ICT Proposers' Day

CSC - IT Center for Science Ltd.ICT Proposers’ Day

Ville Savolainen

Development Manager, Software Engineering

Jan 22, 2009

Budapest

● IT support and resources for academia, research institutes and companies● One of the largest supercomputing centers in Northern Europe

● 3000 researchers use CSC’s servers● Over 100 Tflops computing capacity● 170 employees, turnover w/o investments in 2007 16.7 MEUR.

● Funet connects 85 organisations to the global research networking infrastructure – All Finnish universities

– Nearly all Finnish polytechnics– 30 industrial clients and research institutions– Total of 350 000 end users

CSC’s Customers

CSC’s Services

Administered by the Finnish MoE

FUNET SERVICES

COMPUTING SERVICES

APPLICATION SERVICES

DATA SERVICES

INFORMATION MANAGEMENT SERVICES

Application Services

● Grid Technologies● Participation in the development and operation of the

European Grid infrastructures● Software Engineering

● Development of Open Source scientific software● Software Services

● Finland’s widest collection of scientific software and databases

Application ServicesSoftware Services

● Finland’s widest collection of scientific software

● Consultancy, training and support on scientific software and computational science

● Coordination of national software user consortia

● Participation in European Union projects such as EMBRACE and ELIXIR, both in the bioinformatics area

Application ServicesSoftware Engineering

● Development of open source scientific software● ELMER, a Finite Element Multi-Physics package● Chipster, a workflow environment for DNA micro-array

analysis● GPAW, a DFT code optimized for massively parallel

computers● SOMA2, a web based environment for molecular modeling

and drug discovery● ESO Reflex, software for astronomical data analysis for the

European Southern Observatory

Application ServicesGrid Technologies

● Coordination and lead of the Finnish National grid infrastructure M-Grid

● Participation in the development and operation of the European Grid and HPC infrastructures such as EGEE, DEISA, PRACE, and e-IRG

● Partner of the LHC Computing Grid Tier-1 in the Nordic, NDGF

● Partner of the European Grid Initiative Design Study (EGI_DS)

ELMER

● http://www.csc.fi/elmer● FEM multi-physics package● CFD, heat transfer, structural mechanics, acoustics,

electromagnetism, …● Modular, easily extensible structure

Chipster

● http://chipster.csc.fi/● Micro-array data analysis software● Enables researcher to create an workflow

combining remote compute resources and web-services with built-in or own developed analysis algorithms

● Graphical client software at the user's desktop

Application DevelopmentFacilitating researchers productivity

● GPAW● DFT electronic structure

code● Highly scalable● User problem definition in

Python● Solvers/calculators in C

Definition of Infrastructure Services

● Application Services for Research and Development Facilities● ICT infrastructure providing execution environments for a cross-disciplinary software components and data analysis systems

● Structure for data management, simulation and analysis across organisational borders

● Management and sharing of resources● Flexible collaboration between service developers, data

providers and science users● Analysis workflow may involve seamless integration of tools

and data from personal workstation to supercomputers

Infrastructure Components● Researchers’ productivity is the focus

● Workflow environments● Web Services● Web based environments (access portals,

collaborative work tools, sharing environments, …)● Analysis and simulation software (Open Source)● Standardised security infrastructure

● User authentication and authorization ● Compute and data services