The screen capture below is a good example of how ICTS's HPC is contributing towards the research community in South Africa through SAGrid. Grid technology, in this instance the gLite middleware, allows portions of an HPC cluster to be dedicated to national and international research communities.
The communities are defined in virtual organizations and queues with guaranteed minimum resources are assigned to them. Membership of a virtual organization is controlled by PKI certificates granted to users after they have been positively identified by the grid regional authorities at the institutes. An institute will therefore never have all of its resources consumed by researchers from other organizations.
In the above screen shot the SAGrid virtual organization has been allocated a maximum of 10 CPUs, while local user's jobs continue to run unimpeded. Of course there's a lot more that ICTS's engineers do for SAGrid than provide CPUs. UCT runs the core services for SAGrid which includes the indexing services for advertising resources and the workload management system for scheduling and routing jobs to the appropriate resources country-wide. In addition to SAGrid ICTS HPC also shares resources with ALICE (LHC's large ion collider experiment), GILDA (INFN's training laboratory), ATLAS (LHC's high energy proton experiment), euMed (the Mediterranean grid infrastructure), biomed (biomedical data processing) and eNMR.eu (NMR Research Infrastructures). You can read more about virtual organizations here.
In the above screen shot the SAGrid virtual organization has been allocated a maximum of 10 CPUs, while local user's jobs continue to run unimpeded. Of course there's a lot more that ICTS's engineers do for SAGrid than provide CPUs. UCT runs the core services for SAGrid which includes the indexing services for advertising resources and the workload management system for scheduling and routing jobs to the appropriate resources country-wide. In addition to SAGrid ICTS HPC also shares resources with ALICE (LHC's large ion collider experiment), GILDA (INFN's training laboratory), ATLAS (LHC's high energy proton experiment), euMed (the Mediterranean grid infrastructure), biomed (biomedical data processing) and eNMR.eu (NMR Research Infrastructures). You can read more about virtual organizations here.