Overview of Coupled Simulation e-Science Support in the NAREGI Grid Middleware

Japan's National Research Grid Initiative (NAREGI), whose first project phase was five years during 2003-2008, was not merely a national grid middleware development project, but also several e-Science activities were run alongside in close collaboration with middleware R&D in order to identify the necessities as well as the use cases of applications that would benefit from the grid. There, our focus had been application-specific middleware components to "grid-enable" large-scale nano-science and chemistry applications, including those that require coupling of multiple applications on the grid. We will on describe the portion of software stack of NAREGI middleware to support such coupled applications, which are still relatively few in grids despite the perceived suitability of grids to foster such an application environment.

Traditional methodologies in such multi-scale and/or multi-physics applications had involved laborious user efforts in developing custom codes and decomposing original codes for semantic-level communication between heterogeneous scientific application components. To relieve the application users of such hardship, parts of the NAREGI middleware stack was designed with requirements for executing coupled applications across multiple machines, from the top application level to the very bottom resource management level such that such different components can be registered, discovered, and coupled together in an easy fashion across the grid in an uniform manner, much in the same way web services are used federate commercial services. Such was the requirements as posed by the application groups at Insititute ofr Molecular Science---for example, to easily couple a variety of different Molecular-Orbital and Molecular-Dynamics solvers in a QM/MM solver across the grid.

Satoshi Matsuoka is Professor in the Department of Mathematical and Computing Sciences, Tokyo Institute of Technology He received his Ph. D. from the University of Tokyo in 1993. He became a full Professor at the Global Scientific Information and Computing Center (GSIC) of Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech / Titech) in April 2001, leading the Research Infrastructure Division Solving Environment Group of the Titech campus.

He has pioneered grid computing research in Japan the mid 90s along with his collaborators, and currently serves as sub-leader of the Japanese National Research Grid Initiative (NAREGI) project, that aim to create middleware for next-generation CyberScience Infrastructure. He was also the technical leader in the construction of the TSUBAME supercomputer, which has become the fast supercomputer in Asia-Pacific in June, 2006 at 85 Teraflops (peak, now 111 Teraflops as of March 2009) and 38.18 Teraflops (Linpack, 7th on the June 2006 list) and also serves as the core grid resource in the Titech Campus Grid.

He has been (co-) program and general chairs of several international conferences including ACM OOPSLA'2002, IEEE CCGrid 2003, HPCAsia 2004, Grid 2006, CCGrid 2006/2007/2008, as well as countless program committee positions, in particular numerous ACM/IEEE Supercomputing Conference (SC) technical papers committee duties including serving as the network area chair for SC2004, SC2008, and will be the technical papers chair for SC2009. He served as a Steering Group member and an Area Director of the Global Grid Forum during 1999-2005, and recently became the steering group member of the Supercomputing Conference.

He has won several awards including the Sakai award for research excellence from the Information Processing Society of Japan in 1999, and recently received the JSPS Prize from the Japan Society for Promotion of Science in 2006 from his Royal Highness Prince Akishinomiya.

http://matsu-www.is.titech.ac.jp/~matsu/