Miron Livny, a professor of computer science at the University of Wisconsin and a well-known expert on distributed processing and high throughput computing, will provide an overview of two national distributed computing facilities at a Feb. 23 lecture. The talk begins at 10:15 a.m. at 011 Sitterson Hall on the UNC-Chapel Hill campus. It will last about an hour and will be followed by a short question and answer session.
Livny is known for his research in distributed processing, data management systems and data visualization environments and for leading the Condor project. Condor is a widely used high throughput computing system that harnesses the resources of large collections of distributed machines while they are idle.
Researchers worldwide use Condor “flocks” of processors as well as other tools created by Livny’s research group, such as the DEVise data visualization and exploration environment and the Biological Magnetic Resonance Bank (BMRB), a repository for data from NMR spectroscopy. Livny holds a PhD and master’s degree in computer science from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovet, Israel, and also has degrees in physics and mathematics from Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
In his talk, titled “Submitting Locally and Running Globally – the GLOW and OSG Experience,” Livny will focus on two projects that utilize grids and distributed computing: the Grid Laboratory Of Wisconsin (GLOW) and the Open Science Grid (OSG).
GLOW, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is a facility funded by the National Science Foundation that includes more than 1,400 CPUs and 100 terabytes of storage. The resources are distributed over six locations and serve a broad range of disciplines at the university, including biotechnology, computer science, medicine, physics and economics.
OSG, funded by the NSF and the U.S. Department of Energy, is a distributed computing facility that supports scientific computing through open collaborations among scientists, software developers and computing, storage and network providers. The OSG Consortium builds and operates the OSG, bringing together resources and researchers from universities and national laboratories and working with other national and international grid projects to give scientists access to worldwide computational resources.
Livny’s talk will examine both projects and will describe new capabilities that allow users of Wisconsin’s GLOW to take advantage of the national OSG infrastructure.
The lecture is sponsored by the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI) and Information Technology Services at UNC-Chapel Hill.
