Off Campus Computing Resources

Research Computing leverages the added capacity of computing grids, data grids, and collaboration grids to help support the needs of RIT researchers. Research Computing supports RIT researchers' use of these off-campus resources by identifyting and facilitating access to the various systems and aiding in the porting and running of software on those systems.

  • RIT hosts nodes for PlanetLab

  • RIT has access to XSEDE (formerly TeraGrid). This is an NSF funded grid consisting in aggregate of petaflop high performance computers, petabyte storage systems, high performance networks, and over 100 databases. RIT participates in XSEDE by providing a Campus Champion who can help with getting connected and receiving allocations.

  • RIT is a founding member of NYSGrid, a grid for collaboration among New York institutions to create an advanced technological infrastructure that will strengthen research and share cyberinfrastructure. Membership in NYSGrid gains RIT access to large supercomputing resources such as the IBM Blue Gene/L at RPI and New York Blue at StonyBrook/Brookhaven. NYSGrid is a VO (virtual organization) of OSG (Open Science Grid) and therefore RIT is also a member of the OSG.

  • RIT is a Virtual Organization of the Open Science Grid. The Open Science Grid OSG is a consortium of software, service and resource providers and researchers, from universities, national laboratories and computing centers across the U.S., that brings together computing and storage resources into a common, shared grid infrastructure over research networks via a common set of middleware. Research Computing provides a gateway to access the large distributed resources of the OSG. The OSG project is funded by the NSF and DOE.

  • RIT is a participating member of SURAgrid, the Southeastern Universities Research Association Grid. SURAgrid is a consortium of more than 30 organizations collaborating and combining resources to help bring grid technology to the level of seamless, shared infrastructure. Research Computing is working with SURAgrid to join computing resources for more powerful resources for researchers.

  • RIT supports the World Community Grid by fielding several teams from the RIT community. World Community Grid's mission is to create the largest public computing grid benefiting humanity. Research Computing is running WCG jobs on some of its systems. Research Computing Stats

  • RIT is actively involved in the use and development of a collaboration grid based on the AccessGrid, an open source collaboration framework for multimedia-rich multipoint real-time conferencing and interaction. Funded by the Department of Energy and led by Argonne National Laboratory, the Access Grid is now supported and developed by a worldwide community of users. Research Computing has developed its own version called the RIT Global Collaboration Grid.

About Grids and Clouds

  • Cloud Computing Synopsis and Recommendations, NIST Special Pub 800-146
  • The NIST Definition of Cloud Computing, Special Pub 800-145
  • The Grid Technology Cookbook
  • Grid and bear it
  • What is the Grid?
  • OxGrid: Building a Campus Grid
  • Purdue Offers Condor Resources toTeraGrid Community
  • Perspectives on Distributed Computing: Thirty People, Four User Types, and the Distributed Computing User Experience
  • The Grid: A New Infrastructure for 21st Century Science
  • NSF Cyberinfrastructure User Survey 2005

    • Grids

  • New York State Grid
  • Open Science Grid
  • World Community Grid
  • SURAgrid
  • Great Plains Network
  • TeraGrid
  • GridRepublic
  • GriPhyN/iVDGL
  • Nebraska Tier 2 Site
  • OpenMacGrid

    • Grid Software

  • Condor
  • Globus
  • VDT
  • Gridbus
  • Commodity Grid (CoG)
  • BOINC