Enabling distributed petascale science

Petascale science is an end-to-end endeavour, involving not only the creation of massive datasets at supercomputers or experimental facilities, but the subsequent analysis of that data by a user community that may be distributed across many laboratories and universities. The new SciDAC Center for Enabling Distributed Petascale Science (CEDPS) is developing tools to support this end-to-end process. These tools include data placement services for the reliable, high-performance, secure, and policy-driven placement of data within a distributed science environment; tools and techniques for the construction, operation, and provisioning of scalable science services; and tools for the detection and diagnosis of failures in end-to-end data placement and distributed application hosting configurations. In each area, we build on a strong base of existing technology and have made useful progress in the first year of the project. For example, we have recently achieved order-of-magnitude improvements in transfer times (for lots of small files) and implemented asynchronous data staging capabilities; demonstrated dynamic deployment of complex application stacks for the STAR experiment; and designed and deployed end-to-end troubleshooting services. We look forward to working with SciDAC application and technology projects to realize the promise of petascale science.