Communications of the ACM
NSF Forms Throughput Computing Partnership
The PATh partnership will focus on distributed high throughput computing technologies and methodology.
The U.S. National Science Foundation has awarded $22.5 million to a partnership between the Center for High Throughput Computing at University of Wisconsin, Madison and the Open Science Grid (OSG) to advance open science via the practice of distributed High Throughput Computing. The project seeks to harness the computing capacity of thousands of computers assembled in a network of campus clusters to cut time to science from years to possibly days, especially for applications that are parallel by design.
Collaborating in this initiative is the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California San Diego. Frank Würthwein, SDSC's lead for High-Throughput Computing and a physics professor at UC San Diego, also is executive director of OSG, a national cyberinfrastructure funded by the NSF to advance the sharing of resources, software, and knowledge.
Researchers and staff from the University of Southern California, Indiana University, the University of Chicago, and the University of Nebraska are also part of the collaboration, called the Partnership to Advance Throughput Computing, or PATh. The five-year award will fund more than 40 individuals across participating institutions, most of whom have been working together for years and in some cases for decades.
The collaboration is being undertaken to serve the growing need for throughput computing across the entire spectrum of research institutions and disciplines. The partnership will specifically focus on dHTC technologies and methodology, leveraging automation while building on distributed computing principles to enable researchers with large ensembles of computational tasks.
"The NSF gave us a mandate and the means to move in a new direction that includes community-building and workforce development so that more and more researchers and campuses will benefit from distributed high throughput computing," Würthwein says.
From University of California San Diego
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