Track the progress of the start of the Social Science Gateway @ VirtualRDC.

• Hardware ordered: 2009-09
• Hardware delivered: 2009-10-08
• Hardware installed: 2009-10-13 – 2009-10-16
• Operating system installed and functional: Installed
• Functionality tests completed: testing of file storage
• Closed beta phase: November-December 2009
• Open to all: January 2009

Please contact Lars as soon as possible to discuss this if you are affected.

The initial SSG cluster will have 4 nodes, with 8 cores/72GB/5TB per node. VRDC6405 will join the cluster, once reconfigured, with its current crop of 16 cores/128GB, plus an additional 5TB of scratch space (in addition to the current 1.1TB of /home and project space). We will be running a PBS-variant for scheduling (no need to run pmon). Initially, 1 node will be configured as
the NX front end node, with no statistical software (this will later be replaced by a reconfigured VRDC6402). All statistical processing will occur on the compute nodes; however, calling ’SAS’ or choosing SAS from the menu will initiate a remote SAS session through the scheduler on one of the compute nodes. Stata 11/MP8 will also be available (5 users, plus another 5 Stata/SE users).

“The Virtual Research Data Center at Cornell University has been a successful research support tool for users of many of the Census Bureau large-scale confidential data products including, but not limited to, those that are accessible via the Census Research Data Center network. [...] In addition, most social science researchers face substantial hurdles when they wish to harness the power of large-scale computational clusters, in particular when using new, very large synthetic data sets with their unprecedented detail on people, jobs, and firms. The proposed activity seeks to extend the VirtualRDC model to allow support of tera-scale social science computing via the NSF-sponsored TeraGrid resources. The most widespread statistical software packages used by social scientists, i.e., SAS, Stata, and SPSS, are not available on the TeraGrid itself or on any of the servers at the borders of the TeraGrid with fast connections to it. When viewing the problem through the lens of the typical data-driven research process (extract, edit and transform data; transfer data to a computational location; and perform analysis) social science researchers are typically constrained in at least one of these steps when approaching the high-performance computing clusters on the TeraGrid. For most data preparation, and for much analysis, the lack of standard statistical analysis and data preparation software packages is a serious impediment. However, the typical social scientist workstation or university-provided computational infrastructure does not have the resources to handle these very large data sets. Furthermore, the social science workstation and the university-provided infrastructure do not have sufficiently fast data connectivity to transfer any large prepared data files to the TeraGrid for processing there. This project aims to remedy bottlenecks in the first and second steps, with a focused expansion of resources at a critical location resulting in a highly useful gateway to the TeraGrid for the social sciences. The project builds a social science TeraGrid gateway that (i) allows researchers to perform the data preparation step using their comfort-level software packages, speeding up the data preparation phase, and (ii) do so on servers that have a fast connection to the TeraGrid, thus greatly speeding up the data-transfer process. [...]“

The full award information can be found at http://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward.do?AwardNumber=0922005. Press articles are available at the Cornell Chronicle and at the ILR News Center.

We will be building the Social Science Gateway over the course of the next couple of months. Information will be provided through this website, in particular at http://www.vrdc.cornell.edu/news/category/ssg/.