NCCS Supports Inaugural DICE Vendor’s Day

The NCCS supported the inaugural Data Intensive Computing Environment (DICE) Vendor’s Day held in Springfield, OH, on March 6. Phil Webster, CISTO’s Lead for High-Performance Computing, served as the Master of Ceremonies, and more than 120 participants, representing vendors, universities, government agencies, and several private corporations, attended this very successful, ground-breaking effort.

Vendor’s Day was conceived as a way to bring together members of the HPC community to identify data-intensive computing needs while laying the groundwork for further development of a HPC test bed environment. The agenda included presentations and discussions detailing the overall objectives, operation, and governance of the DICE Project and presentations from user sites representing the DoD, DoE, General Electric Aircraft Engines, and GSFC highlighting their unique data challenges. The Keynote Address, “Data - Who Needs It?” was given by William Kramer, National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) Center General Manager.  Kramer was also Chairman of the Supercomputing 2005 Conference, the premier conference for the HPC industry.  Dan Duffy (CSC), NCCS Lead Architect, presented a review of GSFC’s data environment, opportunities, and management issues. A highlight of the meeting was an appearance by Rep. David Hobson (R-OH) who provided his support for this innovative and cooperative effort to assist federal agencies working closer together to solve data management issues.    

DICE exists to support the identification, investigation, and development of hardware and software solutions that support the demanding and unique data requirements of the HPC community. The NCCS is one of the three initial sites to form the distributed DICE test environment.  The other sites are the DoD’s Aeronautical Systems Center (ASC) Major Shared Resource Center (MSRC) located at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, OH, and the DoE’s Ohio Supercomputer Center located in Springfield, OH.

Since Vendor’s Day, a call for proposals addressing challenge areas was released and the submitted projects are currently under evaluation. It is anticipated that these projects will show the value of the geographically dispersed DICE test bed and the value of the technology being evaluated to find, move, and visualize data that require large data sets. Projects will be selected for use in DICE on a priority basis, subject to resource availability and environmental suitability. A follow-up meeting is being planned for this fall.

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