USCGrid

The Information Technology Systems(ITS) of the University of Southern California is proud to make available to its community of researchers the growing capabilities of grid computing in the form of an operational installation of the National Science Foundation's Middleware Initiative grid software.

The Power of Grid Computing

Grid computing is designed to foster cooperative research and the sharing of resources across organizational boundaries. For example, using grid computing components and the Internet (or another comparable network such as Internet2), a USC researcher in Los Angeles interested in analyzing earthquake data through real-time visualization can collaborate with a colleague in Tokyo, sharing sensor output, stored data, and computing resources to create a visual representation of the data that both can examine and discuss.

The Components of Grid Computing

The components of grid computing allow researchers to reliably authenticate themselves across institutional and organizational boundaries, to describe the resources required for a particular job, to locally submit that job for remote execution, to check on the status of remote compute resources, and to locally log remote job results.

Globus Toolkit client software allows local authentication and job submission.

Globus Toolkit server software allows a major grid resource, such as USC's High-Performance Cluster, to accept remote job submissions, execute the jobs, and return the results to the user who made the request.