow
- Neutron imaging data management
- The Astronomical Virtual Observatory