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Welcome to the Polar Grid Wiki
Polar Grid is an NSF MRI funded partnership of Indiana University and Elizabeth City State University to acquire and deploy the computing infrastructure needed to investigate the urgent problems in glacial melting. Polar Grid's major components and concept of operations are depicted in the figure below. A fuller description of the project is available from the full NSF proposl. The Polar Grid project collaborates with CERSER, CReSIS, and the Byrd Polar Research Center. For a list of team members and partners, see Team Members.
Project Summary
Intellectual Merit
Recent polar satellite observations show disintegration of ice shelves in West Antarctica and speed-up of several glaciers in southern Greenland. The great ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland interact with the global climate in a complex manner, and the impact on global sea level of their retreat would be profound. Most of the existing ice-sheet models, including those used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), cannot explain the rapid changes being observed. The Center for Remote Sensing of Ice Sheets (CReSIS) is developing new technologies to perform 3-D characterization of ice sheets to understand the physics of rapid changes, and develop models to explain observed changes and predict future behavior. In particular, CReSIS has demonstrated that Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) can image the beds of ice-sheets. This will enable a new-generation of high resolution ice-sheet models with realistic boundary conditions, but it will require distributed Cyberinfrastructure to gather and process data and assimilate them with large simulations. We propose a sophisticated Cyberinfrastructure instrument that will both enable the crucial ice-sheet science and educate and train a diverse workforce in both Polar science and Cyberinfrastructure. Instrument: This proposal addresses these compelling scientific challenges with a PolarGrid Cyberinfrastructure, aimed at research, education and outreach. PolarGrid consists of intermittently disconnected field and base grids feeding information to “lower 48” data and computing resources. True real-time processing at the field camp is backed up with increasing fidelity but increasing delay at the base and “lower 48” systems. The requested system includes an expedition grid consisting of ruggedized laptops in a field grid linked to a low power multi-core base camp cluster; a prototype and two production expedition grids feed into a 17 Teraflops "lower 48" system at Indiana University and Elizabeth City State (ECSU) split between research, education and training. This will give ECSU a topranked 5 Teraflop MSI High performance computing system, building on its distance education and undergraduate laboratory infrastructure to create tremendous outreach capabilities. We request upgrades to student laboratories, video-conferencing and key scientific software to support the ambitious education and training goals. PolarGrid will be integrated with TeraGrid for both resource utilization and curricula sharing. We will follow modern open data access standards so that raw, processed and simulated data can be archived outside PolarGrid by and for the full science community.
Management
We have formed the Cyberinfrastructure Center for Polar Science (CICPS) with experts in Polar Science, Remote Sensing and Cyberinfrastructure. This center includes the lead institutions for this proposal: Indiana University, which is internationally known for its broad expertise in research and infrastructure for eScience; and ECSU, a founding member of CReSIS with a center of excellence in remote sensing. CICPS includes CReSIS institutions as collaborators and will drive PolarGrid to meet their goals while using the best known technologies. Impressive institutional commitments include a new building and faculty lines at ECSU and resources and system support from Indiana University. We also commit the substantial initial effort needed to build the portal, workflow and Grid (Web) services that are required to make PolarGrid real.
Broader Impact
We exploit strong existing outreach activities at CReSIS and Indiana University to involve Minority Serving Institutions (MSI) directly in our work. A strong education and training activity led by ECSU (a Historically Black University) will involve undergraduates through new curricula and research experiences at all CICPS participants. Students trained and educated on PolarGrid will participate in internships and enhance the entry of a diverse workforce into exciting important science. Existing collaborations with the Association of Computer/Information Sciences and Engineering Departments at Minority Institutions (ADMI) and the NSF-funded MSI Cyberinfrastructure Empowerment Coalition (MSI-CIEC) will ensure our outreach has broad impact. The innovative architecture of PolarGrid with intermittently disconnected components has applications to other powerand bandwidth-challenged applications.
Polar Grid Press Release
Indiana University’s Polar Grid helps scientists study Earth’s shrinking polar ice caps
According to polar scientists, the world’s ice caps are shrinking and sea levels are rising, an environmental change that may have implications for all life on the planet. To better understand the current and future state of ice sheets, scientists must reliably collect and analyze large amounts of environmental data under extremely harsh conditions.
A team from Pervasive Technology Labs, University Information Technology Services and collaborating institutions is working to meet this challenge by creating a computational “Polar Grid” spanning from the North to the South Pole. The grid will be comprised of ruggedized laptops and computer clusters deployed in the field in the polar regions, and also two large scale computing clusters for detailed analysis in the U.S. – one to be installed at IU, and the other at Elizabeth City State University (ECSU).
The Polar Grid project is funded by a $1.96 million grant from the National Science Foundation under the leadership of principal investigator Geoffrey C. Fox. Co-PIs include Craig Stewart and Marlon Pierce as well as Linda Hayden and Malcolm LeCompte from ECSU. The Center for Remote Sensing of Ice Sheets at the University of Kansas is also an institutional partner in the project.
“The Polar Grid project will transform U.S. capabilities in ice sheet research,” said Geoffrey Fox. “With this technology it will be possible to collect, examine, and analyze data – and then use the results of such analysis to optimize data collection strategies – all during the course of a single expedition. This will help scientists more quickly gain understanding about the potential impact of rising sea levels and how they relate to global climate change, a problem of urgent importance.”
The Polar Grid represents a dramatic change from the current method of study, in which expeditions occur during the summer months, data is brought back to the U.S. for analysis, and a new expedition takes place the following year.
In addition to improving polar science research, the project builds upon Fox’s existing efforts to help minority serving institutions enhance their research by gaining greater access to technology. The Polar Grid project will provide Elizabeth City State University, a historically black college in North Carolina, with a high performance computing cluster and will offer ECSU students hands-on internships and field experience.
“This will give ECSU a top-ranked 5 Teraflop high performance computing system, building on existing distance education and undergraduate laboratory infrastructure, that will enable crucial ice sheet science and educate a diverse workforce in both polar science and cyberinfrastructure, “ said Linda Hayden, project co-principal investigator from ECSU.
Equipment installation for the Polar Grid project is slated to begin early in 2008.
