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About SInRG
The Scalable Intracampus Research Grid (SInRG) is a National Science Foundation (NSF)
funded project to create an interdisciplinary computational research environment on the University of
Tennessee campus. Through various SInRG grants, a variety of high-power computing environments have
been purchased for use by several academic departments at UT. These machines have been linked together
with the university's existing networking infrastructure to create a grid-computing environment for both
faculty and student researchers at the university. SInRG is a wildly heterogeneous environment, combining
several hardware architectures, including Intel Pentium and Sun Sparc processors, hardware configurations,
such as single processor, SMP, and clusters, and operating systems, including Linux and Solaris.
SInRG machines have been configured with most of the major grid-computing middlewares, including NetSolve,
Globus, and Condor.
NetSolve and SInRG
NetSolve is the preferred middleware for those who wish to utilize the computational
resources available on SInRG because it provides several benefits over other available grid middlewares.
Because SInRG machines are distributed to different academic departments, they are also under the control
of different system administrators and require different user logins. By using NetSolve to access SInRG
resources, users no longer need to request user accounts on each SInRG machine, but rather use the NetSolve
agent and servers to access the needed resources. This scheme also simplifies the job of system
administrators, who can determine which software resources they wish to share through NetSolve and no
longer need to worry about the activities of their users. By using NetSolve users also do not need to
worry about knowing where required libraries are installed or reserving system time, as NetSolve handles
the resource discovery and scheduling automatically.
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