This document summarizes grid computing and high-performance computing in Israel. It provides background on Israel's computing infrastructure and discusses several academic and research institutions that are involved in grid computing, including the Israel Academic Grid, Technion, Hebrew University, and Ben-Gurion University. It also discusses the Israeli Association of Grid Technologies and Israel's involvement in the SEPAC collaboration.

1. Grid Computing
and
High-Performance
Computing
in
Israel
Guy Tel-Zur, Ph.D.
The Israeli Association of Grid Technologies
tel-zur@computer.org
http://www.Grid.org.il

2. Topics
■ Background
 About the country
 Infrastructure
■ The Academy
 IAG
 The Technion, The Hebrew Univ., Ben-Gurion Univ.
■ The Industry
 IGT
■ The SEPAC Collaboration

3. Background

4. This means~500,000PCs
Overall Computing
Power: ~500 TFLOPS


5. Network Infrastructure

7. ILAN Statistics
2006
2008

8. Israel
IUCC
IUCC – The Inter University Computation Center

9. The Academy

10. The Israel Academic Grid
(IAG)
• http://iag.iucc.ac.il/
• Funded by the MOST
• Steering & Technical
Committees
• Coordinates the Israeli activity in
EGEE, EGI and IsraGrid
IUCC is the CA for the IAG

11. EGEE III
■ May 1st 2008 to April 30th 2010
■ Budget reduced by about 50%
■ Subject to severe FP7 regulations
■ SA1 to be handled through ISRAGRID
Vision of EGI
Formation of National Grid Initiatives (NGIs) which unite
efforts within each country, providing a single point of
contact for coordinated efforts

12. IsraGrid
■ A national committee recommended last July to
establish a National Grid Computing
Infrastructure.
■ Waiting for final approval by the Government
■ To be used only for R&D purposes
■ To be used by all the Academic institutes and
the Israeli High-Tech industry
■ Secured access
■ Managed by the IUCC

13. MOSIX
A management system targeted for HPC on
x86 Linux clusters and multi-cluster
organizational grids
Main features:
– supports parallel processes and batch jobs
– Automatic resource discovery
– Adaptive workload distribution by process
migration
Outcome: the grid and each cluster performs like a
single computer with multiple processors
Guest processes can’t modify resources in
hosting nodes

14. The Hebrew University
Organizational Grid
• 15 MOSIX clusters ~400 nodes
• In life-sciences, medical school, chemistry and computer
science
• Applications:
Nano-technology, Molecular dynamics, Protein folding,
Genomics (BLAT, BLAST, SW), Meteorological
weather forecast (WRF), Navier-Stokes equations and
turbulence (CFD) , CPU simulator of new hardware
design (SimpleScalar)
More information at http://www.MOSIX.org

15. Nanco- a cluster for
Nanotechnology
Technion
Center for Computation in Nanotechnology,
Russell-Berrie Nanotechnology Institute
Taub Computer Center M M M
P P P P P P
64 dual processor dual
core compute nodes (total
256 cores), Opteron Rev. F
8GB RAM memory/node Infiniband Switch
 2 master nodes for H/A , Operational since summer 2007

also Opterons for
redundency Provided by Sun – integrated by EMET and Voltaire

Fast DDR Infiniband SUN and GNU compilers

Interconnect Voltaire MPI and OpenMPI for parallelization

Netapp storage Most of codes are MPI codes – either commercial
or self developed
 More info on http://phycomp.technion.ac.il/~nanco

16. Grid Computing at the
Technion
Israel Institute of Technology
http://dsl.cs.technion.ac.il/index.html
• Projects:
• Distributed Systems – GMS
Laboratory – Super-Link Online
– The Dependable Grid
• Prof. Assaf Schuster –
Head – EGEE
– …and more

17. GMS – Grid Monitoring
System
 Distributively store all logs of a large batch
system in local databases
 Apply distributed data mining on logs
 Implementation using Condor
 Taken up by Intel NetBatch team: started a $3M
project

18. SuperLink Online
 http://bioinfo.cs.technion.ac.il/superlink-online/
a production portal for geneticists working at hospitals
 Submitted tasks contain gene mapping results from lab
experiments
 Portal user sees a single computer (!)
 Implemented using a hierarchy of Condor pools
− Highest/smallest pool in Technion (DSL)
− Lowest/largest in Madison (GLOW).
 In progress: linkage@home and EGEE BioMed
implementations.

19. The Dependable Grid
 Provide a High Availability (HA) Library as a service for
any Grid component
 HA for Condor matchmaker with zero loc changes (!!!)
 Part of Condor 6.8 distribution
 Deployed in many large Condor production pools
 Plans to develop and support an open-source
distribution

20. Ben Gurion University of the
Negev
• Inter campus Condor pool
• Grid Computing

21. The BGU Condor Pool
• Started in 2000
• Today: ~200 processors
• Linux & Windows
• Campus-wide project
• Non-dedicated resources

23. We plan to build a new Condor pool
installation at the Soroka Medical Center in
Beer-Sheva

24. Grid Computing in the Negev
- BGU, NRCN
BGU:
• A Certified EGEE-II Production site
• A Pre-Production EGEE site
NRCN:
 A small Condor pool
 40 processors, Part of the IGT Grid Lab.
 A member of the SEPAC Grid
Collaboration

25. Parallel Processing
Education
■ Cluster made of Virtual Machines (Xen)
■ “Classic” tools: MPI, OpenMP
■ “Modern” tools: Star-P, Grid Mathematica
■ Grid Computing practice: Condor, Gilda and
UNICORE
■ Final projects on a variety of subjects: Parallel
Image Processing, Parallel Game of Life,
Map/Reduce, Monte Carlo…

26. The IDIP Group
Inter-Disciplinary Digital Image Processing
Scientific Computing,
Physics and
Optimization and
Engineering
Data Analysis
Applied Imaging
Science
• BGU Members belong to variety of departments from
the faculties of Engineering, Exact Sciences and the
School of Medicine
• Collaborations with various parties in the academia
and Industry
• More than 20 research students

27. Multi-scale Geometric methods
for Filaments detection in 3D
 Development of state of the art tools
 Due to the large typical size of real 3D images and
the high dimensionality of the coefficients space
the computational and storage complexity are very
high

28. The Israeli Association of
Grid Technologies (IGT)

29. IGT Members

30. IGT Work Groups
• Grid-Data Centers & Labs Utilization
Peter Weinstein, IGT Lab Manager
• Grid-SOA
Ronen Yochpaz, CTO VeNotion
• Grid-HPC
Dr. Guy Tel-Zur, NRCN
• Grid-Application Server
Nati Shalom, CTO GigaSpaces
• Grid-RDMA
Asaf Somekh, Voltaire
• Grid-Virtualization
Niran Even Chen, BenefIT

31. IGT WEB Site
Knowledge Sharing and Networking
16,500 Visitors per Month/ 75% from the US
1GigaByte Downloads per Month

32. IGT2008 – World Summit of Cloud Computing
December 1-2, 2008, Hertzelia, Israel
Cristophe Bisciglia Simone Brunozzi
Creator of Google's Academic Web Services Evangelist,
Cloud Computing Initiative (ACCI) Amazon Web Services
Senior Software Engineer, Google
Paul Strong Dr. Owen O'Malley
Distinguished Research Scientist, eBay Owen O’Malley, Yahoo!
Hadoop Architect and Apache VP for Hadoop

33. IGT2008 – World Summit of Cloud Computing
December 1-2, 2008, Hertzelia, Israel
Steve Rubinow, CIO, NYSE Euronext, Dr. Frank Baetke
The largest exchange in the world. Global HPC-Technology
Program Manager
HPCD Richardson / Munich
Dr. Yaron Wolfsthal
Senior Manager, Reliable System Technologies
IBM Research Lab in Haifa (HRL)
IBM and EU Joint Research Initiative for Cloud Computing - RESERVOIR

34. The SEPAC
Collaboration
SEPAC, The Southern European Partnership
for Advanced Computing, is a multi-national
Grid-cooperation initiated by major South-
European High Performance Computing
Centers.
The objective is to build a Grid as a highly
reliable application framework based on open
interfaces facilitating a consistent and easy-to-
use user interface for scientists and
researchers in distributed heterogeneous
environments.

36. The SEPAC Grid

37. SEPAC Future
We are looking for more sites to join us
http://www.sepac-grid.org
Cloud Computing
Layer

38. http://www.facebook.com/
group.php?gid=8450870046

39. Thanks to…
■ Prof. David Horn, TAU, Head of the IAG
■ Mr. Avner Agom, IGT General Manager
■ Prof. Amnon Barak, CS Dept., HUJI.
■ Mr. Eddie Aharonovich, CS. Dept., TAU
■ Dr. Anne Weill,The Technion
■ Dr. Ofer Levi, The Ben-Gurion Univ.
■ The SEPAC Collaboration

40. Questions ?
References:
 Condor at the BGU:
http://www.ee.bgu.ac.il/~tel-zur/condor/
 quot;An Introduction to Parallel Processing” course at the
BGU:
http://www.ee.bgu.ac.il/~tel-zur/teaching/2008B
 Grid Computing at the BGU:
http://www.ee.bgu.ac.il/~tel-zur/grid.html
 IGT: http://www.grid.org.il
 EGI: http://web.eu-egi.eu/