Project Suggestion: PetaPlex

• Number of people: 10 projects, each with 2 or more
• Goal: for VT-PetaPlex-1 to go into production use on campus
• Contact information: Robert Akscyn, rma@ks.com, President of Knowledge Systems Incorporated, developer of PetaPlex technology; the instructor; and others listed in subprojects below
• Required background: ability to program in C and C++, over networks
• Description: This is an exciting project to help deploy the Virginia Tech super storage cluster for campus use. This system involves a powerful RS/6000 front end (1G RAM, 4 processors) and the main PetaPlex unit itself. That has 100 nodes, each with a 233 MHz Pentium, 64 M, and 25G byte disk, so there is a total of 2.5 terabytes capacity. Robert Akscyn will work with project groups during the semester. Documentation should be available directly at http://ks.com/vt/50.html or indirectly from ks.com/vt under "Documents". Particular efforts include (i.e., you can work on one or more of):
  1. Help Ohm Sornil (osornil@vt.edu) and extend his PhD work, that soon should lead to a number of publications (which students may co-author) and probably another dissertation. One effort is to integrate his inverted file technology with MARIAN and get that to run on the PetaPlex as a production service. Another is to carry out experiments with information retrieval for 1 terabyte of text, to get performance figures and tune the algorithms.
     See O. Sornil, "A Distributed Inverted Index for a Large-Scale, Dynamic Digital Library," Virginia Tech Computer Science, Blacksburg, Ph. D. Dissertation, to be defended 1/25/2000 in McB104c at 9am.
  2. Develop support for video on PetaPlex, working with Paul Mather (paul@csgrad.cs.vt.edu) who is funded by IBM to connect their VideoCharger software
  3. Develop a Web server atop PetaPlex. Work on this proceeded well with a CS6604 project group in Fall 2000:
     • Rohit Gupta, rogupta@csgrad.cs.vt.edu
     • Palash Jain, pjain@csgrad.cs.vt.edu
     • Abhishek Ram, aram@vt.edu
     It may be possible to adapt their code as a backend to a standard server like Apache to quickly achieve full functionality, using rewrite rulesets.
  4. Develop NFS and FTP services for PetaPlex. Assistance can be provided by Sumedh Sawant, ssawant@vt.edu, who is carrying out an Independent Study, CS5974, related to this in Spring 2001.
  5. Develop quota and security controls for PetaPlex, so various applications Assistance can be provided by Sumedh Sawant, ssawant@vt.edu, who is carrying out an Independent Study, CS5974, related to this Spring 2001. can run without interfering.
  6. Adapt a Web spider to PetaPlex, so we can index the Web. Divide up the sites to index randomly among the 100 nodes and have each one index a complete site, in turn. See for example spider code from U. of Arizona.
  7. Adapt bioinformatics algorithms to the PetaPlex, running on MPI. One interesting possibility is the work of Professor David Bevan (drbevan@vt.edu). He has particular interest in the parallel version of Assisted Model Building with Energy Refiement (AMBER) software. See also separate specific project about the BLAST tool.
  8. Connect PetaPlex with the Internet 2 Distributed Storage Initiative
     Students working on this include: Julia Lee (jewlz_77@yahoo.com), Dzung T. Dang (ddang@vt.edu), Matt Weber (mweber@vt.edu)
  9. Connect PetaPlex to run the Storage Request Broker (SRB) software from San Diego Supercomputer Center, so it can support collections interoperable with that, around the world. See http://www.npaci.edu/dice/srb and http://srb.npaci.edu/
  10. Develop support for images and GIS on PetaPlex. The best contact on this is Professor Carstensen, carstens@vt.edu, x1-2600.