Cyberinfrastructure in New York State - Grid Computing: Infrastructure, Service, and Applications - page 46

In 1998, with funding from the Department of Energy, Miller's group
worked with Ian Foster's group at Argonne National Laboratory and
employed Globus within the Shake-and-Bake framework to continue to
rei ne the Shake-and-Bake method and solve ever-larger molecular struc-
tures. In 1999, with funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF),
Miller's group initiated a Buffalo-based grid research project that included
the Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute, SUNY-Buffalo, and
several Buffalo-area colleges. These early efforts represent the genesis of a
WNY Grid.
In 2001, an NSF MRI grant funded a signii cant storage system that was
shared by Miller and four other investigators at SUNY-Buffalo. The stor-
age system was quickly incorporated into the grid that we had developed
and served as a data repository for Shake-and-Bake results. All of this
early work led to an NSF ITR grant that was funded in 2002 and focused
on the deployment and efi cient implementation of Shake-and-Bake on
clusters and grids. In fact, this ITR grant also funded the design, develop-
ment, deployment, and hardening of the aforementioned Buffalo-based
grid (ACDC-Grid), the WNY Grid, and the NYS Grid.
In particular, these funds and the success of the ACDC-Grid and WNY
Grid led to the establishment of the NYS Grid in 2004. The number of
sites and variety of resources have grown substantially since 2004 and
now include a heterogeneous set of compute and storage systems
throughout New York State. The institutions include academic and non-
proi t organizations, although the NYS Grid is not restricted to such insti-
tutions. The NYS Grid has been used extensively by the Shake-and-Bake
team as well as by numerous other users at SUNY-Buffalo and from the
Open Science Grid.
A virtual organization, called GRASE (Grid Resource for Advanced
Science and Engineering), was established by Miller's Cyberinfrastructure
Laboratory to support general science and engineering users on the Open
Science Grid and the NYS Grid. (The Cyberinfrastructure Laboratory
applied for and continues to maintain control and oversight of GRASE.)
Given the success of the Buffalo-based ACDC-Grid, the WNY Grid, and
the establishment of the NYS Grid, the NSF provided CRI funds in order to
provide signii cant resources to the core sites in Western New York (SUNY-
Buffalo, Niagara University, Hauptman-Woodward, and SUNY-Geneseo).
More details, including publications, presentations, and the current status
of these grids and their associated projects, as described earlier in this chap-
ter, are available at www.cse.buffalo.edu/faculty/miller/CI/.

2.4.2 NYS Grid, Miller's Cyberinfrastructure Laboratory,

and the Grassroots NYS Cyberinfrastructure Initiative

In July 2006, a group of interested parties gathered to discuss the possibil-
ity of initiating a state-wide effort in cyberinfrastructure at a meeting in
Ithaca, New York. The meeting was entitled the “New York State Workshop