IBM Grants Harvard Servers, Software for Grid

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

IBM Corp announced that it had selected Harvard University for a grant so it can become a test bed for grid technologies. The Crimson Grid, which will be administered by the Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences, has received a mix of IBM BladeCenter servers and pSeries 655 midrange servers comprising a total of 128 nodes; in the next three months, it will add another 128 nodes to the cluster.

The BladeCenter servers will run Linux and the pSeries machines will run the AIX variant of Unix, according to Joy Sircar, the IT director for DEAS. The IBM gear will be gridded with existing Unix HPC gear from Sun Microsystems and SGI using the open source Globus Toolkit. DEAS will also be using IBM's Cluster Services Manager to cluster the Linux and AIX machines. Sircar says Harvard will use various other open source gridding technologies developed for Linux as well, and explained that IBM approached Harvard, not the other way around. The IBM machines are not replacing anything at the DEAS data center, but simply augmenting and connecting existing machines.

The Crimson Grid will be used as a collaboration and computing hub for all of Harvard's various schools, not just the engineering and applied sciences division. Sircar, like many other IT executives, thinks that grid technologies are the wave of the future, particularly for research institutions. "These days, research computing is interdisciplinary and collaborative, and we need a rethinking on how we architect systems." He believes that the grid architecture is a good starting point to build a more collaborative IT infrastructure, and IBM is giving him some of the tools to try to create it. Both will learn from the other's experience, and that is part of the deal. So is working together to build the grid, which IBM techies and Harvard IT people will do together. Harvard has to supply the network backbone to link all the machines together.

This is a bit different from the old days, when computer companies simply gave universities their excess servers at the end of the year so they (the companies) could get a tax break through donations. That said, Harvard does not appear to have paid for the servers, which is old school, and neither will some 50 other educational institutions that will eventually be given Shared University Research awards from Big Blue for similar kinds of projects.