Grid Computing in New York State, USA

We have designed and deployed the New York State Grid (NYS Grid), which consists of an integrated computational and data grid. NYS Grid is used in a ubiquitous fashion, where the users have virtual access to their data sets and applications, allowing the user to perform tasks without knowledge of the physical hosts for data storage or compute systems. A wide variety of applications have been ported to NYS Grid, including critical programs in a variety of fields that are ideally suited to a multiprocessor computing environment with distributed datasets. Two applications from structural biology are presented as exemplars, including our Grid portal version of the

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program, which has been run simultaneously on all computational resources on NYS Grid, as well as on the majority of the tens of thousands of processors available through the Open Science Grid. This paper also discusses previous grids that we developed, including the Buffalo-based (ACDC) experimental grid and the Western New York Grid, as well as a wide variety of advances that we have made in terms of grid monitoring, predictive scheduling, grid portal design, and grid-enabling application templates, to name a few.