The condo of condos

Abstract

University-located computational and data storage resources are increasingly being aggregated into shared university-level systems that are dubbed "condominium clusters." This session will describe the "Condo of Condos," a "consortium of the willing" that is working together to extend this condominium model both locally and across the consortium. By aggregating resources and expertise at the institutional level it will be possible to create distributed technical and support operations that provide faculty and students with methods to leverage a much larger and robust set of resources. Partnering with Internet2, the consortium will use the Innovation Platform to connect campuses and allow high performance interconnections through Science DMZs that can be built and broken down in ad-hoc ways using SDN. The ability to develop these network connections, coupled with the project's community building characteristics, will be a model for "team science" that can be extended and replicated nationally. By leveraging existing local and national computing resources (XSEDE and Open Science Grid), we will enable science and education deployments that are not possible today, making complex collaborations with computational needs routine. This project will be transformative for campus IT and will create a community of practitioners that shares resources, experience, and expertise to facilitate new knowledge and discovery.