In brief
The M-grid is the Material Science Grid, a national distributed computing environment and the NGI for Finland. The idea was to join a number of computing clusters at different places, which are logically combined into a grid. The project was started
in the winter of 2004, and joined seven Universities at different
cities of Finland:
Helsinki, Espoo, Turku, Tampere, Lappeenranta, Jyväskylä, Oulu.
CSC piloted the project and maintains the largest M-grid resource, the M-grid. System administration of the clusters/Grid is done in co-operation between CSC and the university partners.
Purpose
The available resources are used both locally by CSC/University users and through the grid middleware. Massive long time or data extensive calculations, as well as interactive needs, are better met by using a cluster either directly at CSC or locally.
The grid middleware provides scientists with the computational capacity for problems that are serial in nature or that can be easily
run
concurrently. Via the M-grid, users are able to run their applications
flexibly on computing resources hosted by different institutions. They can also choose to use a pre-installed application from those that form part of the M-grid's Runtime Environment. The
grid middleware automatically chooses a suitable resource.
Submitting grid jobs and retrieving results is not instantaneous.
The M-grid is ideally suited to calculations which take from tens of
minutes to up to 24 hours. Job related data is transferred with the
program to the cluster on which it will run. Results can be retrieved
when the job has completed.
Jobs that run on the M-grid are not billed from the users project budget.
Resources
The detailed information about the M-grid computing resources is available at the Finnish grid monitor.
M-grid in CPU numbers:| Cluster Name |
CPU cores |
|
Institute |
|---|---|---|---|
| Akaatti |
58 | Tampere University of Technology |
|
| Ametisti | 260 | University of Helsinki |
|
| Jaspis | 16 |
Helsinki Institute of Physics |
|
| Kvartsi | 192 | Helsinki University of Technology |
|
| Murska | 2176 |
CSC |
|
| Opaali |
88
|
University of Jyväskylä |
|
| Spektroliitti |
26 | Lappeenranta University of Technology | |
| Topaasi | 52 | University of Turku |
All clusters reserve 20% of each their capacity exclusively for M-grid users. (With the exception of Murska, which reserves 60 Cores) Grid jobs can also fill the unused capacity on the clusters.
Links
| Degtyarenko Ivan | Ivan.Degtyarenko at csc.fi |
| Tourunen Olli | Olli.Tourunen at csc.fi |
| Gindonis Michael | Michael.Gindonis at csc.fi |
