Environment from the Molecular Level A NERC eScience testbed project

Paul Wilson

I am a research assistant in the Earth Science Department at University College, London. My primary responsibility involves setting up and administrating the UCL Condor pool. The pool is now in its primary phase as a production resource, with 910 windows nodes at full capacity. With a daily average of 750 nodes running 24 hours a day, the pool has completed over 700,000 hours of computation since October 2003. In total the UCL Condor pool has executed this significant computational effort in less than 800 hours of Condor pool-time. Further more, the pool brings daily utilization levels of the UCL cluster machines up to 100% (up from a pre-condor 5% utilization level) without any additional hardware expenses. Next stages for the Condor pool are: migration to a UCL information systems dedicated server, integration with Condor-G and Globus to provide remote access for users and eventual integration with the eMinerals mini-grid.

Contact details:

Address:	Department of Earth Sciences University College London Gower Street London WC1E 6BT, UK http://www.ucl.ac.uk
Email:	paul@eminerals.org
Telephone:	0207 679 3424
Fax:	0207 388 7614
WWW:	http://slamdunk.geol.ucl.ac.uk

Background notes:

I have a background that includes Oudoor pursuits instructing, Circus knife throwing, Chemistry and Geology A-level teaching and Oil industry geophysical engineering project management. I graduated with distinction from UCL in 2002 with an MSc in Computer Science, during which I pursued a project under Dr Wolfgang Emmerich involved in a study of high-throughput computing systems. During this project I completed the initial pilot study of the integration of Condor into the WTS images running on the UCL cluster network. Since being employed by the eMinerals project I have spent 12 months incrementally scaling the UCL Condor pool, until reaching production mode in October 2003. As an accepted part of the institutions grid resource infrastructure, we plan to increase the pool size by embracing the ~2000 centrally managed desktop PC’s around the campus.

Additionally, I will be administrating the UCL Computing Resource Allocation Group, which will control access to UCL’s HPC and HTC grid resources, Currently, I am installing the eMinerals personal Access Grid and SRB facilities at UCL, and collaborating with other members of the eMinerals team to develop the eMinerals web portal to grid resources.