Minnesota Supercomputer Institute

Current Projects

TROPIX

The Research Optimizer for Project Information eXchange (TROPIX) seeks to create a new way for researchers at the University of Minnesota and the Mayo Clinic to easily capture and share data collected from core experimental facilities at both sites. Tropix is funded by the Minnesota Partnership for Biotechnology and Medical Genomics.

The project will utilize caGrid architecture to achieve some of its goals.

CWEB

The Collaborative Workflow Environment for Bioinformatics (CWEB) seeks to create a library of workflows for common tasks in the area of bioinformatics. The workflows created will be built with a workflow engine that allows easy deployment as a web service. This is a project funded by the Minnesota Partnership for Biotechnology and Medical Genomics.

Other Projects

caGrid Introduce Extensions

Introduce is a tool used to create caGrid services. To improve the utility of this program and give back to the caGrid community, the development group is creating new extensions to the program. Below are brief introductions and examples of how to use the new extensions:
Interfaces Extension
Spring Extension

Cell BE

The Cell Broadband Engine (often reffered to as the Cell Processor) is an emerging architecture that has been explored by the MSI development group.

April 6, 2007: The Cell BE programming workshop was a great success! This workshop was given by Duc Vianney from IBM, and was attended by researchers from six different departments at the University. Below are the materials presented during the workshop:

Day 1: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

Day 2: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

CUDA

CUDA is the GPGPU technology that allows easy programmatic interface to recent (2007) NVIDIA hardware (GeForce 8800, Quadro 4600). We are exploring how users will be able to take advantage of this hardware for high-performance computing. Please check back here in the second quarter of 2008 for example codes using Fortran, C, and MPI.

Microsoft CCS/HPC Server 2008

Microsoft Compute Cluster Server (CCS) is a new platform for high-performance computing. We are currently evaluating the product by porting some existing parallel codes as well as parallelizing an existing serial code on a test machine.

WS-GRAM

The Grid Resource Allocation and Management (GRAM) service provides an interface for requesting and using remote system resources. We are investigating WS-GRAM as a way to submit jobs to the supercomputers from the caGrid environment. This will grid-enable the supercomputers at MSI.