New software enables rapid response to time-critical emergencies

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ARGONNE, Ill. (Nov. 16, 2006) — Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Chicago demonstrated a new specialized software system at Supercomputing 2006 that provides computational resources quickly for emergency applications affecting public health, safety and security. This new system, called SPRUCE (Special PRiority and Urgent Computing Environment), supports urgent computing on both traditional supercomputers and distributed computational Grids.

The SPRUCE system was demonstrated at the Argonne and TeraGrid booths at SC06, the world's premier supercomputing and networking conference. The demonstration featured a hypothetical situation in which scientists requested immediate access to the TeraGrid supercomputers at the University of Chicago to make time-sensitive analyses of a fast-evolving weather emergency.

"SPRUCE makes massive resources available on short notice for critical applications," said Pete Beckman, leader of the SPRUCE project and computer scientist at Argonne, as well as a senior fellow at the University of Chicago Computation Institute.

The system provides users with "right-of-way" tokens applicable to a select set of computer resources and urgency levels. During an emergency, a token can be activated either automatically via Web services or manually from a Web-based portal.

Computer resources that are linked into the SPRUCE system can respond to the emergency call, for example, by preempting other jobs or running them immediately after the current job completes.

"Severe weather prediction can be computationally intensive, and naturally the workload is unpredictable," said Kelvin Droegemeier, head of the National Science Foundation LEAD project (Linked Environments for Atmospheric Discovery) and Associate Vice President for Research at the University of Oklahoma. "We need access to supercomputers quickly when severe storm forecasts are required. With SPRUCE, we can rapidly get resources at some of the nation's largest supercomputer centers."

"Integrating the weather forecast models available from the LEAD Web portal with SPRUCE demonstrates the flexibility of our advanced Web-based tools for collaboration and scientific computation," said Dennis Gannon, a computer science professor at Indiana University, who is co-director of the LEAD Web portal with Beth Plale, also a professor at Indiana University.

"By providing fast, immediate access, SPRUCE can assist with urgent decisions required by flash floods or wildfires, where late results can be useless," Beckman said. "We envision in the future, that all of the nation's largest supercomputers will be ready to provide urgent computing to support and protect the nation."

The SPRUCE system currently is deployed on NSF TeraGrid resources at five sites: The University of Chicago/Argonne National Laboratory, National Center for Supercomputing Applications, Purdue University, San Diego Supercomputer Center and Texas Advanced Computing Center.

The TeraGrid project, funded by the National Science Foundation, is the world's largest distributed infrastructure for open scientific research.

Argonne National Laboratory seeks solutions to pressing national problems in science and technology. The nation's first national laboratory, Argonne conducts leading-edge basic and applied scientific research in virtually every scientific discipline. Argonne researchers work closely with researchers from hundreds of companies, universities, and federal, state and municipal agencies to help them solve their specific problems, advance America 's scientific leadership and prepare the nation for a better future. With employees from more than 60 nations, Argonne is managed by UChicago Argonne, LLC for the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science.

For more information, please contact Eleanor Taylor (630/252-5510 or media@anl.gov) at Argonne.